Something to Chew On

Dr. Kim Kirkpatrick is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences here at K-State where she is the director of the Cognitive and Neurobiological Approaches to Plasticity Center (CNAP) and leads research at the Reward, Timing, and Decision Lab. The main focus of her research is the role of timing and reward processes in determining impulsive and risky choice in rats. This was a very interesting conversation where we discuss the role of diet, specifically those containing foods high in certain types of fats or sugars, in promoting impulsive behavior that may be linked to obesity. There are all kinds of implications for this type of work in our personal lives as well as governmental policy and we try to dig into all of that. A fascinating topic that surely many of you will enjoy!

For more about Dr. Kirkpatrick and the projects she is working on check out: https://www.k-state.edu/psych/research/kirkpatrick/

Transcript:

Diet, Impulsivity, and Obesity: Does What We Eat, Influence How We Behave? – Dr. Kim Kirkpatrick – Psychological Sciences

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of global food systems. It's produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Jay Weeks PhD candidate in the Department of Agronomy. My co host is Scott Tanona, an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy who specializes in the philosophy of science. Do you ever wonder sometimes why you do the things that you do? Or why, when there seems to be an obvious rational route to a specific goal, some people repeatedly undermine their own desires and best intentions. The current scientific literature and decision making is extensive and far from complete. But what is becoming increasingly apparent is that in some ways, we may be in less direct control than we might want to believe. Our guest today is Dr. Kim Kirkpatrick. Kim is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences here at K State, where she is the director at the cognitive and neurobiological approaches to plasticity center, and leads research at the reward timing and decision lab. The main focus of our research is the role of timing and reward processes in determining impulsive and risky choice in rats. This was a really interesting conversation where we discussed the role of diet, specifically those high on certain types of fats, or sugars, and promoting impulsive behavior that may be linked to obesity. There were all kinds of implications for this type of work on our personal lives, as well as governmental policy. And we tried to dig into all of that. Definitely, it was a fascinating topic that I'm sure many of you will enjoy. So we now bring you Dr. Kim Kirkpatrick. Dr. Kim Kirkpatrick, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, it's good to be with you.

So I've been pretty excited to have this conversation. I've been looking forward to it ever since we got into contact. And before we get into what your lab does, and your research and all of that, we usually like to get a little bit of background information. So if you wouldn't mind, would you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, so I'm a professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, I also direct a center of Biomedical Research Excellence over there, the C nap center, and I've been at K State since 2008. Before that, I actually taught and did research for eight years at the University of New York in the UK. And then going back a little bit further, I did my graduate training at the University of Iowa, and my postdoctoral training at Brown University.

So what got you into psychology?

You know, I actually started off, as at Iowa State University, and I went there for engineering. And I took a general psychology course, and it was taught by a neuroscientist, and it just lit me up, I loved it. And I changed my major, like, almost right away, was illuminating to see, you know, explanations for things going on around you why people behave the way they do, or what, why, and it was really the brain, which is like, I just seem so fascinating. And so, so much that we didn't know about it. It just sort of seemed like this frontier that I just wanted to, like, get into.

How would you say the fields change, like since then to now?

We know a whole lot more. So I think that's good. And I hope I have made my own little bit of contribution there. I definitely, I think that there's a lot more public awareness of neuroscience now maybe helped a little by Big Bang Theory. And then brain health, I think is really become a really big issue. I think this understanding that we need to not just look after, you know, things like our heart, but we need to also really think about our the aging of our brain as saying something that's very near and dear to me for our research programs. I think about brain health and how, like things that we eat and do kind of affect our brains.

We have more information certainly is the general overall quality or veracity of that information. Higher or lower, we seem to get a lot of population of social media sites with information that's potentially spurious.

Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, I mean, I'm sure you guys are aware, the replication crisis, I think that has shone a spotlight on some issues with all sciences. And I think there are some things that came out of that that, you know, have made people aware that we really need to think about the robustness of our methods. I think neuroscience certainly has advanced to Having much more elegant techniques that allow us to get at functioning specific cell types and networks. And in that sense, I think has been very good. But oftentimes, as we start to really drill down and become more specific, we also begin to lose some of the power to really detect effects. And so I think there's always a trade off between specificity versus whether you can really get the the power of you need, I mean, because if you're getting really specific, you might now get down to where you're dealing with five neurons, and then are you gonna really be able to figure out what those five neurons do? Yeah.

For the listeners who don't know, what is the replication crisis? And why was it? Why is that important?

So really, it refers to the fact that some of the results that have been reported, even ones that are like in textbooks, haven't really bore up to being able to be replicated when others went and tried to, you know, do the research very similarly to how it was originally done. And I think what really kind of came out of it was this recognition that some of its because of the way we do our statistics, and too much of a focus on P values and trying to just get over a certain line, and not enough of a focus on effect sizes. And it turns out a lot of these things that don't replicate very well, are really small effects. And so they're just probably, you know, spurious. And something to do with the group that was, yeah, it could be something with the group that was tested, or whether presuming.

Something is a replication when in fact, is not a replication. It's not a true statistical replicant?

Sure.

So well, so and this is it just for everybody? You know, for people who are listening, it said, not to Psychology and Social Sciences. You know, a lot of other areas, a lot of medicine and cancer research, right?

Oh, over pharmacology is a really big one. drug development research was a huge one, I think the one thing is really kind of shown us is that you do really need to have robust designs, you need to have good sample sizes. And also it turns out that within subjects research is much more replicable. So if you, you look at an individual's behavior, relative their own baseline performance, that's much more replicable than if you're looking at comparing two individuals.

Good. And and some of the responses to this, I mean, so, you know, there's there's been these increased efforts to do more replication, the incentive structures for scientists to do these are not great, right? So this is, this is a hard thing, we don't actually do a lot of just like, let's try to do exactly the same thing, right. But, but some of the response to this has been that looks, we've got some maybe some things about our statistics that we need to worry about. But some of it is just about the transferability. Right, from one area to another, right? So you do a study on, you know, group of undergraduate students at your institution. And then you say there's this general phenomenon, right, but doesn't necessarily apply somewhere else. Because like, people are so complex, right? So just, I don't want to push you too much on this stuff. But what's your main thought? I mean, how much of this is like the things didn't replicate? Because as John just said, they were actually looking at like a different population, or there's something different going on, and how much of it was, things didn't replicate? Because, you know, we were looking at such a small little effect that maybe we thought we found something that wasn't there.

I think there probably are some of that, too. There's all effects have boundary conditions, right. And that can affect replication if people go outside of those boundary conditions. One thing we do a lot in my research program is we build a nested replication to a lot of our designs. So that way, if we get a result, that seems like funny, like not what we expected, we can at least look at the nested replication conditions. So nested replication. And replication is where you maybe have like one or two of the conditions within your study, that are things that you already have done before. So it's actually like provides a way to connect together, like if you do two experiments, and the second one, you now include at least like one condition from the previous experiment. And then there's actually statistics you can use it's kind of Bayesian statistics where you can use the first experiment as priors for the second one. And you can actually do tests on like, you know, how likely is that effect is thing going to replicate if you do it again and again. So I think that's one really good way forward. Whenever I kind of write my grant proposals and I have to talk about robustness and replicability. I really call upon nessa replication as a real strength.

So what kind of work is your lab doing?

Yeah, so I mean, we were really interested in impulsivity, which is when you aren't really able to wait in order to maybe get a better outcome. So we specifically study and if you guys know the marshmallow test, yeah, it's very well now. Explain it. Yeah, steady decisions, kind of like the marshmallow test where, you know, this was done in kids where they kind of had a choice between you could get one marshmallow now, or you could wait 15 minutes, and then you can have two. And for some of the kids could wait, and some didn't do so well. But what made it so famous and my philosophers know about the marshmallow, is it when they went back and looked at these four year old kids, when they were teenagers, they actually found that the kids who could wait had higher LSAT scores, they actually were performing better on a lot of metrics of their, like, social, you know, abilities, and their, you know, abilities to like, deal with, you know, challenges and things of that sort. And they really funny enough, they actually went back and looked at these kids when they were, they're in their 30s. And they actually found that the kids who waited for the two marshmallows had lower BMI. And that's kind of interesting, when you think the kids who waited for the two marshmallows actually are thinner later. Yeah. And what that tells us is, it's not really about the marshmallows, but it's about the self control, you need to be able to wait for the marshmallows. So I mean, I think this is really fascinates me that so famous that this test, you do just one time with a kid, when they're four actually predicts all of these things like later in life, even we into well into adulthood.

That's interesting, because that crosses metabolic changes across brain development stages.

Yeah, and all different kinds of like SES, and lifestyle, and just, I mean, all different kinds of things that are and this does like to be a well replicated effect.

So is this did you get interested in this early on in your psychology career? Or is it something you came to after some period of time.

I kind of migrated there, but it was kind of my research program, you know, just as it does, you tend to kind of build and progress. And then I would also say that a lot of my research is student driven. And so one of my students was actually the first person who kind of started doing impulsivity research in my lab. And she found some really exciting things. And we just kind of built from there, we kind of continued doing it. I always like to let my students take me interesting places.

Interesting. And how do you decide which ones you've not? Which student but which? Which research project? gets to move forward with these undergraduate students?

This is actually a PhD. Okay. It was her dissertation that really get that question where we're going. Yeah, we do have undergraduates can do some interesting things, too, though.

So how are you testing impulsivity? Is this more marshmallow tests or what's going on?

Well, we have some work, most of our work is in rats. But we do also do some work in people. So in our rats, what we do is, they're actually in a special box where we can give them these levers that they can press. And we have these little food magazines are called that actually let us deliver automatically with the computer, different numbers of food pellets. These aren't nearly as tasty as marshmallows, that I go around by tasting. But so the rat can choose like, does it want to get food, put one one food pellets and maybe has to wait five seconds? Or it can be for, say, 20 seconds? And it could get to? So it's the same kind of question, right? It's just asked in a different way. Now, of course, the rats don't really know what those contingency are, they have to learn them through pressing and getting things. And we also, don't just ask them once, we asked them hundreds of times, and we can change them out and change the delays. And then people were actually doing something that's very similar to what we do in the rats. We have actually a food dispenser, very much like the rats, it dispenses mini m&ms. And people get a question on the computer screen, it's literally says like, you know, one m&m In five seconds or two m&ms in 20 seconds. And then they pick and then they have to wait, and then the m&ms Come out? And yeah. And they I mean, their behavior actually looks very similar, though, between the humans and the rats.

Is there? Is there an assumption that everybody's gonna want more food or more m&ms? Or is there you know, what's the utility function here?

Something really interesting. There we go. Because some people just want just won't.

Yeah, and some just want like, just one.

And so we'll just pick the five and it doesn't matter, no matter what, but always pick like the five, which is the biggest one we offer. But we actually found that people, we've done some work looking at how diet, you know, kind of predicts what people do on this task. And we found that individuals who eat very low sugar diets actually really only wanted the small choice m&m, no matter what. So I thought that was interesting maybe reflects them like kind of having such a really high level of self control or possibly just that they've developed a preference where it's like, I just don't eat much sugar, so I'm not gonna walk. Right.

And yeah, cuz, yeah, as we want to find out what you're doing with all this, but I think one of the basic questions are about sort of, if you're measuring impulsivity, right? It's kind of an assumption that, like, Oh, if you wait for more, that makes more sense, right? You know that you're, you've got more self control in that sense, right. But yeah, but yeah, there's a lot of factors which you control for, right, by looking to sort of see what their other interests are.

Yeah. And I thought it was really interesting that people on the low sugar diet, I mean, they're actually exhibiting self control, but they're doing it a different way, from what we think about what the marshmallow kids, they're not really necessarily doing it by being willing to wait for maybe a longer term outcome of like, I'm going to fit into that dress on Saturday, right? Rather, what they're doing is they're, they're regulating their amount preferences, saying, I'm just gonna prefer to eat really small amounts of that food type.

Probably just the same thing in terms of salt, or people are on low salt diets to see the same effect.

Yeah. So I really want to dig deeper, because we just found this in a study we did pretty recently, I would like to dig deeper and try to understand some of the strategies that people engage in, saying self control is certainly one that we know is really important, but there may be other, maybe even some decision biases that people develop like or heuristics that people develop, where that just allows them to say just almost be automatic in those decisions, where they just say, I always just pick the small one or something.

I might explain what he meant by heuristics.

Oh, yes. So heuristic is really just kind of like a rule that you can use, that helps you be able to make decisions more or less automatically, you don't really have to think too much about them, you just, you just do it without thinking. And that can be really beneficial. If people can establish those if they're wanting to like change their health, because then they're just doing those behaviors automatically, almost habitually, rather than having to actively work at them.

And is it true that actually sort of a lot of how we live our life is really just like this, we kind of like develop these rules, and we kind of tend to just follow them, right? We're not every day processing. Each decision we make, right? In a way we're like, alright, which is going to be better for me, right?

Yeah. Yeah, there's actually, so I don't know if you've heard of Daniel Kahneman. Yeah. So he's got the system one versus system two, and the system one are these biases, heuristics and just automatic processes, they guide the majority of our behavior. But then we do have the ability to engage. So this more complex systems, but people are actually very lazy cognitively. They actually would much prefer to engage system one and only use system two, when you're really forced to…

right. And it's not like that's a decision either, right? It's just kind of what happens, right?

I mean, I think it's because system two is really like it's it's labor intensive, it actually uses a lot of brain fuel, if you will, to engage system to

So these actually different physical systems, are they kind of, you know, how do you think about these as when you say, system?

I think there are bound to be different brain networks, although I'm sure there's overlap. But I think the thinking of it as a system as more a way to just distinguish that, you know, sort of psychological processes.

Yeah. Yeah. And when you say there's biases in system one, this is because they're automatic. And they, they work well, for a lot of circumstances. But under other circumstances, they like send us the wrong way. Right? Is there like some standard examples of those?

Yeah, well, even just the example, I was going back to my low sugar people, a choose small bias, maybe it's really helping them with their dieting, but it maybe won't work so great if they're like making decisions about money.

So some of the work you're doing in your lab is looking at what dictates who who has these biases and things right, and you know, whether or not you're you're genetically born with it, or whether or not it's your diet that's affecting this. And so what's going on there?

Yeah, so we're, we are looking at those factors. And we are also interested in whether we can change decision making. So we were really interested in dietary factors. That's one of the big areas we look at, we do also look at individual differences, to try to like it, you know, what kinds of variables might just, you know, predict how people are going to choose in different situations. And then we're also developing interventions. My current NIH grant is actually all about developing these interventions where we're trying to train self control. We've actually gotten a great success with this with our rats, and we are currently working on trying to translate it with our humans. I think one advantage we have with the rats is that they live with us. And so we can just, you know, really train and train and train them and they become really self like happily self control, not over self control, but like happy level of self control. And it does seem to provide then some resistance to problem behaviors that emerge from impulsivity. But we haven't quite got it working in people yet.

Oh, well, so how does it working rats, what do you do to train them?

We actually give them experience where they have to just work at learning the delays that they experienced in the task. So we might just give them like 10 days where they just get the 22nd delay that they'll later have to choose about. So they have no choice there is that they don't have a choice. So it's forced exposure to us the kind of delays that they're going to later have to make choices about, I think one thing that happens is they really learn the delay. Like they learn them better than they do when they're in their choice environment.

I was gonna ask you whether or not there are differences in populations for time length discrimination.

Yes, that's actually one of the variables we look at, we found that poor time discrimination is a predictor of impulsivity. And that's true in people is true in our rats and ADHD, is, yeah, it's associated with poor time discrimination and heighten impulsivity. Yeah, so that's one of the factors we look at. And we think they're time discrimination does get better when we give them this training. And then we also think that they just learn how to wait. Better. And so we have that factor as well. But we have been very successful in training the self control rituals who that means.

Are there dietary factors and things that control the ability to maintain self control? So you know, not every person is able to, to have discipline, right? Or to the same degree, what are, what are some of the factors that might impact that?

We've looked at high fat, high processed fat, I should say, so Christgau, and high sugar diets in our rats. One thing that's very nice in rats, is that you can control their dietary history. So we can really say that is really the diet, because oftentimes, diet actually is confounded with a lot of other things in people. But associated with all kinds of other things that might like low SES, and you know, even just like where you live, there are also notable wires, if people aren't good at reporting their diets, even when they mean to, you know, and then plenty of people try to hide what they eat, but, but in our rats, we can actually, you know, control this experimentally. And we found that both high fat and high sugar diets, if they get a few weeks of exposure to them, make them more impulsive. And then we find even, so they were on the diet for several weeks. And then when we remove them, and give them some time to like, just get back to normal, their weights dropped back down to normal. And then we retested them, we actually found that in a subset of the high fat rats, they actually still remained impulsive. But the remaining high fat rats and the highest high sugar exposed rats actually recovered and looked normal. So we think that fats particularly seem to reproducing major, like pervasive and probably long lasting changes in the brain in the brain and make you more impulsive. Yeah, at least for the rats. Yeah, so fats are very inflammatory. So these processed fats that I'm referring to, so we think there's probably neuro inflammation that's causing damage, and that's long lasting.

Like, what's the difference when you're talking about process fat? So like, do you haven't tested other things? But do you have a hypothesis about what's the difference between the process fats like why? Why the more inflammatory right and might be affecting the brain more than other fats?

Yeah, it seems that the, the processed fats, I'm not, I'm not sure exactly what the reactions are. But they actually damage the blood brain barrier, which is the very, that kind of keeps things out of the brain that are designed not to hurt our brains. And then that allows it become more porous. And then it means that the fats themselves can get through as well as a lot of other things that can lead to inflammatory processes.

Wow. And so what's in the category of processed fats? Or Christgau? You said, but what other things? I don't know anything about fats?

Yeah, so it'd be really any, like, for example, your hydrogenated vegetable oil would be another example. So anything that's really being you know, like, processed through this, like a natural fat like butter would be a natural fats, but anything that's being kind of processed to change its constitution, and then saturated fat, I think is a really key element too.

So does this create sort of a like a vicious cycle of impulsivity, then, you know, if you're on a poor diet, and then you aren't able to control yourself, you eat further poor diet. So you just kind of spiraled down down the hole, then?

Yeah, I think that's exactly what happens. And we've actually been able to really kind of chart that in our rats and see that vicious cycle development happens so and I think if you kind of think about people who are living and like what are called obesogenic environments, and if you've kind of come across that term, but it's their environments really promote obesity because there's a lot of fat food fatty foods like you know, your lots of McDonald's and other kinds of fast food rest John's in the area, that would be a really big problem when you think about it, because people are probably more likely to eat those foods because they're readily available and cheap. And then as they eat those foods is going to undermine their self control. And it means that they can't just drive past those restaurants anymore, they're going to be tempted to want to go in.

Is there any indication that this affects children, or adults more so or less so if a child has a high fat diet early on, does that, you know, promote this behavior more as an adult?

I think that in terms of the brain health effects, almost certainly are going to be worse in a developing brain. Because you could actually alter the trajectory of development if you're producing neuro inflammation during that time. So I would expect that with children, if you are producing this kind of high level neural inflammation, you would really see different developmental trajectory in the brain, and probably much more likely to have persistent long term effects.

So it's also suggested that perhaps parents or other professionals are really taking the wrong approach when they're trying to deal with young obese individuals to try to get them to change their behavior. If they're doing things that are still allowing a diet that's allowing more impulsivity.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, I think changing the diet is probably the first step. And then maybe some self control training would be another really good thing, we've actually started doing a little bit of work with healthy hawks, which is at the University of Kansas, their childhood obesity treatment program. And one of the things that they found is that impulsivity is actually the big predictor of dropout from the program, and also from like failure to go along with the exercise and the dietary requirements, which, you know, not surprising, right? So we're kind of working to see if we can develop our interventions, we've done in our bats into an app that the kids can maybe use to practice their self control, I think maybe we could do some scaffolding where we could get their self control, maybe looking a little better than they might be able to stick with the diet and the exercise and might be able to stick with the program.

So I wanted to follow up earlier about that. But so you're talking about training the rats, right? Not as much success in humans yet, but you don't have as much control, what have you. What have you been doing? What have you seen for training people to be less impulsive?

Yeah, I mean, like I said, it's very early stages. But there is some, there's a little bit of literature in kids. It's a little bit older, actually. But we're individuals did this kind of delay exposure training, same sort of thing, the same sort of thing. And they found, at least in the short run, they were able to get improvements and self control. In our rats, we've actually found that our intervention effects lasted when we retested them nine months later, which is I think, 15 human years, I think so we actually have a technique that's not just strong in terms of its effect size, but also really long lasting.

What are those interventions?

Sorry, where we just give them that first exposure to the delays repeatedly, and then later give them choices between the delays of the good.

So what would this look like in humans is this sort of thing like, right? Oh, I'm hungry, right? Now, let me let me like, set up my lunch, but put it off to the side for a little bit before you did, or like things just like spend a bunch of time just doing that kind of thing are

We actually with the healthy hawks, we're developing a game that the kids play, it's a type of space invaders like game. But what they have to do is like they press a button to fire a shot at the ship, but then they have to wait a certain amount of time before their missile recharges. And they can fire again, and we don't tell them how much they have to we. So they have to just like it rats, like experienced the delay and really learn about it, and kind of practice it. And we're, we really like to get it so that they could play it on their phone. And then we've also thought a little bit too about just having an adult, I think would be probably more likely to work. But there's another kind of training that you can do. It's called mindfulness training. And it's where you kind of really practice like paying attention to certain kinds of cues. And we're thinking that some mindfulness training for really paying attention to delays, could maybe be a nice thing. And then we could couple that with practicing, like experiencing and learning about delays. And the two together might be a really good way to go. I think.

Interesting. It's almost like self talk when you're listening to yourself.

So one of the things that are one of the models of addiction and impulsivity and things like that, that I've heard of is that you know, some of these, some of these dietary choices could be affecting the the gut microbiome, and that may be releasing neurotransmitters and things that that may be impacting how people behave. What are your thoughts on that? How much of an impact do you think that that has?

I'm certainly changing their micro. How's it going? We give them the phases that we get them. And I mean, the gut brain axis is obviously becoming very popular because this is recognition that I think was the serotonin. I can't remember what it's a high pretty high percentage of serotonin where the precursors, like rely on things in your gut. So I think without a doubt, it's a little far afield for me, but I would think the microbiome is pretty key as well.

Yeah, I think that's a fascinating aspect of it. I saw also in your in your publications list that you have looked at a little bit of the social factors that may be influencing some of this stuff, too. I'm fascinated by the rat Park stories from several decades ago. Bruce Alexander, right, we started all that. Are you doing something similar like that? And then and looking at how it impacts impulsivity. So maybe you could start from that idea, and then talk about what you're doing?

Yeah. So there's two. So this really relates to enrichment. And it's, it's pretty well established, the individuals who live in more enriched environments, you know, have a lot of, you know, better self control, better coping skills, the kind of things that we see with the kids who can, if you will pass the marshmallow test.

Enriched in what, what do you mean by enriched?

Well, in terms of people, this would be like having a lot of opportunities to like, learn and advance yourself, like after school programs, experiential, yeah, experiential kind of, you know, environments who, and then also having, you know, a warm house to go home to and healthy food to eat. In rats, they stimulate enriched environments by giving them both social enrichment. And also you can give them novelty enrichment, the novelty enrichment kind of stimulates the opportunity for experience. So you literally give them toys, and then they can interact with the toys and kind of get this novelty enrichment effect. We have done some work with both the social and novelty, we found that social enrichment, promotes self control. So even just having one other rat with them, just having a buddy was actually enough to significantly promote self control. We actually found that giving them toys partially reversed that effect. So now they were getting a new toy every day. So they were kind of like the spoiled rich kids. Maybe you're having like less frequent changes in toys, maybe it'd be better. But we were kind of like over almost overreaching now with the toys. And that actually kind of backfired a little bit, which is interesting.

So it's always try to start to scale some of these findings. Globally, right? Or at least in the United States, where we're seeing an increase in Well, some people say an increase in impulsivity within the general population, but certainly obesity issues and things like that does. How does that translate? You think that or the fact that more people are looking for meaning or maybe feeling more lonely in the social isolation and all that are having an influence on obesity in the United States? And that's, you know, sort of that's sort of part of the explanation.

I think that's certainly could be possible. I think there are probably a lot of variables driving that. And no, I, I've seen things as well about the kind of new, more like social media culture where people don't actually interact physically with each other. So you may have a lot of online friends, but if you don't actually have, like, face to face time, that actually seems to be related to a lot of problems with like anxiety and depression. It suggests that maybe we actually need physical contact with people to really like, get the effects of the social enrichment.

But somehow, we don't really know what kind of social enrichment might help with impulsivity? Is that,

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't think it really know a lot about that. But I think certainly like having some form of physical contact, you know, it seems to be a good thing.

So was this, what you're talking about the same sort of thing about drug addiction? I remember reading some rat studies, right about sort of the social network really reduced, right?

Yeah. And of course, impulsivity addiction are strongly interrelated. So I think they're probably affecting the same systems.

Interesting. So can I go back and ask about sugar, because we're talking about fat and it was fat that you sort of labeled as are the saturated. So also, we should distinguish are just not all fat, because you were looking particularly at these processed fats. Right, you know, but then sort of one of the things that's happened in nutrition is that people have realized, Oh, the fat was the boogeyman for a long time, right? And, Geez, it's not nearly so bad, right? And certainly not all fats, right. But sugars, perhaps much worse for like, a lot of health effects, right. So. So you're looking at both of these and you saw, particularly the process that seemed to have a longer term effect is that sort of I don't know, how does that line up with sort of this shift in understanding recently about the health effects of sugar versus fat?

Yeah, well, I would say I mean, the sugar did produce effects. It just was it, they rebounded, they kind of looked okay after they stopped eating the sugar. That suggests to me that maybe the effects of the sugar are really quite qualitatively different from the fats. And we know that sugar is addictive. And that it actually getting exposed to sugar alters your reward system in a very similar way, actually, to taking drugs. And it may be that if you just go off sugar that you're able to then like restore your normal reward system functioning again. So I think that's why we probably don't see the pervasive effects.

But if you're on sugar, if you're on sugar, it's a bad thing. When you're on sugar without a doubt. And, you know, sugar is definitely associated with a, you know, a whole host of other health problems as well. So yeah, it wasn't trying to just make fat, the bad guy. Sugar is pretty bad as well.

What does sugar do to the reward system?

Well, it seems to like dampen your dopamine response. So that you actually kind of need You need to eat more sugar, for example, to feel the same, like positive reaction hedonic reaction that you would feel when you maybe used to eat less sugar, much like you see with drug use.

So if you, you know, if you have a couple m&ms one time, the next time to get the same height as the EB three m&ms and that sort of thing.

Yeah, I mean, we're less. That's really, you know, it drives people that want to eat, eat more of it. Yeah.

And, and in fact, but we got to specify here that we're, I think we're limiting pretty much to sucrose as opposed to glucose. Yeah. So sucrose m&ms? Glucose, popcorn? Sure.

So in Okay, so So what's going on there? What's the difference in why?

Well, they're different sugars. They're different. Different structures, they're processed differently in the body of sucrose, glucose, one fructose, right? Correct. Yeah, yeah. Glucose comes in a variety of polymer sizes and complexities. And it's processed very, very differently.

So its impact on the brain and body, it could be different. It's causing that sort of thing. Oh, certainly.

Yeah.

Another thing that I saw that you were getting into is you started studying female rats for some of these studies, too, because typically, it's a male rat that's used, right? Do you see? Are you seeing differences in sex and gender, how that how that's making a difference in some of these results?

We found a little bit of an effect of gender on a result. Again, this is all the rats. But basically, two things. One, is it females, she just regardless of whether you give any kind of intervention or anything, seem to be more self control than males in their choice behavior. But in terms of looking at the efficacy of our interventions, we actually found that females were more variable in, you know, more individual differences and their reaction to our interventions. But overall, there was no sex difference in efficacy of the intervention. So that was kind of promising, because it suggests that you could still, you could deliver an intervention to females, and it would be just as effective as it was in males.

Could you say something about why it's only been male rats for so long that have been used and not so much female rats? Like this is true in general, right of the field?

Yeah, the issue really has to do with estrus cycle. So this poor girl rats, they go through estrus every three to five days. And I think it's maybe why they're very their behaviors more variable, is because their their hormonal environment is just turning over so frequently. I think the traditional way of kind of dealing with that is people either would measure their estrus and account for it, or they would ovariectomized them. So that's where you, you know, you remove the ovaries, and then that stops them from cycling. But that's not really ideal to do, because I knew now I've got a group of rats that had a surgery, and then your males didn't. And so that's not really good either. And so I think it's just mainly because people felt like they needed to control for estrus, but then it's really hard to do. Of course, we don't do that in people, right. So in that sense, like from a transactional standpoint, in our work, we just let the females be, and we're like, they're just going to do what they do. We also just recently developed a modeling technique to account for estrus in our data. We do live regression analyses, and we actually just added the sine wave component in to our regression, and we actually found we detected in estrus cycle in our choice behavior was there in the females and we also checked for males there was no estrus or in our male rats, so. So we think that maybe we can just account for it statistically moving forward, trusting.

And so that's specifically about impulsivity, the same choice function. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

You're really addressing a lot of different aspects of this seems to be very, very productive, very broad based. What's the next question you want to ask?

Yeah, well, I've got a few things in the works right now. One is we actually are very interested in trying to delve into the dietary research more, we want to try to get a little bit more like the brain mechanisms of particularly the high fat diets. We're also wanting to use our interventions and see if we can rescue some of the effects of the diet on choice. And then we also have some ideas about using omega threes to possibly rescue the brain effects because omega threes are really wonderfully anti inflammatory. So we might be able to kind of do some of that rescue of the effects of the diet on the brain. And then we've got some other things in the works. I'm actually working on a collaborative venture where we're wanting to do some genotype analysis of our rats to see if we can identify genes that might predict individual differences, as well. So they will probably still keep working on our interventions. We want to start delving a little bit more just all the brain mechanisms of those.

But you're looking at the same background popular, they're all what Sprog douleurs, Italy's same temporary, it,

If you start looking for doing genetic analysis to sort of start looking at different different groups of different populations are at seven different types are like and how many actually I don't know anything about this is there, there are a whole bunch of different kinds of rats you can get for these kinds of studies are worth

playing to go there, because it to do proper gene analysis, you need about 1000 animals. And it's pretty laborious to do these tests on them to figure out their impulsive choice. So we probably would only start with one this day with our Sprog dollies. But you could ultimately do that if you had the resources to do this kind of testing.

So that I know this is far afield what you do, but sort of what's the difference in all these different routes? I mean, so this is like this went back to the replication crisis is one of these kinds of things we sort of in you talked about the difference between sort of trying to get very specific in control and power, right, you know, there's this other thing that sort of control for as many variables as possible, but then that restricts your ability to then generalize, right, you know, so what are the factors that are in choosing your, your model organism when you do all these studies?

So there's the outbred versus inbred difference, which is a really big one. So outbred animals are ones where, you breed them with individuals from other lines, so that the genetic stock is always varying. And there are different strains that have different original source animals, and then they, you know, continue breeding from there. And then the inbred is where you breed within a line. And they will oftentimes do that to create animals for specific models.

homozygosity increases.

And so there's like, we have done some stuff with strains that were in bred like, that were developed for specific functions, like, turns out these, these one rats are called spontaneously hypertensive rats, they were bred specifically to be a hypertension model. But it turns out, they're really hyperactive and impulsive. It was just sort of accident. Yeah, so I think they have special animals they bred for obesity research. So and then, of course, you can also do, you know, genetic knockouts and create special models as well,

Across all of these rat models that are out there, do they what's the rate at which they transfer to human applicability, right. Like there's a big issue in pharmacology that, you know, they see effects in rat models, but then when they try to use them in human populations, they're not able to really see anything, right. How well does that transfer? Just a guess?

I think that it depends a little bit on your questions. So I think if you're certainly if you're dealing with things, where the behaviors you're looking at are likely to be very kind of high cortical type functions, you're probably not going to get as good a transfer because rats have a pretty underdeveloped cortex. But for more kind of lower level stuff, or you're dealing with, like reward system, for example, that seems a lot of that seems to transfer pretty well. We I mean, our decision making work that we do, I think we're dealing with fairly low level processes. So I think there has been good translation there. But it's always a challenge in terms of the translation issues, and I think you just have to try and see if it works or not.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you have to do the basic research. Basic Research.

Yeah, I see you moving to a larger scale? Because you know, because this is global food systems and things like that, right? Do you have any? Do you have any ideas about like governmental policy or school lunch policy or anything like that you would like to see to help with obesity issues and children and that sort of thing? What are your thoughts on that?

Well, one of the things that I've really been thinking about quite a lot with children is it just an oftentimes don't really have choice about their diet. And so they may be getting exposed to foods that could then you know, set up a pattern where if they're really impulsive, because they ate a lot of bad foods when they were younger, that then could be set up to a lifetime of impulsivity and unhealthy eating. So I think it is really essential that in cases where, you know, we're determining the diet of the kids that we really make sure that they're eating foods that are good, not just for their bodies, but for their brains as well. So I think that's a really essential one in terms of policy.

So like making sure that the school lunches and things have the rights, the right composition, and that sort of thing right now. It's really interesting. It's something we don't often hear enough about, probably.

Yeah, I mean, you could give a healthy food. And it's something that seems like a well balanced diet, like maybe you give them some lasagna, but if you use a saturated process fat, when you eat it, there could actually be problems lurking in there that are gonna have a negative impact. So thinking about the ingredients of food as well, rather than just the end product of the food.

So gonna ask about effect size, because it's something we started with, right? So of all the other factors that sort of might affect impulsivity, right? Sort of, you know, variety things, you're talking about SES, socioeconomic status, and sort of all these other things that sort of affect us, right? So how, how big is the dietary effect compared to these others, just with respect to this impulsivity issue?

Certainly in our rats, it's quite, it's pretty big.

But you're not looking at a lot of other variables there either. That's kind of their control. That's one strain of RAD. And it's sort of like only a small certain environment, right?

Yeah, yes. I think if you put it in context, where there could be other moderators, it's going to be weaker in people than it is in the rats, where we have the full control.

So in terms of like, non dietary stuff, right, sort of the food, sort of the type of food versus like enough food calories, right, sort of to feed the brain growing and development versus sort of other kinds of factors, what's your mean, for and actually, sort of, even with food, like choice, having choice, like learning how to make your choices? That's one of the things that you talked about, sort of what other kinds of recommendations do it's hard, it's hard to translate basic research into recommendations. Right. So but what are the things are you concerned about sort of about, especially raising kids?

I think another thing that I have thought a lot about is that we are a very instant gratification society, I sort of think back to, you know, when I first like use email, and how long it took to boot up your computer, like, get your email open. And now if it took that long, I would be going crazy, like what's wrong? Like, why is it taking so long? I think there is like value in making kids wait for things, and kind of not just automatically fulfilling that instant gratification. And that can be a way that really self control can be just built into upbringing, if you don't just automatically always, you know, go for the fastest option. I think it's good to be bored a little once in a while. And this promotes creativity, right?

Yes, it does. Yeah. Do you have any you have any thoughts on the in this is sort of the kind of out of left field. But do you have any thoughts about how like things like bad food are advertised and the impacts of that might have psychologically on these sorts of things?

It's really interesting, the advertising is fascinating, because it turns out that we form associations between food labels and the foods themselves. So that McDonald's arches elicits the same response as actually a hamburger in our brains, which is really fascinating. And I think in terms of that, I mean, the labeling is actually you know, it's it's eliciting desire to want to eat the food. So I think we're being mindful about those associations, I think it is probably definitely important. Another issue, and this, again, is going pretty far afield for me, but I know that you know, in the cereal aisle, for example, they put the foods the, at the level of sugar. So and I mean, we know that with decision making, that things like that actually really do influence your decisions if the food that you first see is the one that you're most likely to pick. So maybe also trying to combat some of those factors would be a good thing.

Yeah. And this is one of these like, really basic things. It's sort of been behind a lot of what you do and you talk about but sort of it's hard for I mean, even when you know a lot about it, it's hard to Think about yourself as you know, as a, you know, your the processing the thinking we do. So much of its automatic, so much is controlled by other things, right? And we like to think we're in control of things, but you know, you just Alright, so if you feed me different food, apparently I'm behaving differently, right? So so how should we be thinking about our own selves psychologically, in general, like those are their major shifts in terms of how to think about yourself, self that you would recommend to people that's really interest me.

I think sometimes we give ourselves too much credit for being like this really advanced species, like what we do is still very much driven by maybe our animal past, if you will, I think being very aware of the importance of habits is a really important one. And that establishing habits can actually go a long way towards you being able to change your behavior, that's much more effective to establish a habit than to try to like just consciously to decide at the moment to decide to do keep with it, but it actually takes about two weeks of just daily practice of a habit before it becomes pretty automatic. So if people can just like use their system twos for long enough to get the habit established, then that habit will just kind of take over.

Two part question, when you test the rats, do you test individuals? Is it like one rat in the box being tested? Yes. Would you predict or hypothesize that that might change if there were multiple rats? And what I'm getting to is the idea of people eating by themselves versus having a meal with others? Whether that would change the that's really interesting.

Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm sure that there's social effects, we know that. Actually, much like in people, the rats actually engaged in social learning about what to eat. So they actually will smell each other's breath. And if they smell a certain food type on a rat that's looking really healthy, they're actually much more likely to eat that food themselves. So I think certainly food choice would be influenced by other individuals.

That's fascinating, interesting. Well, we want to be respectful of your time. We really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us got John, do you have any further questions? How's it been great. Is there anything else? We haven't covered that you would like to say?

We covered a lot? Yeah, yeah.

Fascinating stuff.

Yeah. Thank you so much.

I hope everybody enjoyed. Thanks so much, Dr. Kim Kirkpatrick.

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. Sandy Procter is an assistant professor and extension specialist focusing on maternal and child nutrition in the Department of Food, Nutrition, Dietetics and Health at Kansas State University. A registered dietitian and former coordinator of the Kansas SNAP-ED nutrition education program, she possesses a wealth of knowledge surrounding human nutrition that spans from pre-pregnancy all the way through advanced age. Our discussion was quite wide-ranging covering some more technical topics relating to maternal health and breastfeeding to the more social considerations of how to demonstrate healthy eating habits to children and provide recommendations to adults.

For more about Dr. Procter check out: https://www.hhs.k-state.edu/fndh/people/faculty/procter/

Transcript:

Improving Family Nutrition at Home and Abroad with Dr. Sandy Procter – Maternal and Child Nutrition

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of global food systems. It's produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Jay Weeks PhD candidate in the Department of Agronomy. My co host is Scott Tanona, an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, who specializes in the philosophy of science. Everyone, everybody, we're glad you're back. The field of human nutrition is fascinating, and obviously important. But as we all might imagine, very complicated. It seems like almost every day there's press coverage of a new study concluding that something like coffee or chocolate is good for you, or is going to give you cancer. Scientists and doctors have learned a lot over the years to keep us healthy. Yet many questions and seeming contradictions remain. So how do we make sense of all this? One way is that we can all buy all the books and read all the papers to make decisions for ourselves. But many of us, even if we would like to take on this endeavor, sadly do not have the time. Fortunately, another route is available, and that is that we can rely on specialists to spend their careers assessing all the information and distilling the findings down into recommendations that they then provide to us through various means. Our guest today is Dr. Sandy proctor. Sandy is an assistant professor and extension specialist focusing on maternal and child nutrition, and the Department of Food, Nutrition Dietetics and health here at Kansas State University, a registered dietitian and former coordinator of the Kansas snap Ed Nutrition Education Program. She possesses a wealth of knowledge surrounding human nutrition, the spans from pre pregnancy all the way through advanced age. Our discussion was quite wide ranging covering some more technical topics relating to maternal health and breastfeeding, to more social considerations of how to demonstrate healthy eating habits to children and providing recommendations to adults. Regardless of your background. I think everybody can find something interesting. In this episode, our Global Food Systems Initiative Coordinator, Dr. Maureen Olewnik, joined by Scott Nye for the interview as well. She has a strong background in serial chemistry and brought an additional perspective to the conversation that I think you will appreciate. Lastly, if you're enjoying the podcast, please tell your friends either in person or on social media. Word of mouth is an important mechanism by which we grow our audience. Also, if you wouldn't mind taking a moment to rate us and leave reviews on whatever platform you happen to be listening on. We will be most grateful. We want to continually improve the program and your feedback is a tremendous help. Okay, sorry for the long intro heavily. We now bring you Dr. Sandy proctor. Enjoy. Dr. Sandy Proctor, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks. It's good to be here.

So we usually start off with a short intro how before the podcast is even recorded. But we would like to get your perspective and your background and how you got here. So if you don't mind, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sure. I'm originally got my bachelor's from K State in dietetics way back and started on a traditional what I thought was a traditional career path for dietetics in a clinical setting and progressed through a variety of different dietetics positions, each of them still long term care and then feeding college students and infant and child feeding programs. And each of them I realized I was sort of embracing the idea of moving further back, I wanted to move back further to make a difference earlier. And so I went from basically instructing patients as they were leaving the hospital about eating more healthfully to ultimately when I completed my PhD working with maternal and child nutrition and actually beginning to understand that we can can really affect change earlier than then before birth and and also beyond just a single generation through some of the the genetic differences that we know that adequate or inadequate nutrition can make.

Yeah, so I definitely want to get into the Maternal and Child Health things as it gets really important that a lot of people will be interested in that. To get you into that when you start moving closer and closer to childbirth were the things that you were noticing in society or in people that made you you know, sort of key on that or what got you interested in that specifically?

Well you know, as s in a role of nutrition or dietetics, or in health care, you realize that so much of what we do is focused on people's people's health or correcting something that's wrong with people's health. And so, so many of the chronic diseases that we deal with are nutrition, food related, that it is just a real goal. And I think of many people who are in nutrition related work, to catch that audience at an earlier time to to get to them and help them understand how valuable changes can be earlier in their life. So if you're a parent, how starting your child with that, right kind of food is, essential, or even earlier than that, talking with mothers about breastfeeding the minute that their baby is born. And so those were the kinds of nutritional interventions that really captured me as I sort of progressed through my early work career.

So most of your work now is an Extension agent with case date, correct? Extension specialist or specialist. Sorry. So what does that mean for people who aren't familiar with the extension system?

Well, and that's why I wanted to tell you why I corrected those agents are educators that are out in the field, and they are in Kansas, housed in every county, and they cover a variety of subject matters, topics, generally, they may be community development, or they may be agriculture, and National Natural Resources, family and consumer sciences. And then specialists are faculty members at the university level, usually or regional level, that are subject matter specialists. And we provide programming information, resources for those extension agents that are out interacting with local audiences.

Your specialty is maternal and child health, mainly us nutrition, nutrition. So what are some of those things that you're doing? What does the day look like for you? Or what programs are you working on?

Well, for many years, in this role, I worked as a coordinator across the state for two nutrition education programs, both the expanded Food Nutrition Education Program, and snap it and both of those are aimed at low income audiences, to help them better utilize what limited resources, they may have better feed their families, and to, to follow as closely as possible optimal eating information, helping them learn how to cook, if they aren't able to do that, to use some of the health foods that they may not know how to incorporate into their diet. So really complete sort of nutrition education for themselves, their families, how to shop, how to keep their food safe. So kind of all information around that. And so that really fit well with my my research or my focus area on maternal and child nutrition, because those programs really focused at the homemaker who was trying to better feed their family and and to make to stretch that food budget and to make better decisions that was going to, you know, affect the health and well being of the people in the family.

So you mentioned sort of supporting agents, but these could you say something more about these programs that you're working on there? This isn't all just sort of, for agents out there? Are you contacting the public? Are you working writer on your own to write

Those two programs I mentioned are both USDA programs that are delivered in Kansas through extension. And so we are the the sole teachers, the sole delivery agents have both of those programs, and they're delivered in about 80 counties for SNAP Ed and about 10 counties for the smaller program, F snip, and so as the specialist supporting that, and the coordinator was really a lot of just program management across the state. And there are there of course, it's both of them are based with the information that comes out from USDA. So my plate and the nutrition information that is developed my plate is that the basic pictorial embodiment of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. And so both of those programs are based on getting that type of information out to audiences and in a variety of different ways in different curricula. And so specifically, what I did is as coordinator of those programs, and this was until 2018 was to really coordinate the effort And the the direction that our programming took in specific areas identified by the the local programming, but then facilitated through the state and supporting the the agents and the educators with the tools and the information that they needed in the training to keep them so that they were able to deliver those programs soundly.

So one of the benefits of it being on a county by county basis is you can target specific programs to benefit the people in that specific county. Correct.

That's one of the beauties of of Kansas and the extension in Kansas, it's very locally driven it if you were to compare what a specialist does in Kansas versus other states, in many states, from what I understand, it's kind of top down, we would decide at the state, a program that we wanted to send out over the state and everyone would do a program on on this topic in in Kansas, because it is locally driven. And there's that local funding, and that local board that is really driving some of the direction that extension takes place in those local needs are going to be identified. And then as specialists, we help agents realize what resources might be available to meet that through a series of lessons or through information provided to stakeholders or whatever they might identify that they need. So it really, is challenging for both, I think, maybe specialist for sure, agents, probably, but hopefully is a much more flexible system for the stakeholders. And the people of Kansas.

You had mentioned a local board. And I don't know that I may have missed the definition of what that is. So who would be on that board? And is that true? Is there a local board in every county, working with the agents?

There is a local Extension board that supports every extension office, and there are extension offices in every county, and now districts and so that may be a district board if there are counties that have gone together. And that even is through a change in Kansas law that they would join together as an extension district. And then there's a board that guides those there, their work and the hiring and the oversight of those programs. So our extension agents are they have input from the state, but they also have input from local stakeholders.

And then that board, that local board who makes up that board is local people who are elected to elected and people who are interested in what extension has to offer. And you know, extension, oftentimes people only know maybe about four h as part of the extension. And so there are people who are interested in youth development and people who are used to interested in and focused on community development or health or water. The Global Food Systems is one of the grand challenges. But probably one of those at least challenges is going to be a focal area for people who are interested in serving on the sport or people who are just really interested in seeing a vibrant service in their communities for the well being of what can happen when extension is really involved and informed.

Could you just say something about the way like what extension is doing here in Kansas versus like in other states, you described? How just different terms of the locality. But is this, I guess is anything like this is like everywhere, in across the whole United States, like every state has universities working, you know, with Extension agents throughout the state? Or is this sort of just in our, you know, breadbasket areas or like how does that work?

That's an excellent question. And I should broaden my description here. We are in Kansas, the land grant university, there is one in every state that was set up by moral just immoral, I think is his name back in the 1800s. Is when he first started off 1860s I think it was Abraham Lincoln's idea to have land grant universities he thought it was important that the average person out without that was not able to necessarily go to a university have the benefit of the excellent work that was being done at a university. And so he had this idea of land grant university and then Morell was the person I believe he was a senator. He was definitely a congress person that was involved with many times proposing this and getting it to actually come to fruition and getting a piece of land in every state put aside for land grant. universities and now in many states, there are Sea Grant air grant, lots of other types of universities that do that same research, and then make sure that that research part of that research challenge is to disseminate that out to the people of the state.

And it's a key part of Kansas State's mission, right.

And we find ourselves in today's conversation, oftentimes, you'll find us packaged into the discussion around engagement, because in extensions worked, is truly engaged work. And so getting back to the topic today, with the global food systems, it is important that we look at the role that key state has, with all the amazing research and the connections out across the globe. As far as developing the information and discovering all the amazing science, that's that's there. But it's also, at least in our estimation, that engaged part that taking that information out to the consumer, whether that be individual families in in, you know, the most rural part of Kansas, or if that is some sort of community setting where we can change the environment and, and really make it a healthier situation, because we have agents that are working as part of the school wellness committee, and they're going to have healthier food served at at vending opportunities, all of those types of opportunities that engaging and changing step by step, the possibilities moving toward toward health is is what the role of extension is either directly or indirectly, but aiming at those sort of components set that allow us to have a healthier life.

And I think, you know, you were talking about kind of education and providing information a lot. And I think it's really easy to see, like the the job of the land grant and of extension is sort of serving that role. It's kind of core, right, you know, sort of information. But, but, but I like the way you're focusing on engagement there too, right? Because there's a lot, there's a lot of this that isn't just about here's some information, let me give it to you. It's about, like you said, working with people and getting them interested in involved. And, I mean, yeah, agents are doing things to besides just providing information.

Absolutely. That's the classic model, when you think back to it. Let's take it, you know, around the 30s in the Dust Bowl era, and those agents out there teaching people how to, and I'm out of my element here, but circular plow, say and prevent the, the wind blowing in the erosion in some of the things that were the real. One of the real parts of the problems to the problems with the decimal. And part of that was education. But part of that was application to it wasn't enough just to say, oh, I need to, I need to eat more fruits and vegetables every day, but an understanding of not only do you need to eat more, here's how it could happen. Here are some samples, and you can tell your kids really like it. And this is a recipe that makes it really easy for that to happen.

In your opinion, what are some of the best ways to engage the public?

Well, I think, you know, I think that's a challenge that is ongoing with us. And when I first started being interested in extension, I was just a kid I was in four h and to me it was just fascinating to go to the extension office and see all those brochures that were written. Most of them in you know, in food nutrition were written by the same person is like, Who is this amazing person with these credentials that can write all this amazing stuff. And it all fits, you know, it's color coded fits in these these little holders and it was just the coolest thing well, that you know, that has changed obviously we don't do a lot of print information anymore, we do some because that's still a way that works for people but we do a lot of electronic information and we do you know blogs and and all sorts of of more modern we in with some of our young pregnant moms in some of our nutrition classes, we we do tweets or we do YouTube Live or whatever the form is that can really make sure that it is effective because it's just like nutrition isn't nutrition until it's eaten. Information doesn't do any good until it's received communication is two way so it has to be received as well as sense so the best way is what is going to work best for the two that are communicating whether it's the sender, but the receivers as well. So we'll find sometimes that we have multiple ways in the middle of programs and Depending on if something spans generations, that's not atypical at all. Or it could be that we start everybody off with face to face, because that's going to really build some, some rapport and some trust. And then we may go to online so that this young mom can, you know, get that last two or three lessons after she puts the kids to bed, but we still have that, that face to face touch with her. And she knows this and knows who to contact if there's questions. And so I think extension works really hard to identify what those best methods of communication and and information delivery are.

So K State does a lot of work internationally, with through the Feed the Future labs through many other activities where people are traveling, how does that affect the extension side of K state's outreach? Do we have any overlap or any, any connection between some of those international activities,

We do have some and I imagine there are more in agriculture proper than I'm even aware of. But I can give you an example of one that I was really fortunate to take part in just a few years ago, and I was approached by Sajid Alavi, with the Feed the Future work that he was doing and he was developing interested in developing a new food for very young children. That would be replacing the corn based food that they were had used in aid programs. And it was going to be sorghum based. And so there was a lot of work being done on what that would look like, and what all else that would include and, and the recipe for that. But also, it they were interested in information of you know, how can we work with these young moms? And how can we, you know, build their trust? And what do we need to know about, you know, we're brain scientists, we're not that familiar with young children nutrition. And so I was brought into that, that project very early. And I have a background from an earlier project of working in Kenya with doing some nutrition education. And so I thought that maybe some of that information might be transferable, as we started to learn about working with rural families in Tanzania, for this, Feed the Future project, and also with the community health workers who were sort of our, our go between sin and made it all possible, they could translate, they had relationships already with the families. And so that sort of that extension role developed for us. So we weren't just walking in there, like the experts and, you know, trying to change things or offer them, you know, food for your babies, you'd be very distrustful if you're given a food for your baby, but we worked with the local health educators to build that trust, and they could start to see a real benefit to their kids, they they really showed health benefits right away. And so then we had a role at the end, to work with those same health educators to make sure that the moms knew what to do next, because when the project ends, and the food source goes away, the moms want the health benefits to remain. And so to have those discussions with folks who worked as our outreach people, you know, we had some sound nutrition information, but they had knowledge of local plants and inexpensive fixes that maybe families didn't typically use to feed their family. A lot of times historic plants are so nutritious but our thought of is poor people's food are fed to the animals and not not eaten the way they were even a generation ago. And so when you have a child who's in a really healthy situation, and looking good, you have a health educator who's saying you can keep your child this active and healthy by adding these things, these simple things to his diet. You have a a motivated, engaged listener that's ready to say I can make these changes because I see how it's going to work and I'm I moved to keep my child healthy.

To drill down into this project a little more, what were the health challenges that were presented? And then you know, how did you move into correcting those?

I was part of a big team and so I need to talk about that because it was a really, I thought, really visionary group of people. We had Sajid whose work is with of course with grains and extrusion he was learning he was extruding the grain, meaning that it was being pretreated. So it cooked faster. And one of my experiences was in Kenya is that one of the things that is extremely hard on the natural surroundings, but also expensive is fuel cooking fuel. So if it cooks more quickly, that's a real bonus to the family, they don't have to go and collect wood, they don't have to buy food, they don't have to spend a lot of time cooking. So those that was a real benefit. So you had this extruded product. And then we had also from our Food Nutrition Dietetics and health department here at K State, we had sensory specialists who were able to do all kinds of testing to make sure not only was this a nutritious food that they were going to get, but it was by far one of the tastiest things that they'd ever come in contact with. And it really helped because when you're trying to get people to try your food and to taste your food, you want to make sure that it is even more attractive than what they're used to eating. And then another one of our group, also from our department was Brian Lynch shield, working with the the lab the basic nutrition and finding out how can we formulate this food so that it has increased nutrients. It's very digestible. Sorghum is historically not real digestible, but when you extrude, it that helps the digestibility and then mixed with some of these other products that increases some of the attributes, and then the whole micronutrient array that was added to it to make it so it overcomes some of the main problems, which were vitamin A deficiency and iron anemia, iron deficiency anemia, so lots of efforts went into it, even looking at the feasibility of with some of the agricultural economics folks that we worked with Nina Lilya, and her students doing a study on the feasibility of making this this extruded product, because it was USA ID in addition to USDA, yes, we can make it here in the United States and ship it but what would be the feasibility of making it in country and making it a sustainable type foods at some time in the future? So there were multiple aspects to it. And so seeing what the costs of those grains either grown or purchased, and did you know that they had extruders in I think it was in, in Kenya, not in Tanzania, but right next door. So just learned an awful lot and found out so much about working with our partner and in country was a non governmental organization, NGO, and the ability to get an IRB through a foreign government, when you're working with young children, is not to be missed, if you think you've done science. Yet. That is a lengthy, lengthy product process. But those who don't know an IRB is what, oh, internal review board the permission that you get from, in this case, the government and all the layers of the government in Tanzania and the health agencies, as well as our university to make sure that every step of what we're doing treats, people and processes and all parts of the system with respect and very aboveboard, so that ethical, ethical research is being done all the time.

Were there any learnings from that experience that you were able to bring back that had some impact here in the states?

It's really interesting that you asked that because obviously, there were, you know, the bigger project ones were the huge ones related to the brain and the sensory, and I think it's gone on and sort of continued growing. But for me, personally, one of the things I learned was, then coming back and working with those low income programs is, you don't know what low income is until you try making connections and finding support systems outside of this country. Because the support systems that we take for granted, whether it's, you know, the WIC program, or and I shouldn't say that we take those for granted, but that are here and part of our structure are so non existent food stamps or snap as we have those those things that are there, when a family simply isn't able to have enough money to feed themselves. There isn't anything there in other countries. And you know, so just finding out that, that ability to to depend on some of those resources and build on those and really help people maximize what's available to them is key because we forget to be extremely grateful. I think for some of those things that are available, that are not in other countries structure.

Could you talk a little bit about how important those programs are for getting people out of poverty, right because there's not but necessary that people are sitting on these, you know, for a lifetime, right. But by having these programs to help people through tough times, you know, that helps them move further up in the in the income ladder.

I can do that. But I don't have the facts and figures in front of me. So this is just sort of rough. But I do know, that snap itself, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is one of the great indicators of economy writing itself. And that is because if you look right now, the use of SNAP has gone down. And it continues to go down. It was at its height, I think, in 2010, which reflects the 2008 economic disaster, I guess it's fair to call it and it was at its height, but is has continuously and appropriately worked its way down, because more people are able to support themselves and their families and move away from that, that support system. And so there's lots of discussion about is that really accurately what that reflects, but best estimates are that, it really is a really good inverse relationship to the economy. And that it kicks in when it is when it's left to, to being delivered as it was originally or subsequently designed. It is most responsive, when the need is high, and it fades back into less need when economic times are better.

So what are some of the ways the besides, you know, at a macro scale on the economy and things like that? What are some of the ways on a local scale, you assess the effectiveness of some of these programs?

Well, the one of the ones I mentioned that the expanded Food Nutrition Education Program is one that is really a hallmark it was in in created in 1969. It was Orvil. Friedman was the Secretary of Agriculture at the time, and he wrote a letter to Lyndon Johnson, who was president and said, Mr. President, there are people in this country who do not know how to feed their families, and they need the information that and this is his words, that extension, Homemakers would, you know, give them at a meeting, but these people are not likely to go to meetings. So we need these educators to go into the homes and to work with the families one on one. And that's the way that program was started back 50 years ago. Well, the beauty of that program, and the reason it's still alive after 50 years, in my opinion, is because in the 80s, before anyone was calling for evaluation, we developed we I was not in it, but they the program developed a very complete evaluation system that is looks at a family's practices pre program, and then post program and also addresses other aspects of their behavior that change over time. So instead of just how did you like the program, it really is these are the changes that that we have made as a result of the program, and that has been able to allow our program to, to really sort of continue prove its impact through the years. So that's one example.

It's really obvious, I think, Well, maybe it's not obvious, but it should be obvious to people like how nutrition matters for health, right, you know, but could you say something more about like, the the the other impacts, right, sort of what what, what difference is there for a family, right? So when they, when they improve their nutrition, it's just like in terms of just calories in terms of sort of, you know, vitamins and micronutrients? And sort of like, what impact does it have on people overall, in terms of the well being?

Some of the micronutrients are simply, I mean, all of them have ability to change life, but some of them are truly intergenerationally life changing. And what I'm thinking of is iron, the capacity to learn is increased exponentially when a child has enough iron in their diet during the formative times in their life. And so we talk a lot in maternal child nutrition about the first 1000 days, and that is during pregnancy during from the time of conception during pregnancy to their second birthday, and that is really key for optimal nutrition. So, and there's lots of nutrients that we talk about folic acid because we know that if it's missing, and that's most typically found in fruits and vegetables, but it can also be added to lots of grain foods. It's a B vitamin that's going to prevent many of the neural tube defects that we see still in other developing nations. And so that one is really key. So having a very diet with with again, one of the main things we talk about is increasing fruits and vegetables because nobody no matter what, nobody, nobody eats enough, it doesn't matter, it's not a message that's targeted at this audience or that audience, it's like, you can be safe if you say more fruits and veg. So there's, there's folic acid and vitamin A, which is either beta carotene as a precursor in fruits and vegetables, or, in the actual form version in animals is one of the main causes of blindness, lack of vitamin A, in the developing world. So, you know, some of these, nutrients that are not that difficult to obtain in foods are really lacking across the globe. So when you're talking global food systems, you know, it's like, yes, the, the macro giant, commodity type, making it work, and even down to the farm and making, you know, the farm, the farm prospers, but down to the individual and down to the, you know, the whole cross ability to, to, you know, just figure out the necessary foods to be on the plate is is a key part, I think about what I think when I think of global food systems, it's it's that that mega, but taken down to the mega number of individuals that benefit from it, and I don't think I answered your question completely. But iron, vitamin A, are two of the biggest ones. And probably those are some in then there's different populations and different ones that are specific to, you know, where they are, but those are two of the ones globally, that are particularly an infant and maternal.

That's a great answer my question, I think, great, because, you know, it's, it's, again, it's just not about, it's not just about calories, right? Right. So there's so many things that are important,

It's so important to get out of this country, and no offense to this country, but to talk to people who really, until just recently, and most of them still don't talk, there is no talk of obesity, because people are struggling to get enough of, of, you know, enough. And so it's really hard for people to get their head wrapped around, buying an eating, or growing and eating a variety of food, because more to them means more of the starchy, you know, center of their plate food, whether it's maize, or, or whatever that rice, whatever that food is, that gets them that full tummy feeling that they are able to have enough to eat and their kids are able to go to sleep and so to introduce a concept of very diet is, is really beyond the scope of a lot of a lot of people's thinking at the individual local level. And so having some of those, those local educators that can put it in perspective that resonates with those families is key.

You talked about sort of getting some of these nutrients from you know, variety of sources. And obviously, the varied you know, fruits and vegetables is a great way but, but supplements to grains and stuff, right. And so, you know, in this country, we've got a lot of experience of additives, right, you know, vitamin D and milk and you know, the list is long, right? Sort of what, what's your view about? Or? I don't know, if you have a specific view about this, but what do you think about the difference between adding essential nutrients to food, like through the, you know, through a manufacturing process, or like improving, you know, shortening the cooking time through extrusion, like, ahead of time, versus like, trying to get these nutrients, you know, and your calories and sort of increasingly cooking, you know, getting getting, making things easy, more easily available, like through other methods, right. So, like, basically, you know, should we just be trying to eat more fruits and vegetables? Or is it okay to sort of set up a system where, you know, hey, we need certain things, let's get it into other parts of our food, so we don't have to worry about the fact that we're not eating enough fruits and vegetables.

You know, I think, I don't think it's one or the other. I think it's I think it's a mix I remember it seeing in Kenya, and they stopped the bus after about the fifth time I made him stop. And so I could hang out the window and take a picture of this sign that said, Ken salt, and it's iodized salt. And it's like, that is huge. And in we are the one of the only developing nations that doesn't require that iodine be in all our salt. We have the option of it, but we have the freedom to not pick iodine too. So we do have in some cases, reoccurrence of goiter indeveloping nations where they have iodine added to the salt. It's a simple fix relatively simple fix for problem that is a health issue forever and ever. And not only is it goiter, but it's also cretinism. In developing in infants, you know, it takes a different form when it's birth and young children. So it's, it's, it's a simple fix and it needs it's an inexpensive and complete coverage of people to get that, that nutrients that they need. I feel the same way about folic acid, it really corrected a lot of things, I think we're we're starting to find out now I think that there are some sort of individual age related, you know, folic acid more is not always better as you age, there's some some issues, it looks like that there can be too much and it may affect heart health. And so to have it across the board in every you know, every cereal or bread may not be the best solution. But it's certainly solved one of the huge problems that we saw in our country, and worldwide too, so it wasn't just the US. So I don't really think there's, as a dietitian, I'm programmed to say if we can get it through our diet that is probably best. But we know population wise that there are several nutrients that we cannot get adequately, easily through our diet, even in this country. During pregnancy, it is difficult, if not impossible to get enough iron to for women during pregnancy, at the level that is needed. So that's one of the main things that's almost always included in a prenatal vitamin. And it's simply because diet wise, it would be very difficult to do that at a time when many women aren't feeling like eating enough, let alone more to support that particular nutrient. So I think it's a mix of if we can get it from the diet, great. But if there are ways that we can affect health of populations, in through appropriate supplementation, then I think those need to be pursued.

And fruits and vegetables in particular fresh ones are expensive, right?

They are. They're seasonal, I mean, we got issues we can we can talk about that across Kansas, and you may be able to get him in the southeast corner, but the Northwest, you know, and when we talk about fresh, how fresh is fresh, it's different if you live in California, and it truly is grown right there versus you know, it's shipped in and brought in and so you can have fresh, you know, something at your western Kansas grocery store.

So how quickly do things lose their nutritional value?

Oh, a lot of them will are losing like vitamin C. And some of those are really volatile, they'll go away shortly after they're harvested. And so ideally, we'll tell people that canned food may be inexpensive, but it's picked at its peak. And it's captured, the nutrition is captured at that point. And so we encourage people that instead of thinking that everything ideally is fresh, that you have a variety of food and that you not worry about it being we have a healthy, very complete food system that you not worry about it necessarily being organic, and it doesn't necessarily need to be fresh because foods are are picked and and packaged at at a real optimal nutrient level.

Could you say a little bit more about food access. In Kansas? I think a lot of people thinking that, you know, in the United States that food is accessible to pretty much anybody, right? Because a lot of people have cars and that sort of thing. But you know, depending on your situation, your access to a grocery store might not be possible, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and this is something we talked about a lot and again in our programs and extension, but I think food access is a really big part of it. And in Kansas we have areas and even in our county here in Riley County, we have areas that food access is not easy. And when you think about that, there's two components to it, there has to be a place where food is provided like a grocery store, but then you have to have the financial support to be able to to access the access and so you may be you may be several miles away from a grocery store but it's not a food desert if you have a car and you can hop in your car and go to the grocery store as many times a week as you need to but if you don't have access and there's not public transportation, and you don't have the money to make that happen or you're working hard to get the money so you have two jobs and you're the store closes while you're you know so it works and the same is true. If you even count in the pantry only serves people in one county and you work in that county but you live outside the county because the cost of living is less there. And so you've got access problems that, you know, we best intend to fix things and help things, but we create some of those as well, sometimes with our systems. And so, it is not that difficult to identify what we call and now I think they're starting to develop new terms, but food deserts where food access is more limited than you might ever think, in a country with this much to offer.

Yeah, and you said even here on campus, you know, hidden hunger is a real issue more than you would think, you know, university in a relatively prosperous area around.

Yeah, and that's, that's something that that people much smarter than me have been aware of for a while. But the we have a case cat's cupboard as a food pantry that has been a male vailable for last couple of years. Because it was identified that as costs go up for college students, they may be able to, you know, live in, in a very expensive area, or they may be able to hold down a job or to to make their tuition and books. But sometimes that last thing that that is covered is his food, and they'll go without the variety, or the quantity of food that they need to stay healthy. And it was identified in several different ways from several different directions. That was not only an issue here on our Kansas State campus, but on many campuses across the country.

One thing I wanted to make sure that we covered what we have you what we have you here, you talked about for young mothers and young parents and child nutrition and things like that it's important for them to get things like iron and folic acid and whatnot. Is there. What other things do you think young parents should keep in mind or you wish more people understood about child nutrition?

Oh, you just touched on it. Now we're here for the rest of it.

That's great, as long as you need.

One of the things that I've been partnering with another extension specialist, he's in family child development and nutrition is I've had a real focus for a while on parenting through feeding. And I think that's a real important aspect of it is that the whole idea of adequately nourishing your child's not only nutrition, nutrient needs, but their whole, their whole, just educational and emotional support, oftentimes happens through parenting and parenting is always on display. If you think about it, during feeding, it's a given a take, and so I early subscribed to the idea, of an educator. She's a registered dietician who's also has a master's in social work and, and has spent her life counseling families on feeding problems with children. And her name is Ellen sadder. And she has developed what she has come to call the division of responsibility in feeding. And basically, she's saying it's up to the parents to, to, to choose the to, you know, to provide healthy foods in a safe and dependable setting for the child, but it's up to the child to decide how much food to eat, or if to eat it all. And so thinking about that, and working with parents, if if the child has the responsibility of how much to eat, and whether or not to eat at all, that means that instead of prodding your child to just take two bites, just just take a bite, clean your plate, or whatever the current dialogue of the day is from parent to child. Instead of doing that we trust the child's appetite, and the fact that they are programmed to grow. And we do other things. So we make this the setting. You know, I'm not saying that it's an entertainment, you know, everything's always perfect. It's not that at all, but it's a functional, very positive time, where kids feel supported, as they learn to navigate food and their own eating capability to become eaters that are capable. And we work a lot with parents through programs, to to sort of instill that, that strength in them and then to also understand that what they're looking at may not just be, you know, picky eating, there are other things that it can be around and how To how to sort of arm themselves with information and and some tools that might help them pass through some of those, those challenging stages.

Is there some research out there the sort of shows, if you allow the child to make these decisions over time that they do develop us, are they given the adequate nutrition that didn't need rather than trying to force it on the child at any particular time?

It's not that they develop faster, it's that they become competent eaters. And so they trust their own ability to start and stop eating, to have the ability to say, I don't care for that, or I don't feel like eating now, I'm not going to eat anything. And that's not a time for mom or grandma, or granddad to freak out. It's, it's, it's, the child has that responsibility to be able to say that, because we know as parents that they're going to eat when they're hungry. I mean, there's a few ground rules that we understand about how they're going to eat when they're hungry. And that, you know, if they go on a, let's say, they go on a food jig, and they only will want to eat one food for a period of time, you offer a food that you know, that they like, in addition to new and different foods, and you continue to offer foods, you don't make a big thing about it, if they're only, you know, going to eat one food. And so you kind of yes, there is research, and that's, that's the whole point, there is research that shows that by doing that, you let them know, kids know that there are boundaries, you know, that they can be cranky and obstinate, and food is still going to be on the table, they're still going to have that interaction and that support from their parents. And so it really gives them sort of this, this framework for success and, and it shows that there's all sorts of research on this. But there's it shows that when children are very little in their brought to the table, and they have this this sort of responsive parenting feeding, they develop their vocabulary, better they interact, they learn communication skills earlier, as teenagers, they're less likely to have delinquency behaviors, there's less likely to have drug use less likely to have nutrition. Like food disordered eating. And so there's, there's a ton of research out that shows that if people develop young people, kids develop into competent eaters, that a lot of the issues that come along with that have a food sort of framework to them can be avoided.

So this is interesting on so many levels, but this is all about the social part of delivering food, right? It's not about what you're delivering as much as how you're delivering and everything like that is interesting, because, you know, when so much of what we're talking about with global food systems, you know, production and then sort of, you know, whatever, but sort of food is food is complicated, right? And sort of, and it's so social, right and cultural. Right. And this is I think an important part to be you know, highlighting and man, you know, battles between parents and kids around food or jobs. Yeah, right. Yes. Right. Yeah, it's always gonna happen. Yeah, so obviously, you know, you said no, you know, food doesn't become punishment, I heard you say, right, that's always gonna be there. Alright, so it was always hard for me as a parent, right, not to sort of do a little bit of that forcing. I mean, we, I think we tried to do something that was kind of like this, we said, our kids aren't gonna starve, they'll, you know, they'll eat right? You know, and, and we're not gonna make something just for them, we're gonna make what we're gonna make, and they can choose to eat or not. And so, you know, we felt pretty good about that. But man, there's so many times I'm like, No, you got to eat this, right?

You know, and, it's built into us, you know, it's like, I made this for you. And it's sort of, you know, it still comes out. But I think, just, even if you are only, you know, cognizant of it, and 90% of the time you try to do that, it's just remembering that the, for lack of a better term, the clean plate club, or the to Bike Club, which is interesting. You know, they're well meaning books coming out from all different directions that talk about that, but that's infringing on the child's responsibility is to decide how much to eat or if to eat at all. So if we can just say, you know, here's, here's what I'm offering today, and you can have, you know, you can have this or this. So there's choices involved, but you control that the food is healthy, you control that it's offered regularly, so the child doesn't have to wonder where their next meal comes from. And you keep the you know, the discussion, it's not about, you know, punitive and you keep the discussion light and positive, that those are very positive aspects not only of eating competent Stephen A parenting.

I was just gonna say it's fascinating to listen to you describe that and to the impact that has the effect that has as the child grows. Expanding that out just a little bit. What are the guidelines if the child 30 minutes later comes back and said, I'm ready to eat now?

Well, according again to Ellen Sattar, that's one of the things that you do is you can say, okay, you don't have to eat this. But your next opportunity, you know, you'll have a snack it at three, like we always do, and then there'll be supper, so find the ground rules. And yes, that Yeah, and so there won't be the opportunity to come back and, and, you know, demand something in 30 minutes, or dig in the snack or whatever it might be. And, yeah, so it gives, it gives parents a break, too, because you have sort of this set of things that you can, you know, because nobody wants to screw up their kids eating. But when kids aren't sure that where the next meal is coming from, or that they, you know, can trust themselves, let's say that somebody is so worried about some child's weight that it's like, no, don't eat that you or don't, don't take more, you know, you've had enough or something like that, when you're over doing that part of their responsibility. It undermines their ability to trust their own satiety. And so there's instances in settings where kids will just eat meat and eat and eat, because they're not sure that, you know, they will get a chance again, because you know, it's been restricted or something. And so, there's lots of cases like that, where, and that that can be normalized, but it is then you know, there's there's feeding clinics and parenting, feeding clinics and all sorts of, of manifestations of trying to get that message through to parents that it's really, and and you know, when you think about it, it starts at the very beginning, if a child is breastfed, they can't be forced fed, they are able to say I've had enough and I don't choose to eat right now, from the very beginning. And so if an infant that's just born has that capacity to do that, we need to nourish and support that, as they grow to be competent, older eaters, too.

So are there other trade offs there? Is there evidence that also like that trying of different foods? increases their palate longer term? So that like, actually, if you, right, sort of, if you force some new foods on them, does that actually have benefits?

Or no, no, I think trying enforcing is the key right there. You there are, and I, this changes all the time, so I can't tell you, but there, there are windows, where offering different foods are less likely to be rejected. And so try a variety of foods on a regular basis, and to re offer and to be okay, if, by trying this food today, I'm going to look at smell it and you know, set it really close to my face and look at it for a while, but I may not eat it till next time. Because the senses all come into play at the same time. And so it's not necessarily taste is the one that's going to win out. But yes, by offering a variety and then being real calm about the way that that food is offered, or that you know that it can be rejected without upsetting mom, I can reject the food, but Mom's not gonna reject me because of that. And so being able to to feel confidence in making those choices and not upset that family relationship is key in a child's development.

You mentioned the role of breastfeeding and sort of setting up healthy child development and you did your PhD on the effects of breastfeeding. Correct. Could you say a little bit more about the science behind that and the importance of it?

Well, if we weren't gonna be here all day, before we are now. Yeah, it's just pretty amazing. All the things what I particularly looked at with my research was this was back in, like, early 2000s was the effect of prolonged breastfeeding on child overweight. And there's a lot of research and we used big data from WIC and looked at datasets for Kansas infants and those who who are breastfed at least six months started to show some real protective effect against overweight at age four, and h four we use because it's the nature before they introduce in schools and get other outside food things and so and since that time, it's it's been repeated and reaffirmed in a lot of different places. And that was actually taking Kansas and looking at it because there had been a nationwide study that didn't include Kansas and so it you used, it used WIC data, looking at that audience where we knew that we had at one time we had a higher incidence of, of child overweight in WIC audience than in a generic across the board. zero to two, audience and so on. Yeah. So there's that. And then there's all the nutrition support that's much stronger. And the fact that, you know, so many things are available through breast milk that we're just still struggling to continue to find what it means in should it be added to infant formula even to this day. And so, yeah, and then the whole, nurturing and the child's ability to be in charge of their eating, there's just a myriad of benefits to it.

What are the mechanisms to protection against being overweight?

Is that oh, that's yeah, and that has changed over time to they used to think that it was, I need to check these again, they used to think that it was was something enzymatic, I think, or something, but now they're starting to think that maybe it actually is a some sort of genetic or DNA sort of programming early on, that's a programming thing. And I, I am not as up to date on the information as they used to be, but they have started to have more. More thinking, and I think that it's actually their thinking that programming for satiety sets in earlier something about that.

I mean, it's got to be really, really complicated. I'm sure we don't like, like you said, we still don't really understand everything.

That's it. That's the beauty of nutrition, you know, it's really relatively young science. And so a lot of this stuff, just like the biome, and I was just going to ask Mike, yeah, they're just starting to figure it out. And to really attribute some of the science to some of the changes and, and the, you know, the autoimmune diseases and things that that come up, they're just starting to really start to put some of that together.

So it's which is another whole aspect of food that sort of it's not then just even about the nutrients, but it's about sort of what else are you getting when you're eating right, sort of what other microbes right are you getting?

And what did you get once it's in there? And yeah, it's crazy. It's, so I wanted to ask, I keep on talking here, I'm sorry, but asking you questions, but I'm sure other people say things too, but sort of, you just said something about nutrition, being a young science and sort of Alright, so one of the first things I think people think about when they I don't know, but sort of with nutrition science, one of the things that I hear when I talk to people about science communication, right? You know, nutrition comes up as one of these examples. Well, first, they said it was this, it was bad for you. And now they say it's that and then insert it. And then you know, this is fat and sugar, and it's sort of butter and margarine, and it's all these things and sort of, they don't know what they're talking about. Right? So what do you think about this?

Cuz I'm sure the reason I got into the field is because it's so interesting, and it's still evolving. It's like, yeah, you know, I think we're at our most boring when we think everything is solved, and we figured it out. And let's move on. And so I think that's a perfect example, when I, when I first started out in dietetics, we actually, you know, fat was the, the evil. And, you know, if I would have ever thought that I would get to the point where I would think that, you know, dairy fat now, it's got some really sort of very positive properties that they're starting to find out about. And, you know, avocados and nuts and all these things that weigh back, you know, it's like fat. But such healthy types of fat and the effect of different kinds of fat and what it has to do. And yeah, and the one of my favorite ones to use an example of that, and I love doing it when I'm talking to an audience of seniors is like, member eggs. Member her eggs used to be the criminal, you were right, eggs are back, you know, they're positive. And so and then just the other day I saw something, it's like, well, maybe dietary cholesterol is a problem. And it's like, man, don't go there. Because we're finding out now all this stuff about choline and eggs are one of the best sources of choline is like this nutrient that's been around since the 1860s. But they're just starting to figure out that it may reprogram some of the biome and have you know that we need different levels at different times during our life, depending on you know, whether or not we're making estrogen is women in childbearing years. And so it's like, this is really fascinating stuff. So yeah, so eggs. They're good right now, you know, and I love talking to people about that, but I like getting them to the point where they understand that it is a young science, so you're just figuring out vitamins back in the 20s and 30s. of you know, 1920s and 1930s. So it's stuff is really relatively young. And I just threw out a textbook. I think I told you this, that it was 2000 and it was saying, don't try to attribute anything to To choline, because it really is a nutrient that doesn't have any, any use in the body. And it's like holy cow, somebody gets a hold of this. That is so not where the research is now. So, yeah, to me, that's the fascinating part. But I do understand that it frustrates people. But I think, you know, since the fact that we eat every single day, many times a day, most of us to be able to sort of tweak our eating pattern, as nutrition changes shouldn't be that foreign. It's not like, we're going to find out that we got a bad car, and we have to live with it for 10 years, you can make adjustments to your nutrition as you go along. And it shouldn't be that sort of much of a jolt to people to sort of learn and adapt as they go along. But again, I guess that's sort of job security for nutrition educators for you.

Yeah. So, this is a you know, there's always uncertainty, right? You know, there's uncertainty Now, like all science, right, sort of like, all right, and we make mistakes, right scientists. So that's important. So the but one of the things this brings up is sort of the question like, when do you turn the science into policy? And when do you as a extension specialist, turn the science, it's out there into a recommendation? Because that's kind of where some of this can go wrong? Sometimes, right? Sort of, we've got the science, it's uncertain. Oh, you know, so eggs, maybe, maybe not, you know, fat, whatever. But so then it comes down, like, reduce your fat. And I think one of the issues that you just hinted at was that sort of too often, we take those directives, way too seriously, too extensively. We don't tweet or like all of a sudden, too early, we're gone. But sort of how do you balance that to sort of, like, How soon do you start to make a recommendation? How confident are you in recommendations? You know, how do you handle that?

Also, to add to that, I mean, we're all genetically different, right. And we all have very different backgrounds. We have different childhoods. You know, how do you think about that, too, because there probably isn't one policy right? For everybody. Right?

Yep. And I think that one is just really, it's just really starting to unfold. I think we're really just starting to learn about that. And I think that, for example, choline is a perfect example of that. And I think gluten may be another one, where it's going to react with different people, and they're going to have different, you know, different sort of reactions, or reprogramming, actually from some of these nutrients. And so do you get a lot of questions about gluten? Oh, yeah, that's one of the lessons I wrote a few years back was on gluten when, when it was going from, because again, when I was in school, they talked about celiac, very few people have celiac, this is something you may need to know about. If you're in a clinical setting, learn about this. And then to the point where, oh, let's all try it. It's a great weight loss diet, and everywhere in between. And so I, just a few years ago, felt like it was time and there was lots of stuff being developed out there to write this lesson on. Okay, here's all the reasons that we know of today, why you might need to talk about gluten restricted diets, and it's there's allergies and additions to you know, and intolerances. In addition to celiac, and there's all these things, and then, you know, does it is it effective for weight loss diet? Well, in extension, we try to, you know, really not be black, white, you know, we weigh the science we talked about, and it's like no, it doesn't seem to really be effective just for weight loss. And it's super restrictive, you lose a lot of nutrition in the offing while you, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater, as far as you know, getting rid of gluten. So, yeah, we get a lot of questions about that vitamin D is another one. There are people and research out there that say that vitamin D is the solution to a lot of things that whether it's autoimmune diseases, you know, all sorts of things that are being attributed to vitamin D, at some level, but the research supports only bone health right now. That's where the science is most complete. We've had recommendations that we increase it during pregnancy, it's pretty exciting stuff, but they're not there yet. So what we end up doing what I think we are bound to do in at least in these two programs, and I think it's just good sense is we follow those US Dietary Guidelines for Americans, those are put together by really strong appropriate groups of people who look at the science, see if there's enough weight to the science at the current time to say, you know, we can now say this about this, if we can't see it, we can see it's looking like this. But you know, we the science isn't there yet. So this is all we can say like about vitamin D, they really can say bone health, there's all those other things that they are starting to attribute to it and depending on who the scientist is, there's tons of pressure to make some of those changes. But you have to weigh the science and make sure that you know and that's when something becomes you know, research, even applied research versus public health policy. And so it's a continuum.

We want to be respectful of your time. Maureen Scott, do you have any further questions? Do you have anything else that you would like to say before we sign off?

Um, no, I think I appreciate the opportunity to talk about more things than I ever thought we would be talking about today. I hope I've done well, by extension extension is a very huge and complex system. And I my slice in family consumer sciences is part of it. So, you know, to talk about extension and their focus on the grand challenges, one of which is global food systems, I think really merits a bigger look than what I was able to share with you.

Well, if people want to get in contact with you, how might they do that?

Oh, I'm just [email protected].

Great. Dr. Sandy Packer. Thanks so much. Thank you. You're welcome. 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.

Dr. Nathan Nelson is a Professor of Soil Fertility and Nutrient Management at Kansas State University. A native of Manhattan and an avid outdoorsman, he possesses a strong interest in developing agricultural systems that not only maximize productivity but protect environmental quality as well. Our discussion in this episode covers how and why farmers make the fertilizer decisions that they do and what that means for water quality. Nathan directs the Kansas Agricultural Watershed (KAW) Field Laboratory, a unique 18 plot watershed project, to better understand how cover cropping and fertilizer application practices impact phosphorus dynamics on Kansas no-till fields.

For more about Dr. Nelson and the KAW project check out:

https://www.agronomy.k-state.edu/people/faculty/nelson-nathan/

Transcript:

Cover Crops and Agricultural Fertilizers: The Complexities of Crop Nutrient Management with Dr. Nathan Nelson – Soil Fertility

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of global food systems. It's produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Jay Weeks PhD candidate in the Department of Agronomy. My co host is Scott Tanona, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy who specializes in the philosophy of science. Welcome back, everybody. Often in popular culture, agricultural fertilizers get a bad rap, while they're used definitely does have the potential to come in and environmental costs through promotion of algal blooms or emission of greenhouse gasses. The truth is, these amendments are necessary to produce the abundant and affordable food supply that many of us around the world enjoy today. To discuss the ins and outs of soil nutrient management, we spoke with Dr. Nathan Nelson. Dr. Nelson is a professor of soil fertility and nutrient management here at Kansas State University, a native of Manhattan and an avid outdoorsman. He has a strong interest in developing agricultural systems that not only maximize productivity, but protect environmental quality as well. Our discussion in this episode covers how and why farmers make the fertilizer decisions that they do, and what that means for water quality. Dr. Nelson directs the Kansas agricultural watershed Field Laboratory, a unique 18 plot watershed project to better understand how cover cropping and fertilizer application practices impact phosphorus dynamics on Kansas no till fields, Scott John and I had a great conversation talking with Nathan, having known him for a number of years, I always appreciate the points of view that he brings to agricultural research, I think you will to enjoy. Dr. Nathan Nelson, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. I appreciate the invitation. And I look forward to the discussion.

So I typically do a small intro before the podcast even begins. But in your own words, what's a little bit about your background? How did you get here?

Sure, yeah, um, you know, I've always been really interested in conservation and natural sciences. Since you know, young age, I grew up on a very, very small farm, just outside of Manhattan, Kansas here, but spent a good portion of my younger years up through high school, spending summers on my grandfather's dairy, which is out in out in Utah and western, the western states. And so and that's where, and so I was familiar with agriculture, and things like that, but really passionate about conservation and ecology and environmental things, actually went to school started off in a conservation kind of biology type program, and did a lot of work looking at natural resource conservation, like parks and wild lands and things like that. And it didn't take me too long to realize that a lot of that was managing people that were and their access to natural resources. Whereas in agriculture, you're managing the natural resources. And agriculture quickly became much more interesting to me, it was always familiar to me. But now very interesting is really, really the number one user of natural resources. I still feel fairly passionate that is our most important use of natural resources that feeds us. And we need to conserve it and make sure that we protect the resources, the soil resources that we have, as well as the water resources, everything that goes around it so that we can continue to provide food sustainably. And so that's kind of the background of where I got into then I came to Kansas State actually here, spent a few years here, finished up an undergraduate degree here at Kansas State, went to North Carolina State for Masters and PhD in soil science. And worked in soil fertility, nutrient management, a lot with the animal industry in North Carolina, and then moved out to Idaho in Kimberley, Idaho, near Twin Falls, worked for the USDA in the their irrigation soils research lab and then moved back here to Kansas State so it kind of made a little bit of tour of the nation and ended back up at home.

Was it the you know, you were seeing environmental degradation and things is that what got you really interested in it or just enjoyed the outdoors and being part of it and wanting to conserve it for the future?

Some of both. I've enjoyed the outdoors and really enjoyed doing that. But then at the same time, I saw some degradation and some When I was a kid, I don't want to throw my dad under the bus. But he came from a, you know, a different mentality. And, you know, we had, you know, a burn pile and things that got spread out on the land. And when there were some trash that didn't know what to do with you found a goalie and it stopped some erosion. And I thought, well, you know, that's one way to do it, but maybe there's a better way. So and we still have good discussion. There was one time when he actually dumped a bunch of sheetrock in a landfill. And then later on, he says, Well, you know, he learned that that was a good soil amendment. And I said, Well, yeah, but you weren't using it that way anyway. No, it wasn't covered leaded paint. And I still I was like, come on. Gypsum can be a good land can be a good soil amendment. But anyway,

Not all in one place.

Where it's gonna get washed away in the next big rainstorm. But anyway, so some of that, and I kind of just noticed, I said, Well, you know, there's probably a better way to manage some of these resources. And, I was pretty passionate about keeping things clean. I really enjoyed using fishing and outdoors and water, but wanted to see cleaner water.

So you were working with the animal industry as a grad student, what was that project? What were you doing?

A few different projects mainly, first, I was looking at ways to process swine lagoon effluent to recover phosphorus from it. So looked at precipitating out struvite, which is a magnesium ammonium phosphate mineral, which it can precipitate out naturally, we're trying to enhance that precipitation and then recover the product. So that was a lot of fun. And looked at that as a nutrient source for plants as a fertilizer, then I started looking at phosphate leaching in sandy soils, typical of the North Carolina coastal plain, to try and make some estimates of how fast it was moving, what soil properties affected its leaching, and if this phosphate leaching was actually going to maybe become an environmental problem years down the road. So looked at that.

So a lot of work with phosphorus, why phosphorus?

You know, it was a little bit what it's available, but also I was quite interested in phosphorus because it has a it plays a pretty big role in water quality and algal blooms and so forth. If you get too much phosphorus in freshwater, you can get algal blooms and fish kills and some other things. So there was an environmental side to this that was I was interested in trying to keep it out of the water, but at the same time, it's an incredibly important for our agricultural production. So we need this nutrient it's pretty important for the farms and it just kind of made a good blend of my interests of agriculture and, and conservation and protecting water quality.

Nathan Help Help rookie or novice out here. When you refer to soil fertility, what do you what are you actually speaking about?

So for me, soil fertility is I'm going to say it is a pretty broad field, but basically nutrient management managing nutrients in agro ecosystems, if you want to kind of be specific, but so that would include both on the fields as well as that area around the fields and water draining off of the fields, that whole system, we're looking at managing the nutrients to maximize sustainable production of agriculture and minimize any any negative effects. And so this would go for any nutrient increasing, so part of this is an understanding of the cycling and soils cycling through plants. So there's a nutrient cycling side of this fertilizer management so how to what sources of fertilizer, how to place them at a time them appropriately. So it's the fertilizer management as well. And then some crop management and best management practices to keep that nutrient in the field. So it's that entire dynamic, pretty broad, broad area more than just fertilizers…

and does that conversation or does that subject cover anti nutrients as well? high salt concentrations and..

Oh, yeah, the like, sure. Sure, high salts, maybe some toxicities and things like that. Those would fall into soil fertility. But they also salt will also go into some soil physics and stuff because cuz that doesn't in some of these things bridge into some other areas because high salt content content often relates back to or or deals with soil physical properties and irrigation and some other things that bring in some other areas of soil science beyond just soil fertility and but the same thing soil fertility brings in some things from soil microbiology, and there's there's overlap between all these disciplines.

Yeah, great. So thanks. So as the fertility just about like mostly delivery of nutrients to the plants, then is when you use the word fertility as opposed to other ways in which the plants are affected in their health.

Yeah, primarily, primarily nutrient delivery him.

So not everybody that listens will be familiar with like fertilizer application and things like that, right? I mean, fertilizers get thrown into the agro chemical category, in the get lumped in with pesticides and herbicides and that sort of thing. How does the farmer make a decision about what fertilizers to use what, you know, what goes into a fertilizer application?

Sure, yeah. So you know, every farmer aisle, in general, you're going to be looking at what your plant needs, and can it get that nutrient from their basic building blocks nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, then you got calcium, magnesium, and go through the whole list of, of elements that plants need to acquire out of the soil. And so you're going to look at what the soil can supply. And if the soil can't supply it, you're gonna look at some other way to supply that nutrient. Could be through manure could be through from fertilizer, it could be, you know, changing cropping systems to improve availability of some nutrient. Or it could be just changing cropping systems that choose a crop that may be tolerant of a deficiency. So there's four different things. Primarily, producers add nitrogen, and phosphorus, and potassium, and then some micronutrients. And when they make their decisions there, they're going to look at the crops that they're growing, the system that they're in, if they're irrigated, they still bit different than dry land, their yield potential there, their soils and climate, make some estimate of how much nutrient they're going to need. And then choose a fertilizer source. And their choice is gonna, there's gonna be some personal preference, there's gonna be some equipment, some management styles, a lot of different decisions go into exactly what fertilizer and nutrient source, they're gonna, they're gonna choose. So there are a lot of things, it's hard to say, this is exactly what every farmer does, they're all gonna do something different.

Sure. But there are tests that farmers can do right to determine or estimate how much of some nutrients that is available to plants before they make those sorts of applications.

Sure, yeah, there are soil analyses, and we highly recommend producers to analyze their soil. And a lot of them do, some don't, some make recommendations based on that a lot do that I think the good. The producers that are progressive are going to pay quite, quite close attention to those analyses, because that's going to help them make sure that they're not spending extra money on fertilizer that they shouldn't, or they're not losing some yield, because they don't have enough nutrient things like that.

So I want to ask it, along these lines, how, how fertilizing has changed over time, you're talking about sort of your dad being kind of old school, right? And then you're also mentioning concerns about phosphorus leaching, right. We're, we're there you're talking about, specifically from the waste pools. Right, you know, but, but this is a general concern. That's, you know, I don't know how long it's been but sort of increasing attention to right. fertilizer runoff, right, leading to algae blooms, and things like that. Right. So could you say something a little bit about, like, how, how techniques have changed over time? Or how, you know, how much awareness has changed, right? So is it so in the farmers mind is mostly about cost? Like, you don't want to over fertilize because you spent too much? You know, versus attending to the concerns about right over nutrient, you know, over nutrients? Right, and, you know, elsewhere?

Sure, so if we go back 50-60-70 years, really, that's when fertilizers really started becoming more prevalent in agriculture initially, yields were a little bit lower. They were growing crops that worked, you know, that they were mining a lot of the nutrient in the soil, right. So when people first started applying these fertilizers, a lot of the focus in soil fertility was on finding the right rate and actually helping producers make sure that they're maximizing yield. Okay, initially, and actually, for quite a while fertilizers tended to have Lower and fairly steady cost. And with that lower steadier costs, the idea was, there wasn't a downside of applying too much. Or, you know, you'd want to make sure you had enough. And so there was a lot of building up the soil building soil fertility was a lot of the very common mentality and to do that with fertilizers. And then, at the same time, you had a lot of manure. And that's what people had been using, bulky, kind of stinky, kind of tough to manage. And with this new fertilizer that came along, that was really nice and handy to manage. Somewhat, the manures kind of maybe fell out a little out of fashion a little bit, right. And people looked at that more of as a waste product. And so there was a period of time where you had a lot of nutrients and manure that were really viewed as a waste and trying to get rid of it. Your objective in managing that was to get rid of it. Because you had this easy fertilizer that was cheap. And then not a whole lot of attention to losses. Now, over time, we realized that, oh, no, there are some issues with loss. And that can cause some problems in water bodies, groundwater, as well as surface water, as well as saltwater. And also, fertilizer prices have in the last 10 years become a lot more erratic. Some spikes have gone up, and they've been quite expensive. Why is that? You know, I'm gonna have to speculate on that. One is exactly why I think it's got to be complicated. It's complicated. And part of it has to do with, I think we're moving more towards a world market where the US doesn't control so much of the fertilizer market. And you have other countries with a lot of purchasing power. And then all of a sudden, you know, back in the 60s, when we were the number one user of a lot of this stuff, and supplier, we control the market steady prices. It's more than that, though, probably. But that's part of it. Anyway, so there, there are a lot of factors that went into this, but he had a little bit more of erratic prices. And that has stayed about true, they haven't really stable that stabilized a whole lot. They're stable. So producers are a little bit more interested in, especially in the last 10 years, producers are more interested in the economic side of managing and not over applying fertilizers.

So I want to get to a couple things. One, I want to talk more about what the ways in which fertilizer is lost, because people have a lot of concerns about getting into groundwater or or into freshwater bodies and stuff like that. But first, could you say a little bit about her about the issues surrounding manure and fertility and why manure application is more complicated than it? It might seem our right, right.

Sure, yeah. It has it comes really comes down to the concentration and the physical state. Right. So our fertilizers are highly concentrated nutrient sources, I mean, some of them we're looking at almost 50% of the product is the nutrient that we're interested in. Whereas in manures, you might be 1% 2% 3%, pretty, pretty diluted, from a nutrient standpoint, so you have to add a lot of it. And then it's difficult to know how much nutrient is in the manure. Right. So manure is, by nature very heterogeneous. What they eat, right, depends on what they eat, and depends on how the bedding is mixed with it. And, you know, it depends on what manure source you're looking at, from one farm to the next from one animal to next, whatever, some are a little bit more consistent, and some are very inconsistent. So there's a little bit of a guessing game with how much nutrient is there. And then the availability is different, because a lot of that nutrient is in an organic form that has to mineralize before the plant can use it. And it's a little bit hard to know exactly how fast that process is gonna go. So that has to do with soil and temperature and moisture and, and other things. So there's a lot of uncertainty about how much nutrient is there. And it's, it's a low concentration, so it's more expensive to haul. You have to have different equipment to apply it. So all of those factors kind of come into it's a little bit more difficult to manage.

Are there upsides to it in terms of the like the physics of the soil?

And sure, yeah, there are definitely some upsides to it. And there's a lot of organic matter that can really improve the soil. You get a wide variety of nutrients and micronutrients and some other things they can help replenish the soil you get You know, some areas, we're running into some sulfur deficiencies. And but if you're using newer you don't have to because it supplies some other nutrients that you're maybe not counting on. So there are definitely some upsides.

And this stuff is becoming a greater concern as livestock operations sort of become more and more concentrated in certain parts of the country, right?

Yeah. So as the livestock operations become concentrated, you get a lot more manure in one area. And then to distribute that at agronomic rates, you have to haul it further, right from the source. Furthermore, the livestock industry itself tends to become concentrated in certain areas, like there's an area where there's a lot of chickens or broilers produced this area here is that a lot of Turkeys maybe somewhere else, and then somewhere else, there's a lot of hogs in this place. So and they tend to concentrate together a lot of those farms together. And so then you get, again, more of those nutrients all in one area.

An example would be like the Chesapeake Bay, right, where they have a lot of poultry operations.

And yeah, a lot of poultry out there. So you truck all the grain in, which has a more concentrated nutrient content in it. Animals eat the grain, then the that you're left with the nutrients in the manure, and it's tough to haul that tough to get enough money to haul that back out where the grain came from.

And so when you're talking about the different types of animals, that means that different types of nutrients and sort of different qualities of the manure to right is that monogastric versus.

Yeah, very different from when you go from like, poultry to swine to beef, very different amount of nutrient they get different feed, they process the nutrients differently in their bodies. ruminants, like cattle can use a lot of the phosphorus, particularly some talking a little bit more about phosphorus here, but a lot of the phosphorus in some of these grains is in the form of phytate. I was gonna ask that question. And, and so the cattle can use that form of phosphorus, whereas the swine in the chickens cannot. And so then they end up supplementing swine feed and poultry feed with other phosphorus forms, because those animals can't use the phytate. So there are different ways to get around that as well. But anyway, those are just some of the details, some examples of why there are differences from one animal to next.

Getting back to the losses, what are the main ways in which fertilizers or nutrients are lost into other aspects of the environment? And how does that relate to the environmental quality issue?

Sure. I'll try and do this without giving you might like, week long lecture. But it really depends quite a bit on which nutrient you're talking about. The main nutrients that we're concerned about from a law standpoint are generally nitrogen and phosphorus and the last mechanisms and pathways are very different for nitrogen and phosphorus. Quick overview, nitrogen can be lost through gaseous forms as ammonia, or as nitrous oxide. So both of which can have some environmental implications in air quality. Nitrogen can also be leached as nitrate, and that leaching can move it into deep groundwater, or it can move it in through shallow groundwater into surface water from a base flow kind of mechanism. And that depends on the hydrology and of the area where you are, if you're not in western Kansas, where we don't have a whole lot of rivers, but we have a lot of groundwater deep groundwater, a lot of this moves down into the groundwater.

And that type of soil matters or two, right, so we got a sandy soil, it might move more quickly, whereas the high clay soil, it's more slowly right.

Is one type of loss worse than the other is moving to deep groundwater, more worrying or more difficult to handle or deal with and another type of loss.

You know, it depends upon the water use and so forth. Because we've got some cities in western Kansas that have to treat their water to if you have nitrate concentration, higher than 10 parts per million nitrate nitrogen, then that's above the drinking water limit and you have to treat that or it can cause some negative impacts on human health. So you're gonna have to treat that to get the nitrate out because they're pumping groundwater, but that exact same problem occurs For the Des Moines Waterworks, and they were pumping water out of surface water. Right? And so it kind of depends on where that water is being used, right? And what you're gonna have to do with it. If it goes into surface water and it moves down the Mississippi out into the Gulf of Mexico or in the Chesapeake Bay are into salt water, then it can cause then it can be an agent in eutrophication. Saltwater tends to be nitrogen limited. So you add nitrogen, you're basically fertilizing anyway, it's pretty simple, you know, add these nutrients to soil, we get higher growth, add these nutrients to water, you get higher growth, it's just you're growing algae, not crops.

If you add it, they will grow. Sure, yeah, sure.

And what's the problem with the algae growing?

Changes the ecosystem, right. The whole process referred to as cultural eutrophication or something just eutrophication is basically increase the fertility status, so you have more algal growth, you'll favor some algae species over others. And sometimes some of those algae species can cause problems. Or some toxic algae, some that release toxins. Anyway, so there's might be a shift in the type of algae. But overall, you get more algae, those algae die, then they decompose and that decomposition process, it can reduce the amount of oxygen. The microorganisms that decompose biomass are very efficient at pulling oxygen out of the water. So they'll pull out of the oxygen out and then the oxygen levels drop below what fish can eat, and then you get fish kills and our fish leave the area that contributes to what we refer to as the the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, where it's just our hypoxic region, where we have low dissolved oxygen because of that process.

Right? So nutrients management is complicated, right? Because we've got we need it for farmers need it to grow the food that we're and we're all leading. But then we've got all these potentially negative aspects too. So I want to get into your research. So what kinds of projects are you working on? And what are you trying to accomplish?

Sure. So I tend to be focused more on phosphorus management and phosphorus transport in the environment. And so the projects that I have are focused on that area. One of the main projects that I have right now is looking at the effects of fertilizer management and cover crops on phosphorus loss. So, and this stems, I'm gonna give you a bit of a background before I get into the details of this.

You know, this is a really, this is a really cool project. So yeah, please describe the whole setup for everybody.

Okay, I'll give you a little bit, kind of what led us to this. Sure. Okay. So one of the ways to control phosphorus loss is to place it below the soil surface. If you put it below the soil surface, then that fertilizer is not going to be able to be kind of washed off with rainfall. Right? Heavy rains right after a fertilizer application can remove a lot of phosphorus. And I should put a little caveat next this one I say a lot. A lot from an environmental standpoint may not be that much from an agronomic standpoint. Okay. So like if you look at these systems, you might have 50 to 75 pounds of P 205 pounds of phosphorus cycling a year, through the fertilizer in the crop and things like that. If you lose two pounds, that's a lot. Okay, for the invite, because from the from the environment, but from an agronomic standpoint, that's a small percentage of what's actually out there and so it doesn't make that much of an economic impact in that year of application and year of cycling whatever.

Before you go on just out of curiosity rainwater not affect other nutrients. Nitrogen, same way doesn't pull this year. So nitrogen goes off. Yeah, gaseous right?

Well, you can you can have gaseous losses. Nitrogen is very mobile. And so it tends as soon as the rain so if you serve supplied like a nitrogen fertilizer, as soon as the rain hits that, it'll move that down into the soil. Okay, so initially, the first little bit of a rainstorm event generally that water is infiltrating and because that's very mobile, it moves down and it moves right down with with water, and so it doesn't get lost in runoff too much it tends to leach more, okay. Whereas phosphorus absorbs the soil particles. And so it will stay concentrated in that surface soil. And so it doesn't tend to move down deep in the soil but tends to move often in runoff. And And furthermore, two pounds of nitrogen loss even in runoff is not a big deal even environmentally, you know, whereas two pounds of phosphorus can have a pretty big impact. Yeah. So what led us to this is phosphorus. One way to manage phosphorus or to keep it from being lost in surface runoff is to subsurface apply it. It's more expensive, takes equipment that you have to put it down in the soil, that equipment is more expensive and are and move slower takes more fuel. Furthermore, it's hard to custom apply it that way. Right. Whereas broadcasting it or just dropping it on the soil surface, you can use equipment, the moves a lot faster. And a lot of fertilizer dealers will custom apply it that way. So you can just make a call, ask somebody apply your fertilizer, and they'll get it done at a fairly economic price.

So is it fair to say that a lot of farmers in Kansas prefer the broadcast method or using the broadcast method?

Sure, I wouldn't even just limit that to Kansas, just a lot of producers everywhere. There are economic reasons where broadcasting makes more sense.

And this is in a dry granular form, typically, where's the subsurface supplies of liquid form?

Subsurface could be liquid, it could be dry, too. It depends on equipment, a lot of times there's liquid phosphorus that subsurface applied, but it doesn't have to be. So I ended up getting a lot of questions from producers saying, Well, you know, I know you'd rather have a subsurface apply it from an environmental standpoint. But what if I'm growing cover crops, right? If I grow cover crops, will that allow me to broadcast as fertilizer, and particularly their interest is broadcasting in the fall, they've got a lot more time to do these field operations. And so it's a lot easier to do the fertilizer application in the fall.

And for our listeners that have a non ag background, how would you define a cover crop?

So a cover crop would be a crop that you're growing, after you're after you harvest your main grain crop, you'll plant another crop, let that grow over the winter, or over the kind of the period where you wouldn't normally have anything growing in the field, and then you will terminate, or a lot of times you spray it with herbicide, terminate that crop prior to planting right prior to planting the next crop. So you would have something using a cover crop would keep a crop growing in that field year round, but you're not going to harvest that cover crop. Now some people do harvest it, but I'm going to from my standpoint, if you're harvesting it, it's just a second crop. A true cover crop would stay out there, you're not going to harvest it.

Why might a farmer do this?

Plant the cover crop? Yeah. Well, it can help build the soil that looked at a soil building kind of thing. It by keeping a crop out there growing all the time, you can see some improvements in soil biology, where you have more active microbial communities, which might help turn those nutrients over a little bit faster, it adds carbon to the soil. If you build your organic matter than your soil, you get some other, you know improvements in soil structure, very long term kind of benefits of soil management to say, hey, look, I'm going to try and invest in my soil and make this so that I can continue to use this soil for years to come pass it on to my children. Cover crops will also help with some other things that can help manage weeds. So if you're growing a cover crop, then they'll generally outcompete, you know, non desirable weeds. And the cover crop can sometimes be easier to kill the weeds so you'd rather grow something that's easy to kill, and then kill it and then plant your main crop. It can stop erosion. So there's a variety of reasons why.

So there are economic and environmental benefits possibly from growing these?

There are some agronomic and environmental benefits. I will say that there's a lot of discussion as far as the economic benefits, right? So the economic benefits can be tough to pencil out sometimes. It really depends upon the economic benefit would come in and long term. Right?

It's not because it's investment sorry, because you have to because you have to plant it and either whatever it is a seed expensive typically for these things, or is it you know…

It can cost you $20 an acre, which is a substantial amount still a sunk cost.

Yeah.

What kinds of plants farmers wanting?

Oh, there's a whole variety of crops out there the implant as far as winter crops. Looking at triticale Haley and rye and hairy vetch and there are some rapeseeds there's some radishes and some turnips and some sun hemp and some other things that are kind of summer crops that they might grow. It depends on the cropping system when they would, when they would plant it and when they would terminate it.

And what sort of benefits they may be looking for long term right.

Alright, so how about the question? Does it help?

So yeah, and so We didn't know, we did not know at all, and particularly what the effect of cover crops were on water quality in a no till system. So a lot of our producers don't till. And we encourage that that's a great way to stop soil erosion or slow down soil erosion. I can't say stop, but you know, reduce it. And we just didn't have any. And when I started looking through the day, there was nothing out there at all. And I said, Well, you know, this is a great question. It could reduce runoff because the cover crops are using water. initial thought was the cover crops going to use water over the winter, you'll go into the spring with drier soil, you'd have less runoff in the spring. So less potential for loss there as well. And so it seemed like a very interesting thing. But we thought, well, let's do a project. So So we put together we designed a facility we refer to as the Kansas agricultural watershed field lab, where we have 18 experimental units that we can measure Edgefield runoff on and so each one of these units are about 1.2 acres or a half a hectare inside, so it's a little larger than a football field. So pretty, pretty large area. And we collect all the water at one point, and 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, we monitor the runoff that's coming off. So we have equipment out there that takes measurements, I guess once a minute to see if there's any runoff, it's high resolution, high resolution. And then if and then if there's runoff, then it triggers a sampler. The sampler collects water samples so we can measure how much water is coming off how much phosphorus, how much nutrient nitrogen, sediment, everything. So we put this facility together. When I say we it was, you know, some faculty here, we got a lot of support from the university, some administrators bought into this idea I was very grateful for and they gave us some funds to start this project. And then our initial project was funded through the for our research fund, which is a research fund managed by the International plant nutrition Institute and the fertilizer Institute, which basically came from a lot of fertilizer dealers around the nation that said that they were interested enough in understanding these processes that they put money into a pool to investigate it. And so we were funded through that. We've also received some money from the Natural Resource Conservation Service and, and the Kansas corn growers and Kansas soybean commission, multiple partners came in and they were interested in the same questions. So we started this study back in 2015, was our first crop year. So October 2014, was our first when we kind of said, Chris, in the sites that okay, we're starting.

This is the first site in the country like this.

This is a fairly unique site. There are other large studies where they're looking at Edgefield runoff. The unique thing about this is they're very, we have, we have the ability to do replicated research, we have 18 of these plots in a fairly close proximity. I call them plots or small watersheds, but watershed is in a really small edge of field runoff. And so there's 18. So we can replicate treatments, a lot of other places that don't have that many. So there are other sites that have and we visited several of them really good setups, just smaller number of treatments, maybe looking at pasture systems rather than crop systems. So their differences.

So the replications are important because otherwise just sort of guessing at what the causes are and things like that run a heavy

Independent probability you can't treat you can't treat the data the same way.

Year to year weather variability has a pretty big impact. And so if you're going to look at it, like some kind of a trend analysis, say, Well, I'm going to look at one treatment and look at that for a few years and then look at another treatment for another few years, you had different weather and you're going to that whether it's going to override any treatment effect. And so there's some ways to do that kind of research. You know, comparing before and after it's pretty tough, doesn't have very much statistical power.

Is there a lot of variability between the plots one, or the other lot of other factors going into the kinds of things you're studying or

There are definitely other factors, the soils that are out there, the slopes and even just details without getting it all. There's definitely definite plot factors that come in here. Our plots are fairly uniform for this kind of a study. Okay, they're there. They really are. They're fairly uniform in size and in shape and in slope and whatever. not exact but as exact as you can get for an area that big.

But so then the point for looking at the year to year variation is that you get some ideas sort of within a year given the weather, right sort of what's the rain have different possible outcomes that you have like that's that's the part of the point of having that replicability.

From one year to the next definitely. And then also, when once we implement practices like cover crops or fertilizer management, you want to see how that system changes the soil properties over time. So there are some things that might have a very fast response. And then other things in the system that might take a little bit longer to change. So physical properties, organic carbon, those take longer times. And so you really need to look at this over time. And make sure that your treatments have the same impact from one year to the next, as you as a system kind of build. So yeah, so that we set the study up. And now we are in our fifth cropping year.

Nice. So just to get everybody on the same page. What were the treatments? Oh, these 18 plots? What did you do?

Yeah, so the treatments. It's a factorial experiment. So we have two different factors, cover crops, and fertilizer management, we have two levels of cover crop, which would be with cover crop without. And we have three levels of fertilizer management. And this is all focused on phosphorus, because that was our question, three levels of phosphorus management. One is no phosphorus fertilizer. Another one is fall, broadcast, phosphorus fertilizer. And then another one is spring injected phosphorus fertilizer. We are changing multiple things here. If you look at our phosphorus treatments, we're changing rate from nothing to with fertilizer, we're changing sources, because one is using a dry ones using a liquid. We're changing the time and the placement. It's really a system. The reason we chose these systems is because these were typical of the way producers would manage the fertilizers. And we just couldn't replicate every piece of the system. And so we had to say, well, these are the big questions. You know, we'll compare these systems. And so that's why it's set up is really a system. And so it comes up with six treatments, right? Each of the three fertilizer management is with and without, without fertilizer, or with and without cover crop. And then it's replicated three times what was the cover crop changes from year to year, based on when we're able to plant it. Again, this is a little bit the way producers run, the changes aren't drastic. We generally always have a Brassica and a small grain. The small grain has changed from wheat to triticale. Really depending upon kind of the year and, and availability, which one we think is going to grow better for the time we're planting it and when we are going to terminate and what our next crop is. And then the brassicas typically been rapeseed. So rapeseed in winter wheat or rapeseed and try to Kaley

How long do these studies last? We talked about fast and slow changes are we looking at, like we were developing in variety, if we work, it'd be 1012 years that it would have to have to run.

For this study, we will go five years. The first year was really a a year to move into the rotation and the system, right get the get the treatments established. And then four years have more data collection in that system. And those it's a corn soybean rotation. And so that gives us two years of corn and two years of soybean. And so what have you found? Yeah, so this is what this is why we do research. Right. So going into this, I felt positive that we were going to see some good impacts of cover crops on reducing phosphorus loss. I will say that we have seen that. And well, I'll tell you my assumptions going into it. I felt that the cover crops were going to reduce runoff. And by reducing runoff, they were also going to reduce the amount of phosphorus lost from the two systems or from the system. I also thought that we were doing a really good job of controlling sediment already with no till. And so by adding a cover crop to this, it wasn't gonna make a whole lot of difference. And so we weren't going to get a lot of sediment reduction from the cover crop. But we'd get some phosphorus reduction and we'd get some reduction in runoff. And it was wrong in all three accounts.

That's why you do science.

That's That's why you do it. So first, we have reduced sediment loss quite a bit, even in a system where we typically see low set loss, the cover crop is reduced a quite a bit more, we had very low sediment coming off, I mean visually very clean water coming off of the cover crop plots. So that's been great, sort of looking like 70% reduction in sediment not well, it's very consistent year round. It's not just in the springtime or not just, you know, in big storms in the summer, it's year round, we get less sediment loss, less concentration and less overall loss. Typically, with less sediment, we get less phosphorus loss because phosphorus had strongly absorbed to the sediment and so introduce reduce sediment loss, you would reduce phosphorus loss. However, the cover crop reduces the particulate phosphorus to the phosphorus, since it's already the sediment, but the dissolved reactive phosphorus actually increases. And there's a dramatic increase in dissolved reactive phosphorus. And so from three of well, we've got data collected. Now on three years, we're getting our fourth year now of the four years in the rotation. Two of those three years are actually, I think, two of those three years, we had pretty much no impact on total phosphorus loss. Cover crops didn't affect total phosphorus loss, but they affected the form of phosphorus, higher dissolved phosphorus, lower particulate phosphorus and lower sediment loss. The cover crops did not well, the cover crops have had a variable impact on runoff. Where some rainfall events, you'll have higher runoff losses. With a cover crop and some rainfall events, you'll have lower runoff. And so typically, by the time you look at the entire year, the total amount of runoff is about the same.

Going back to the different forms of phosphorus or loss versus with cover crop versus not cover crop is one. Is the partitioning better for water quality one way or the other? Or is it too early to tell?

Yeah, that's a pretty tough question. And probably a better question for an aquatic biologist than an agronomist

have to get one of those on the show.

But I, what I do know is the dissolved reactive is a much more biologically available form of phosphorus. So algae can access that phosphorus much more quickly and easily. They can take it up better. And so it could potentially cause a faster algal bloom whether or not it causes a faster algorithm. That's what you should ask a aquatic biologist.

You know why you're seeing these differences? Like why are the cover crops creating more reactive phosphorus than without?

Let me hold off on answering that question just for a second. The advantage or the disadvantage of particulate phosphorus is you can end up with a lot of legacy phosphorus, so it's going to move slower through the system. So you might lose move a lot of phosphorus sediment, and it might not be immediately available. But that sediment will get deposited in a reservoir, and might be a long term source of phosphorus for years to come.

So even if you stop phosphorus loss at some point, it's still going to be cycling through.

Yeah, it's still gonna be cycling through the system. And so that's why it's kind of tough to say, Well, which one would you rather have? I'd rather just have less phosphorus. Okay. But you're definitely not. You're probably not making it any better by changing those two forms. Okay. Now, your question was, why?

Because this is counterintuitive, right? Because if you read a lot of the literature about cover cropping and things like that, it seems to indicate that phosphorus is going to be retained in the field, right? And their losses are gonna be less yet?

Well, I'll tell you, there's not a whole lot of literature out there. So there's a lot of speculation. So a lot of people want to say there's been a lot of people say that, Oh, cover crops and reduce phosphorus losses. And a lot of this, I think kind of goes back to some of the research done in conventional till, where, you know, conventional till there's a lot of erosion, a lot of phosphorus moving with that sediment. And so when you plant a cover crop and stop that sediment movement, you really stop a lot of phosphorus, okay, because you have a lot of erosion. And so it's kind of taking that same mentality to a no till system saying, well, our cover crops are going to reduce phosphorus loss. Previously, I had said that there hadn't been a whole lot of research done on this. And I should really preface that there had not been a lot of research done in the climates that we have here in Kansas. So the other research had been done in northern climates, such as like Norway, Sweden, Canada, areas that have substantial different climates. And they had found that cover crops caused an increase in dissolved phosphorous, and had attributed that to the freeze thaw cycles and snowmelt runoff that they experienced in their climates. So basically, you get a lot of snowpack around the cover crop tissue, it freezes. And then the next spring when all that snow melts, it releases this phosphorus and, and we have a different system here, we don't have a lot of snow melt run off. Okay, we have some cold winters, but not a lot of snow, a lot of freeze thaw during the winter. And, so it's different system. And so I thought, well, that research doesn't necessarily apply to what we're going to find here. And I still kind of feel like the processes that we're looking at may still be different than what they're what they observed, even though we saw the same result. So there have been other studies that have found an increase in dissolved phosphorus from cover crops. So what is causing it here, it is possible that you could have some additional phosphorus lost from the cover crop tissue. Particularly even though these are winter annuals. So they overwinter and then start growing in the spring, there is some freezing that occurs over the winter. So you can have some tissue that gets frozen could release some cover some phosphorus, after we kill the cover crop, we've seen a little bit of increase in dissolved phosphorus. So it's possible that there could be some phosphorus coming from that cover crop residue. We've done some research and looked at this. And sure enough, we could estimate the amount of phosphorus coming out of cover crop tissue, it's possible that that could be the source. I'm not convinced that's the only source. The cover crops what the cover crops do from a runoff standpoint is they although they're not decreasing the overall amount, overall amount of runoff, they are decreasing the time or increasing the time that the runoff is in or the waters in the field. Or they're decreasing the time of the runoff. Right. So where we don't have cover crops, the runoff comes off the field a lot faster. So you get higher peak flows.

Just faster runoff that help explain the sediment.

Definitely helps explain the sediment. Yeah, so one of the reasons why these cover crops really help sediment is because the runoff is coming off slow. But what that's going to do also is it's going to increase the contact time with soil. So it's possible that we're releasing desorbing more phosphorus from the soil into the water, or even from fertilizer.

Do you see the broadcast applications? Making a difference versus the injected applications in that respect? Is there more desorbed? When it's retained in the field in the broadcast application?

Sure. The broadcast? We haven't talked about the fertilizer treatments at all yet, right? No. So we tend to see higher phosphorus concentrations and runoff from the broadcast treatment until we apply the spring injected. And then after that, they're about the same. And but I will say over time, those concentrations, once we make our broadcast application, over time, those tend to decrease the concentration tends to decrease. And then by the time the next spring comes around, we apply our spring fertilizer, we see an increase in phosphorus loss right after application of the spring fertilizer, and then they're about equal from there on out.

So they're equal rate at that point. But for total phosphorus loss than the total phosphorus total phosphorus.

If you look at the total mass, because there's been lost during this winter and early spring period, the total loss is higher.

Right, sort of and that was consistent with what you predicted then that was great. Except that then the crop didn't help the cover crop mitigate that at all right? Yeah. Well, or change the nature of the runoff, right. Yeah, right.

So there was no fertilizer by cover crop interaction.

Not really no, not nothing consistent. There have been a few years where you see some subtle things. But I would need a lot of graphs, it's probably probably too detailed to discuss.

What's the primary source of variation that you encounter here, primary source of variation, but contributes the most of the variation that you see.

Gosh, there are a lot of things that contributed there's a lot of variation in this kind of data. Weather creates a very big, a lot of variation from one rainfall event to the next. Right. And from one plot to the next, because you have differences, even though I said these are very similar, still huge differences in the amount of runoff that comes off of one plot to the next, anytime we get less than two millimeters of runoff, it's really hard for us to analyze the data, because we get some plots that didn't produce enough runoff. So you have to get enough runoff that you get runoff from all your plots, then you can collect all your data and analyze it. We still get a fair amount of plot to plot variability. These are big plots, differences in crop growth and things like that. So that contributes a lot to variability as well.

Yeah, but Britain, none of that invalidates the approach. So you can take this approach to allow if you want if you needed to or wherever so it's, it has, it has a global reach, potentially, at least it does, it could definitely be expanded.

I will say that what has helped us a little bit with our study is the factorial design, the fact that we have half of our plots in cover crop and half without we have a lot more power to look at some main effects.

So you've seen the yield effects. We didn't get to that.

Oh, yield. Yeah, we have seen some yield effects. And their weather contributes a lot more to the variability because you know, we might get five to 30 Different runoff events in a year, right. So we'll get variability from one event to the next, but we still get runoff yield, we get one yield each year. And that's a factor of all the weather. And we've had a few years they've been pretty tough. And the last two years, we've had some pretty low yields. And so our corn and soybean yields have been pretty low, because of some drought conditions. And there we have not seen the effect of fertilizer, either the amount or the placement really strong. Okay. We have seen the effect of cover crops though, because when you get into these years where we have less water, if you had a cover crop that used water in the beginning of the year, then.

Also the actually uses the water that the crop men can't use, you see lower yields in the cover crop,

See some lower yields where the cover crop is you have some lower yields, you might also the cover crop, you know, shades a little bit, there's a little bit of some slower emergence we've had, we've had some years where we get a lot of cover crop growth in the spring, you've know, there's not a lot of water that grows really well. And then you try and plant a main crop in there and a little bit of a, you know, a yield drag because your emergence is slower.

You didn't kill it off.

Well, you kill it off, but they're still there. Right? It's still there. Yep. And so some of that is learning on our part. And initially, when we moved into this, I wanted, because with water quality project, I wanted to grow as much biomass as we could to make sure that we had enough biomass out there to impact water quality. I've since learned that we didn't need that much biomass, we've had some years where we get very low biomass. This last year even we had, I don't know the numbers, but it was a few 100 pounds per acre, very, very low biomass. But we've seen some very big impacts on these heavy spring rains, even though it's not very much biomass. And so I've learned that this is we don't have treatments that with high biomass and low biomass, but from my observation, we don't need as much biomass as I initially thought. When we were growing a lot of biomass, that's when it hurts, your crop yields a little bit more. And so we've changed a little bit of our management, you know, to and some of this, it's not necessarily even our change, it's what Mother Nature gave us. Right? We had a really cold winter. That's why we had not very much biomass this last year. But we when you get when you don't have as much biomass than the main crop can grow better.

So one of the advantages of growing a cover crop is that adds carbon to the soil which can increase water holding capacity and that sort of thing, which is supposed to make soils more resilient to drought, right. So do you think over time, you'll stop seeing the negative impact of cover crops in these drought years or in Kansas where you have, you know, the Kansas climb and all of that probably won't make as much of a difference. There's a too early to tell. Sure.

There are two sides to that. First off, we need to recognize the soils that we selected for this our soils. This is a runoff study. So we selected soils that are going to give runoff and that but they're very typical of this area of Kansas northeast Kansas has a lot of soils that have heavy clay subsoil, and so you don't get a lot of infiltration, not a fast infiltration into this. And they're on sloping hills and things like that, if you were doing the same study on a soil that did not have a heavy increase in clay, you might see differences in the amount of in the cover crop effect on runoff. Okay, now to your question, because we have that heavy clay subsoil, it's going to take a little bit of time for the cover crop to really improve soil properties there enough to really improve things like water holding capacity, and maybe even change infiltration or, or deep percolation, I would say, so that, for these soils, it's going to take more time for some of their soils, it might be faster.

So what's going to happen with the project does it after the fifth year are you going to try to continue it on or?

We're definitely going to try and continue it on. We're looking at changing up some of the treatments, we'd really like to keep the cover crops in place. Because there are we are seeing some improvements in soil physical properties already, such as improved aggregate stability. In the surface, what we're hoping is maybe that can move down as you get more cover crops, those roots grow down deeper, it's a slow process. So we'd really like to see how the cover crop continues to change the soil properties over many years. From a nutrient standpoint, I'm fairly convinced that the subsurface injection is really improving our nutrient losses, or decreasing our phosphorus losses and making for more efficient system making Yeah, and so that's probably a good way to go. We are in what we call a build and maintain phosphorus management system where we're trying to build the soil test levels up and then maintain them at a high level. When I say high, it's not really high, but it's high enough that the soil could supply all of the crop requirements. And we just replace what the crop takes out. There's a different approach to this, where we could mine the soil, the phosphorus out of the soil, and only apply fertilizer, if we think there will be a yield loss that year if we don't apply it. sufficiency approach. I really think from a water quality standpoint, there might be some advantages. In the sufficiency approach, particularly because we are not applying fertilizer, we see dramatically less phosphorus in our runoff. So our control treatment, which we really didn't talk about much or control treatment is showing noticeably lower phosphorus concentrations year round, from the other fertilizer treatment probably lower yields to you know, as as early in some in, in one year, we saw a very significant yield effect at this out of three years. Another year. It was significant at the 10% level. And then the other year, there was no yield effect that last year, the third year of the project. There was an those because weather had a bigger impact. So there is a yield effect. But actually, the cover crop had a bigger yield effect, then the fertilizer.

Just shows how complicated all of this is. It is yeah.

It's complicated.

So sorry. Okay, so I wanted to ask you about that part. So given how complicated this is, right, so all these sorts of questions, right. So all right, you're looking at phosphorus runoff. But oh, you know, there's different kinds of phosphorus runoff and right sort of what's the effective of the cover crop? Well, did you mean on yield? Or did you mean on sort of quality of soil or sort of so many different factors, right. And then, and then there's questions about sort of the, how you translate this right, sort of to what if the weather's a little different? Or what if we're going somewhere else? Right, and sort of, or what if you're doing a sufficiency approach? Right. So, two big questions here, right. So given all that complication, sort of how do you translate a study like this into recommendations, right, number one, and then sort of thinking longer term or down the line? How do you see like in terms of people's uptake, right, sort of, you know, you just did this really complicated study, right. So what do you recommend to them? And sort of, you know, how do you convince them? Where do they get convinced, right? Sure.

Um, you know, from this kind of a study, and particularly where we're looking at a systems approach. Our recommendations are going to be a little bit more broad in general, right. So some of the things we have learned is Cover crops are definitely an advantage for soil concert. They do a great job of soil conservation and reducing erosion. From a water management standpoint, they reduce peak runoff rates. That may that could be an advantage from flood management, stormwater management other things, right, there could be some other advantages from that stream bank erosion, a whole host of other things. I'm not for sure if the impact on the hydrology is enough to impact these other things. But still, I view that as an advantage. So it's slowing the runoff, that's an advantage. So, cover crops still have advantages for water quality, but they are not a silver bullet. Right. And in from some standpoints, using a cover crop may mean that you need to pay more attention to some other nutrient management standpoints. And so from when we look at nutrient management, we're looking at the time you're applying it the source, the rate, the placement, those things, I would say that definitely when you're moving into a cover crop system, I would recommend subsurface placement of your fertilizer, because that's going to reduce the dissolved phosphorus concentration. And that's what is typically being increased from this cover crop. So as far as rate, you know, that's where that would be the next question that that we're looking at is, can you using this cover crop? And from a water quality standpoint? Can we do something different than our typical build and maintain fertilizer management, and still maintain our yields and maintain our economic competitiveness, but still managed? And that's, that's a part that we need more next time need more research on? Because? Well, as I already explained, my assumption here, right, is true.

So we need some science.

Yeah. And so we just look at where we're going to hit at the next step, to try and drill down and improve our agricultural systems. So that we can maintain good quality water.

We hear in popular media and stuff that eutrophication issues are becoming more and more prevalent to the public, right? news organizations pick up issues in Lake Erie or Chesapeake Bay, or even here in Kansas, and different areas. We talked before we started the podcast, where do you see all of this maybe going? All right, I mean, is there going to be governmental intervention? Or are farmers going to are we going to need to come up with more economical ways of managing these nutrients for farmers? So they switch to this where do you see nutrient management going? In a larger and a larger context?

I think definitely there will be more interest in, in reducing losses, and reducing environmental impacts of nutrients. I think we see that from the public in general. And when we see more issues where the public, you know, actually has to pay for this, whether they pay for it in increased treatment costs or something like that, then they're going to naturally be interested in stopping this problem. It's a very complex problem, though, a very, very complex set of issues.

We have because farmers aren't the only ones that are contributing to this, the nutrient sources, exactly wastewater treatment plants and all that also, depending on the system, contribute

there, are other nutrient sources. Some of the water bodies impacted, I'll have to say are not natural. That's a whole nother thing. Right here in Kansas, we've got a lot of reservoirs that have severe algal bloom problems, toxic algal blooms over the past 10 years that have really, really a big change. And some of that has been attributed to nutrient management. But at the same time, we have to recognize these are all reservoirs. There was not a lake there for a reason. So you can't expect it to behave the same as some other water body, right. Anyway, there's a whole whole host of questions related to this. I think in the end, it's still in our head, it's to our advantage. Ours meaning society and ours, meaning the agricultural community and ours meaning farmers. So our advantage to reduce losses. Again, reducing losses is not going to fix every problem. It's not going to make our water crystal clear tomorrow, but it will conserve a resource that we're paying for managing and it will, in the long run, I believe it will improve the water quality. It's going to take a little bit of while we're going to take some time, because there's some legacy nutrient that are in these different water bodies, but it will take time it will improve it and we've seen that in Lake Erie when they initially made a big push to improve water quality, through tightening regulation on wastewater treatment plants, it responded fairly fast. I mean, years, but, you know, they saw improvements. And you know, I, we can see that, again, if we reduce losses from agriculture.

Great. We want to be respectful of your time. Is there anything that you'd like to say that maybe we haven't covered here? We're Scott, and John has anything you like to ask?

Oh, this is your end to end of podcast chance to pull forth?

So I will say that as far as the future, where's it? where's this going to go? You asked about regulation and other things. I think that the future to me is fairly bright on this standpoint, because the industry itself, I talk about the fertilizer industry, the agricultural industry, in general, the leaders in that industry want to see lower losses, they have they see that as an advantage to their industry. There are food consumers or consumers, I mean, like in the food chain, large companies that are looking for ways to document sustainability of their products, and water quality, making sure that they have, that their products are produced in a way that is sustainable from a water quality standpoint, it is an interest. And I think there are probably people in the public that might view that favorably when they're looking at making purchasing choices. And so there are a lot of things going in there. And from different areas that I think would say that in the long run, I think we will move towards a more sustainable system.

Just just quickly to take into their as far as food processes and things like that, what sort of metrics are they looking at for sustainability in that regard? Do you have any examples?

In regard to water quality, we're at the watercooler. Like you can't buy anything right now that has a stamp on it that says, you know, water quality approved or whatever, but no, you see, I mean, is that what you're referring to there?

Well, so the best example of the food industry looking at, at documenting sustainability is the field to market movement. And so they've got web pages, you can look at it, they have a field print calculator that tries to document the sustainability, from energy to like carbon emissions to nutrient loss, all sorts of things, they try and put all this into one thing to give their product or a grain or whatever a sustainability print. The water quality side of that is still under development. They have a very rough rubric. And I know from talking with them, they're interested in improving the metric for water quality, but it's a tough metric to approach.

As we've just discussed, right? Well, Nathan, hey, we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us and thanks so much. Thank you very much.

Thanks. Thanks for having me. I've enjoyed the discussion.

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. Harry Klee is a Professor in Horticultural Sciences at the University of Florida working to understand the chemical and genetic make-up of "flavor" in fruits and vegetables. After starting his career at Monsanto, in 1995 he accepted an endowed chair position tasked with developing better tomato varieties through traditional breeding techniques. Enjoy this wide-ranging conversation covering plant breeding, genetic modification/gene editing, why tomatoes at the supermarket don't taste very good, how Harry's lab is producing a better tasting tomato, and much more!

For further information about Dr. Klee and his lab check out his website at: http://old-hos.ifas.ufl.edu/kleeweb/index.html

Transcript:

Making a Tastier Tomato with Dr. Harry Klee - Plant Breeding and Molecular Biology

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of global food systems. It's produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Jay Weeks PhD candidate in the Department of Agronomy. My co host is Scott Sonoda, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy who specializes in the philosophy of science. Everybody, welcome back. Today's guest is Dr. Harry Klee. Harry is an eminent scholar and professor in horticultural sciences working to understand the chemical and genetic makeup of flavor in fruits and vegetables. His career began in Monsanto in the mid 80s, where he helped to develop the techniques that launched genetically engineered crops into agriculture. In 1995, he was offered an endowed position at the University of Florida working to develop better varieties for the state's tomato industry through traditional breeding techniques, and he remains there still today. In 2009, he was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And three years later, in 2012, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, Scott, John and I had a lot of fun talking with Harry, we cover a wide range of topics, including traditional plant breeding, genetic modification, and gene editing. Why tomatoes in the supermarket often don't taste very good. How Harry's lab is identifying compounds that are important to producing better tasting tomatoes, and what it's like to be a scientist and industry along with many, many other things. Hope you enjoy. Dr. Harry Klee, welcome to the podcast.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So we'll have introduced you a little bit in the intro to the podcast here. But tell us in your own words, a little bit about yourself. How did you get to where you are today?

Ah, how did I get here? Actually, I started my Bachelor's degree in Psychology. And I very quickly decided that psychology was a field that I didn't want to be in that it intrigued me actually, I got into science because I worked in a mental hospital for my summer internships. And I saw the remarkable things that could happen to people who were crazy when you gave them drugs. And I started to say, oh, you know, maybe behavior is all about drugs, I need to know more about biochemistry. So then I got into biochemistry and got into from there into microbiology, and from there into plant biology. And here I am working on tomatoes.

So did you start taking microbiology courses and biochemistry courses in undergrad? Or is it something you knew when you graduate you want to pursue in graduate school?

Actually, I did not take any Microbiology as an undergraduate, I looked at it as a major and the university said, you can't take any microbiology courses, even if you're a major until you're a junior. And I said, Well, that's crazy. Why do I want to go all the way to my third year before I even find out if I like this? So no, I took chemistry and a little bit of Biochemistry as an undergraduate but no Microbiology.

So then you said you went on to graduate school? Right out of right out of undergrad that yes,

yes. Straight into a Biochemistry PhD program.

What would you do there?

Actually, my first project was working on frogs, we actually went out and, and in the summertime, we'd go out and capture bullfrogs in the ponds, and we'd bring them back to the lab and cut out their livers. And I decided that that was not for me, I did not want to work on anything involving killing animals. So at that point, I switched. And the last part of my PhD actually was working on BT bacteria. e coli.

So, from there, how'd you work your way into the plant sector then?

So at the time that I was finishing my PhD, was a very exciting time for plant biology because people had just discovered this organism, this bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens, actually took a piece of its DNA and put it into plant cells. And I thought, oh my god, this is this burgeoning new field that we were just calling Biotechnology was something that really intrigued me and I thought that wow, if I could understand how this organism worked, we could use it to genetically engineer plants and that would be the coolest thing ever. And so I went and did my postdoc on Agrobacterium. And that turned out to be the foundation for my career, and then led me from there to Monsanto, where I worked for a decade for them.

So there, I mean, it must have been a fascinating time to be starting in science. So why is Agrobacterium so important? Like what's happening there to just allow us to do the biotech no logical transformations?

Well, Agrobacterium is what we would call today a plant pathogen. It makes tumors in trees, it's a real problem in the orchard industry, for example, and people didn't know how it worked. And literally the year before I got to the lab, a good friend of mine, Mike Thomas show, figured out that it took a piece of its DNA and transferred it into the plant, where it incorporated into the plant became part of the plant DNA. And it stayed there and cause these tumors. And people said, well, you know, if we could understand how it makes the tumors and get rid of the genes that make the tumors, but just leave the part that makes the DNA get transferred, and incorporated in you could put anything you wanted, in between the ends of this DNA and get it into the plant. pathogen to vector. Yeah. And so we said, oh, you know, this is the key to being able to, it just breaks well, that we returned, inter Kingdom DNA transfer, you know, from bacteria into a plant. And we thought, nothing else can do this. This is remarkable. And if we understood this, and we could, we could harness that power to introduce things which, for example, genes that confer resistance to insects or herbicides. And so I thought, this is a field that I just have to get into. And we still didn't know how to truly harness it. When I started my postdoc. We were figuring out the rules, how does the bacterium work, what's required for that DNA transfer, and that was my postdoctoral research. And when I finished up and it was time to get a job, I can remember I interviewed for several academic positions. And I interviewed at Monsanto and, and literally at Monsanto, they had just made the first transgenic plants literally, like a month before I interviewed there. And, and I went there. And I interviewed and I was just blown away by what they wanted to do, and how dedicated they were and how focused they were on improving agriculture and helping farmers. And it's funny because I got a job offer from the University of Illinois and Microbiology. And I told the chairman, I said, No, I think I'm going to come to Monsanto. And he said, you're going to watch? And he says, Well, you should come back. And to a second interview, I said, I don't need to do a second interview. This is what I want to do. On the air. And so, I went to Monsanto and got involved in the earliest stages of what I would consider the second green revolution. You know, we were a dedicated group of people. And I know everybody today likes to bash Monsanto, but I can say firsthand, these were and still are truly dedicated people who were trying their best to make agriculture better. And I was involved and, you know, it's kind of fun as you fly across the Midwest in an airplane, you can look out the window and said, I did that. And there aren't very many people who can say that. Sure.

Yeah, that's true. That's very true. Are there I'm a serial person serial biochemist. And we fight the hexaploid nature of the plant. Are there limits is that bacterium efficient in a in such a polyploid? Ik?

Yes, ah, yes, you can. There still, it's more of an art form to transform certain plants. I think that people are more using for some of the monocots, which Agrobacterium doesn't infect very well. It still can be easier to use other techniques like the particle gun, where you bombard the tissues with free DNA. But Agrobacterium works quite well. For example, in maize, And, you know, we transform? Well, we can transform canola, which is a tetraploid. We basically the limiting step is, merely can you take tissue and regenerate it into a whole plant. And that's still hard with some crops. But, but yeah, Agrobacterium works great for you, for you, us types.

Maize is what a lot of people would call corn, although that's not universal.

So when you have the transfer of tissue, you need to bring it to a whole crowd, what needs to happen there.

Basically, the system, you introduce DNA into single cells. And what you need is the ability to take that single cell that you've introduced the DNA and regenerate a whole plant. For some plants, that's really easy. The first plants that were transformed were things like tobacco, Petunia, trivial, the tissue culture for tobacco was worked out a century ago. And it's easy to take a single cell and regenerate a whole plant from in other plants, it's much harder. Maize was probably 10 years behind tobacco, for example, it was just harder to work with.

What makes them so much different?

Their response to the plant hormones, they, we use tricks with, with hormones to, you know, you take a single cell typically, and you grow it as a callus on artificial media. And then what you do is you trick it into making shoots by applying a hormone we call cytokine. And, so the suddenly those that mass of cells will start to form an organized shoot that comes up on and starts to grow and looks more like a plant. And then after that, you can cut off that shoot from the callus and stick it on a different medium, which forces it to make roots. And again, you know, this kind of technology has been worked out in some species for many years, a lot of plants are micropropagated. That's the way they work. It's for example, or micropropagated, you can make billions of orchids that are absolutely identical through tissue culture. So it just depends on the species.

And these hormones are naturally produced anyway, right? I mean, our plants are using these in the environment. Absolutely.

And to come full circle, the way that Agrobacterium makes tumors is it actually has genes that cause the plant to make oxygens and cytokinins. And that's how it tricks the plant into growing these tumors, which are the home for the bacteria.

In a cereal that's basically living but very slowly living, you'll have hormones that are produced and released under specific stimulation that will go into the seed itself and cause it to to start turning itself on and starting to Germany.

Yeah, yeah. All plants make these hormones.

So you're no longer with Monsanto. After Monsanto. You came back to academia, right? I did. So how did that happen? What made you decide to come back?

Um, I guess a couple of things. The first thing was that we actually developed products and you might think being an accompany once you develop some products that would give you some freedom to do more exciting things. Well, that's not the way it works. The closer you get to products, the more focus there is on making more products. And so it became very product oriented. When I first went there, everything we did was basic science, it was discoveries, research, and we were publishing papers in the best journals. You know, we publish papers and science and nature, which are the top level publications. We were everything we did was discovery. You know, we had to figure out everything there was about what we now call plant molecular biology. But after we figured out how to do this stuff, it became more of what can we do to make products. And also success in a company basically means that you move up in the bureaucracy and you become more of a manager rather than a scientist. And so I said, you know, running a big group is not what I want to be. I want to be a scientist on one. I want to keep my hands in the science and I was very lucky. I was offered an endowed chair at the University of Florida in 1995. And they said we love what you're doing. We want you to work on tomatoes and whatever you want to do is fine with us. When I said that sounds great, either.

Yes. Monsanto had what they called a Fellows Program. And you could be a science fellow or you could be a manager. And in theory, on paper, those were two equal parallel tracks. In practice, though, the fellows were not given the same respect as the managers, if you had 25 people working for you in a big budget, it was worth a whole lot more than some publication, right, and a couple of technicians.

Or a patent here and there. Yeah.

So he started working on tomatoes. So why tomatoes? Well, what's the problem? And what are you trying to solve? Or what are you trying to solve?

So tomato was the number one vegetable crop in Florida when I moved there. It's still sort of is. And it's so it's a very, very important to the Florida's agriculture, I work at a land grant university, our mission is to help the agriculture in the state of Florida. And so it made perfect sense to work on tomatoes. And when I looked around, I said, Well, what's the biggest problem with tomatoes and and the biggest problem was flavor. In fact, there's a great article that I still have that was published in the New Yorker, I think, in 1987, or something like that, that basically talks about how all of the commercial tomatoes look great, but their heart is a rock and they taste like cardboard.

Could you say something about how we got there?

Yeah. So that was the first question. I said, How could you've done this, right? And obviously, and, in fact, there was another book that was published a few years ago, I'm trying to remember what the name of it is, oh, tomato land. This guy published a book called tomato land. And he talks about what motivated him to write the book was, he was running a writing on the interstate highway in Florida. And there was a truck full of tomatoes in front of them, and one of them bounced out of the truck, bounced off the road and hit his windshield and cracked. And I made I shouldn't do that. And so you look at that. And you say, how did this happen? And I guess I'm giving away the punch lines of some of my seminar that I'm going to give later today here. But the reason is actually fairly simple. And that is that the growers are not paid for flavor. The growers are paid for how many pounds of red objects they put in a box. And flavor is not something that they're paid for. In fact, if you talk to them, they'll say, not only am I not paid for it, but if I had a tomato, that tasted really good, the wholesaler is going to take the box of tomatoes, put them in the refrigerator, and it's going to ruin the flavor. So not only am I not being paid for it, if I had it, someone else down downstream would probably screw it up system won't keep it. And so if you look at it, the supply chain, it's very difficult to produce high quality tomatoes at one end, and get them to the consumer at a reasonable price at the other end. It's very difficult. And so they're most growers. Well, in fact, today this is not true when I first moved to Florida, but today, the majority of tomatoes grown in the field in Florida don't go to the consumer, they go to the food service industry. And the only thing that McDonald's or subway care about McDonald's particular, they want it to be round. They want it to be about the same diameter as a hamburger bun. And they want to be able to make eight uniform slices that don't drip all over you and just sit there and look pretty on top of your hamburger and so the majority of tomatoes in Florida today go to the foodservice industry. In fact the majority of tomatoes that are now in commercial production that go to consumers come from either Mexico or Canada. You know you get you can get a better tomato out of a greenhouse and Canada and you can and field out of Florida.

Have you seen those greenhouse facilities? Quite incredible.

They're amazing. Yeah, I mean, they've got it down there. producing large numbers of fruits, they pick them when they're fully ripe, as opposed to Florida where they're picking them when they're still green. And so, the whole system is set up to not reward the grower for producing quality.

So how much that has changed? Okay, we'll get into the science. But I wonder how much sort of what were the cultural forces that have shifted this and how much of that was maybe actually due to the scientific developments to like giving people a image of new possibilities.

I would say almost nothing to do with the science. It's all really based on economics. The growers in those greenhouses and the growers in Mexico can produce a cheaper product. And to some extent, the consumers have recognized that the Florida field tomato does not taste that good. And so there has been this shift towards vine ripe tomatoes, which honestly don't taste a whole lot better, but tastes a little bit better. There's been all of these new niche markets, now you see cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, which have a lot more flavor than the big ones. You see the tomatoes, like the compound, the tomato, which is much smaller cells at a premium, you know, you're talking $3 A pound maybe versus $1, a pound for field grown tomato, more people are willing to pay for that ticket, because they know they'll get a quality. The compiler has very specific requirements, it has to be picked, when it's ripe, it has to be shipped quickly, it can't be refrigerated. And people do recognize that. Unfortunately, though, most people still buy on price. You know, I would say that 20% of the population will maybe shop at a Whole Foods, I don't shop at Whole Foods, I think they charge outrageous amounts of money. And I'm not gonna say it. But some people will shop at places like that there's been much more growth in farmers markets. But that's seasonal. You know, on a year round basis, you know, there's kind of this dichotomy. Everybody would like to eat like Alice Waters, and eat only what's seasonal, and what's local. But the reality is, most people don't want to do that. Most people want their tomato 12 months of the year, they want their cantaloupe, 12 months of the year, and we pay the price for that. And the price is that you have an emphasis on ship ability rather than flavor. But so I think still 80% of the population buys on cost, not quality. And then they complain about the quality, right?

So for me, tomatoes are one of these things that I pretty much only season except for the little those small ones, because those ones year round, those are not bad, right? You know, but there's no point in buying a tomato on the store and winter.

It's not gonna taste very good.

So what's your plan to change that? Or what are you guys doing to make improvements? So the tomato in LA tastes better, but also is economically viable for the farmer?

Well, so what we've done is to focus on, first of all, what is the genetics of flavor? What's gone wrong with the modern tomato? Why does it taste that way? Some of it is production, but a lot of it is the genetics just are inferior, as if you don't select for something, you will essentially select against it. And so tomato flavor is extremely complex, we've identified dozens of genes that affect flavor, and the growers basically have completely ignored him. And while the breeders have six have ignored it. And so what happens is you've you know, you've got two copies of every gene unless you're in a hexaploid. But you got two copies of every gene, you could have a good copy and a bad copy. And if you don't select for it randomly, you stand a chance of getting the good one as the bad one. Well, what's happened is that we've ended up with modern tomatoes. If you look at the whole spectrum of the genetics of tomatoes, modern tomatoes are one tiny, tiny sliver of them they've been highly inbred breeders have taken each other's varieties and exchange them either willingly or unwillingly, very, very narrow genetics. And what's happened is that a lot of the desirable alleles of genes, the copies that have the better properties have been lost. And so you end up with a tomato that basically is genetically inferior in terms of flavor.

How different is the tomato, in the sense of having lost a lot of this genetic diversity? See versus others I think is the same story is true for a lot of agriculture projects, right?

I would argue that any crop that has been intensively bred, if you look at nutrition, or flavor quality, it has deteriorated. And I can go down the list, I can say strawberries are another classic example where people have bred for very large fruit with very little flavor. Basically, all they've done is to increase yield is add water. And that's what we've done with tomatoes, we've just added water, you know, you just diluted out the flavor chemicals with more water. And that translates into yield, you can look at, there's some studies with grains that if you look at micronutrient contents of some grains, you can find that the modern varieties have less than the older varieties. So it's not it's not just tomatoes, it's any intensively bred crop.

And as a precursor to doing all the flavor biochemistry, did you actually go in and have to use sensory techniques to identify what the flavor was? Yes, in that way? Yes, absolutely. So you do that in house? Or did you go out to someone.

We collaborate with a group in food science, and so we have done consumer panels in our food science department, we've, anybody who's done these kinds of things can appreciate how much work this is, we've tested 160 different varieties of tomatoes over probably a decade now. And just think of the logistics of getting enough ripe fruit at the same stage to give to 100 consumers on one day. It's it's been a large amount of work, but basically what we've done, I apologize if anybody's going to attend my seminar today, because you're gonna know the answers.

To people listening to this one not worth hearing twice.

But the reality is, what we've done is we've we take lots of varieties, we've covered the gamut from old heirloom varieties to wild accessions to the most modern, highly inbred varieties, we give them to our consumers. We take samples back to the lab, we grind them up, we measure 68, different flavor associated, potentially associated chemicals. We then go back and say, which ones did you like? Which ones did you not like? And we estimate it when? Yes. And so you end up with a giant statistical puzzle? Which chemicals are correlated with liking and which ones aren't?

So I have so many questions about this, but sort of two of them quickly. One of them is how do you control for so many of those other factors, right? Because these tomatoes all grow in different ways, right? So you're going to be sensitive, you know, to their growth environments. differently, right?

Yeah, that's a very complicated answer. But so what we've tried to do is, we kind of, we embrace the diversity, as long as we're measuring what's in it on the day that we harvested, and the consumers are telling us how much they like on the day that they how we harvested it, it doesn't matter.

So the point isn't so much, which varietal of tomato right or heirloom, it's sort of what are the chemicals? And so then it doesn't matter as much?

That's exactly correct.

So ask a question that would be very sensitive to it, right?

Yes. So the first question is simply which chemicals drive people to like those tomatoes? The second question is more complicated. And that is what is the underlying genetics, and that's where the environment plays a huge role. And so we have ways to deal with that. The best way we deal with it is we always have what we call a check variety out in the field. We've grown it every season, and we put it through our consumer panels every season. So whether we've had a dry year or wet year, cold year, we can always correlate everything back to that one variety that's always present. That's the best way that we have to control the genetics, the environmental influence on the genetics. But that's the extremely difficult part. And honestly, it was easier to figure out what the chemistry of flavor was than it was to figure out the genetics of flavor.

So how much you looking at the, like a lot of these are volatiles, right, sort of how much? How much just texture play role and other factors and people's reactions and how much is that complicated that part of his story?

It does complicate things quite a bit actually. So, so well, not quite a bit, what I'll tell you is it's kind of funny. So we've, we've used our statistical models to say, can we develop a prediction software, where we can just grind up a sample and predict how much people will like it without having to do the consumer panel? And what we found is that about roughly 85% of the time, we could do a perfect correlation. Based on the chemistry, oh, breeder, if you're a breeder, 85%. It's like, wow, yeah. We started to think about what's wrong with the other 15%. And, and it turns out that in most cases, you go back and you find that they're, for the most part, they're just really mushy. Meili is the term we use. And there are texture problems, and they stand out like a sore thumb. The chemistry, when we look at the chemistry, people should really like this, what is this and then it's like, I don't know if you've ever grown heirloom tomatoes. But there are a few like, well, Brandy wines, a great example of it. brandy wine is one that if you pick it off the vine, and when it's perfectly ripe, and you bring it in your house and eat it right away, it's delicious. You let it sit on the kitchen counter for 24 hours, and it gets mushy. And they're terrible. And so that's what we would find we would find that texture did have an influence. If it was so the way I like to phrase it is texture can kill the flavor. It's in most tomatoes, they're within a range that it doesn't make much difference. But if they are way too firm, or way too soft, it's just kills it. And they're, they're awful.

So you've used the term heirloom a few times, and I know that's becoming more and more popular. You see it on restaurant menus and all that kind of stuff that using heirloom tomatoes. What does that mean?

Yeah, so. So my cynical definition is, it's a variety that farmers decided decades ago wasn't worth growing anymore. It's basically I think I would define an heirloom as first of all, it's something that breeds true. So it's not a hybrid. It's old. And it may not taste good. And in fact, so we've screened hundreds of heirlooms, you know, besides the 160, we've tasted probably 500 Different varieties, some heirlooms are awful. I mean, just because it's old, doesn't mean it's good. But so there is no legal definition of an heirloom. But basically, in general, I would say that I would consider heirlooms to be something that's, let's say pre World War Two. Self pollinated, so you can save seeds. And at some point, someone thought it had some properties that were desirable. And that's about it. That's the definition.

Sure. It's become kind of trendy to put on.

Yeah, it's a misnomer.

Well, but on the other hand, right? There was something that's lost, right? So in fact, right, sort of a lot of the better tasting tomatoes. Right?

Yeah, but they're terrible to grow. Right. I mean, this is the thing is that most of the heirloom tomatoes, they don't nobody grows them anymore commercially, because they're terrible to grow. So why low yields the low yields? Issues, no disease resistance survived the harvest process? In some case, yeah, very soft. They're just they just wouldn't cut it today, about the only way that you can grow them as if you're, you know, selling them at a farmers market and you're going to get $6 a pound. And even then it can be challenging.

Yeah, this isn't a phenomenon. Only for tomatoes, certainly ancient grains as an example. Yeah. Of the same sort of thing, the progenitors of modern day trading on the Stiven. Wheat.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's why we've ended up with the varieties we have now. They don't have any flavor, right? It's because we're selecting away from That's right. That's right. We're properties of Yes. Right. Right.

So what we've actually tried to do is to capture that and turn it to our advantage. So one of the things that we've done, we say, well, okay, the commercial tomato market is challenging, we, we, we know how to improve flavor. We need to do that in a package that delivers all of the performance that growers want. But there is an audience out there that's much more receptive and that's the home gardener. And so what we've done is we've taken that knowledge of the home that the heirloom tomatoes and again, you know, we've we've screened hundreds of these we say well okay, what happens if I take the ones the very best tasting ones, and I crossed those to a modern disease resistant high yielding firm variety, what is the what is the hybrid look like. And so we've done that. We've done it with dozens of them. And in a few cases, we've identified lines hybrids that have all of the flavor of the heirloom parent and five times the yield of them. And so we've gotten a few varieties that are just magical. Really, really good. And so we're working with seed companies. Now they're trying several of them. The first two, actually, were just commercialized this year. Congratulations. Yeah, it's exciting. But the home gardeners love us. We actually started a program, we got so many doing things like this interview, we got so many requests for these things that we decided, why don't we set up a system where people can donate to the research, and we'll send them seeds? So we've actually done that we've sent out I think we're up to over 12,000 people now we've sent seeds to.

Wow, and what do you ask from them? Or is this totally Well, direction,

We've asked for a donation of $10. Because that's the minimum, the university will process on a credit.

I was thinking more in terms of tell me any problems you had with it, tell me the weather is related to what you felt?

Well, so this is where we're going. And the reality is we've gotten some real dedicated home gardeners have given us immense feedback. And it's been really useful. They tell us how our varieties do across the country, we've sent them now to all 50 states and 40 countries. And we're getting feedback from people. And so actually, we have just decided to do this in a more formal way. And what we're going to do is to start to use unreleased varieties. And people will agree they'll have to agree to get them that they will provide us with feedback, we recognize that not everybody will do that. But we think we'll get enough. We're going to set up an online system where they can report when they planted them when they harvested their first fruit, any disease problems. And what we're going to do is I'm going to have someone in the lab, my technician is going to if they have problems, like with diseases, send us pictures, and we'll help you diagnose it. If we can't diagnose it, we'll hook you up with your closest extension agent. We want to formalize this in kind of a citizen science kind of yeah.

This is very much what you if you read some of the older documents related to the Extension Service, this was the sort of populist, my deal that they had of including as many people as they possibly could in the process. So congratulations.

Oh, I think it's gonna be really fun. It's gonna be a lot of work. And I can tell you come usually from September through November, I'm getting at least probably five emails a week where people will send me detailed descriptions of what they have done over the season, and how well the bite tomatoes have done. And you know, they'll either say love this one didn't like this one at all. But it all comes together and helps us in order to do the next generation.

Do you ever get sick of tomatoes?

You know, it's funny, I actually don't eat practically any fresh tomatoes. And the problem is that, you know, you have to eat these things on adulterated in order to rate them, right. And you can't even add salt. And I really no longer a big fan of fresh tomatoes. But I eat a lot of processed tomato products, our freezer at home is full of tomato sauce, which we'd all winter.

Yeah, is there a possibility and I'm sort of looping around with the interaction between the food industry and the sort of research, I can see a food company that produces a huge amount of tomato sauce, wanting a flavor company to be able to compound a fresh tomato flavor that they could put into this as as an ingredient. Do you see that as feasible or possible or likely?

So it's kind of funny. So I'll digress just a tiny bit and tell you that the way the citrus industry works, they harvest the oranges, they score, squash them and extract the juice, and then they heat them up very quickly. And all of the flavor volatiles are driven off. They actually collect the flavor volatiles and they add them back. And that's routinely done with orange juice. I have visited some of these big processing places in California and I say, Well, you're not doing that. And they said to me, for tomato They say no, we don't do that. I say why not. And they say, the object here is to drive off water as quickly as possible, and concentrate the product down. They said, if we want flavor, we're going to add basil or oregano. Yes. And so they don't do that. And I am baffled as to why they don't do that. They do not collect those volatiles. The again the citrus industry is a paradigm that says you could do that you could add them back. Now I've seen a lot of recipes for home gardeners, were actually there's a famous guy, actually, you should get him for your podcast, if you ever can, Harold McGee, he wrote a book on the science of cooking. And he actually published a recipe in the New York Times in which he adds back leaves at the very end, because the leaves produce some of the same volatiles that the fruit do, and it adds back flavor. The way that I do it is we just hold back some of our tomato. So we will typically my wife, and I will roast the tomatoes to drive off a lot of the water, put them in the blender and make the sauce and then we'll add in some that haven't been treated in any way at the end to give us that fresh flavor. And that works great. makes a huge difference.

And certainly the hot breeders will breed some hops where they want, yes, volatile hops and others. They want clarity and they want bitter and they'll put them in at different times in the process.

Yeah. It's very, very similar to making craft beers. Yeah, you add the hops again, at the very end that changes the whole complexion. Yeah.

So you're doing this through traditional breeding methods, right? habitation, right. But you come from a genetic engineering background. So tell us about that.

Yeah, so the tragedy is that we probably just can't afford to do the regulatory packages to do this by GMO. I always tell people, you want a great tasting tomato, I could have given it to you five years ago with GMOs. We know the pathways, we know the genes, I know how to manipulate those genes. We've actually done a lot of it experimentally. You know, we do test GMOs and some of our consumer panels to validate some of the work that we've done on the predictions. But we're not gonna sell those things. And I think they're number one is the cost. Number two, a lot of the same people who are so fanatical about flavor are the ones that are most anti GMO. So I say, Hey, you're you wanna you don't want your damn GMOs and eat your crappy tomatoes? It makes no sense. But, but no, we're not doing that. Now, we are thinking quite heavily about gene editing. Because gene editing, at least today in the US, it will not be considered GMO, there are some things the problem with gene editing is at this point, we're really good at taking away stuff, we're not so good at replacing, right. So that's still a problem.

But, gene editing, you're talking about CRISPR technology, it's like that, right? So a little bit about that. For listeners who may not be familiar with what that is, what gene editing is and how that's different than.

So gene editing has the potential to really transform plant breeding. We do use gene editing, not in anything that we've released as a variety, but we use gene editing as a tool. We can go in and we can knock genes out, we can make mutations, and in most cases, we're making mutations in genes that have already been mutated by nature. We're just reproducing what nature has already done. The advantages, we can go into it very quickly. And very precisely. You know, I'll give you a good example. There's a mutation that knocks out the conversion of lycopene to beta carotene, and tomato, that results in a deep red color tomato. They're beautiful. People love them. It's a natural mutation that knocks out this gene. And it's widely used in the industry to give you a deep red tomato. So we know the mutation we know. And so I could take, for example, an heirloom tomato, and I could knock out the same gene with gene editing with CRISPR and make it high lycopene. So it's exactly equivalent to what I could do by traditional breeding, but I can do it in six months. Instead of several years of backcrossing, and fixing all the rest of it, so we are using that technology and we're if the public, I mean, I think we're still in that stage where we don't know what's going to happen, but it would speed up tremendously improving varieties, if we use that. And I'm enthusiastic about it. The government says that it's not going to be regulated, as long as we're doing something that exists in nature.

I've listened to Rob Fraley from Monsanto give talks about how GMO was rolled out to the public. And it was in he, if I remember correctly, he basically said that he wishes they could do it over again, because it would be perceived differently. What do you think is important about gene editing and how it's conveyed to people who aren't familiar with these types of methods so that we don't end up with the same situation that we have with GMO?

So as Rob would have told you, the first thing that that we did wrong when we were at Monsanto was, we focused on producer traits, we were we focused on things that were really important to the farmer. And the consumer didn't see the benefits. We as a society have done a very, very poor job of educating the public about science and about things like risks. How many times have you heard that? Oh, I don't want to fly someplace I'd rather drive right? When you know that statistically, it's far safer to fly. We have not done a good job of explaining it. And so the consumer says, Why should I take this risk, even if it's minimal? When I don't see a benefit directly? The problem is most people don't have any idea where their food comes from. They don't understand that. The BT, the BT gene introduced into corn to fight off insects is safer than spraying it with tons of pesticides. They say, Oh, it's GMO. That's bad. Well, you know, we've been really poor at doing that. I think with CRISPR and genome editing, we have to be careful to make the case that this is identical. We're not doing anything that nature couldn't do itself. So no, no fish, Gene, tomatoes, even though that was never actually done. We're, we're doing things within the species, we're not introducing anything new, that that couldn't be done by nature itself. And I think the first things we have to do are things that the consumers will want. And that's why actually I've been approached by a lot of people about, can you make a tomato that tastes better, that's genome edited, so we can get out there and show that this is something that consumer will really like. And I think that's important.

So the bit about that you've said several times, like we're not going to do anything different than what has already been done in nature, we're just reproducing mutation. How important do you think that differences between sort of, you know, bringing something cross species or something like that? Is that so it's important to, to the consumer in the public, right, because they see it different? Yes. I don't know. Do you think there are any different risks? Right? That happens, like sort of you know, that when you do bring in genes that have not traditionally been right, in the population?

Well, I do think we have to be careful in everything you can, you can make some pretty nasty stuff with traditional breeding. Sure. And we have and there are some good examples of traditionally bred crops that have produced unexpected consequences. But people don't hear about that.

So he said, give some examples.

Oh, there's, I'm trying to remember. Yeah, you do. I'm trying to remember is it celery was the one of the classic ones where they had the high levels of a compound that caused a reaction in people's mouth. Well, I mean, I can give you in the case of tomato, some of the wild relatives of tomato make some really obnoxious glyco alkaloid compounds, they don't taste good, and they're not good for you. I can read those things into tomato and make a tomato that is not very healthy for you, and it would be completely unregulated. And, you know, there are things in green tomatoes that are not good to eat, you know, they go away when the fruit ripen or they're cooked. Those same compounds, the glyco alkaloids. I could put all the glyco alkaloid I wanted into a tomato using traditional breeding and nobody could say anything about it and it could kill you. I mean, it wouldn't kill you. I'm just kidding.

Yeah, except in breeding, you're in traditional breeding. The idea is you're not doing it the breeder is not doing it. It's nature that's doing it and we select. That's right. What nature's right. Yeah, that's the critical scientific difference, right?

I think there have to be regulatory processes. I think we have to look at every product we make, even with genome editing, and make sure we haven't screwed something up. But I think that the public has an easier time with stuff that oh, yeah, there is a natural equivalent of this out there already. I'm not doing anything weird. But to me, the height of hypocrisy is the BT chain. Where, you know, I'm in Well, first of all, I think there's, hopefully I hopefully, I do offend some of your listeners. There's this misnomer that organic is chemical free. And that couldn't be further from the truth. You know, I can spray a field until it's blue with copper, and that's considered organic. I can spray the bacterium that contains the BT, you know, there's, there's only a few different says in the genes between bacillus, thuringiensis, and bacillus, what's the toxic one, I can't remember the name of it. I can spray Bacillus thuringiensis all over your plant. And that's organic. But I take the single gene that has the protein that kills botulism, that's I was gonna say, no, not botulism, nevermind. I can take a single gene out of that organism, put it in the plant, and that suddenly, that's evil. And it's not organic. I think we'd be going a long way. Organic does not necessarily equal sustainable. I mean, to me, the definition of sustainable does not equal organic. And and I think that the organic farmers would be a lot better off if they would drop the, the, the commercial hype, in organic, a large part of organic, the reason that that organic was defined as being GMO free was so that they would capture that group of people who didn't want GMOs. And that, to me is hypocritical. You know, I think we can, if we used certain GMOs in combination with organic practices.

We would be a lot better off using organic methods to get high yields is going to be in many cases worse, like on less sustainable long term, right?

Absolutely, absolutely. You could make organic, a lot more sustainable if you incorporated certain parts of GMO into it. And they won't do it. It's purely marketing.

And that the conflation is people will conflate organic with some kind of quality factor that because it's organic, I ought to be able to taste it, feel it smell it. There's something quality wise, that's different. And that's not it's not true, either.

Yeah. So there's one of the things I think, to really try to understand what this is sort of, you know, people care about things, and they care about important things, right. And people from the scientific community can be very like, wow, right? Organic actually can be way worse in the whole all these different ways, right, sort of the conversation is a really hard one right? To sort of connect up though, like, what do you care about? And let's not get people defensive, either, right? We can offend some of our listeners, but sort of but there's a reason there's something people care about when they say, oh, I want organic food, right? Sure. And again, the key is to then say, right, how do we, how do we pick up on that and talk about how to actually achieve these things? Right? Not necessarily with this particular labor label, especially if it's come from, you know, big, big, you know, farming practices, right?

If is it better to if I'm live on the east coast? Is it better to eat something that was grown locally, non organically or to buy an organic product that was grown in an industrial farm and synchronous and driven cross country? I think I just read an article yesterday about the efforts to ban plastic bags and supermarkets. And someone actually did a study to show that in terms of in the environment, actually, the, the plastic bags are less destructive than than using paper bags effect on climate. Right.

Yeah. Right. So I think but then But then yeah, so that this is a trade off then Right. You know, the trade offs here. What's your effect on the climate in terms of greenhouse gasses versus right, you know, how can we there is an issue with the plastic and the Yeah,

I think in the end, I think a big problem that I have is, people don't trust the government. And, you know, I mean, all of this stuff with the roundup and the things about it causing cancer, this is complete crap. And people need to ask, well, people don't even know what questions to ask is the problem. And I think you have to look at agriculture in a much different way than we are today. And it's not just as simple as everybody grow organic, because if everybody switched organic, we're not going to be able to feed the people on the field. You know, people are going to starve to death. If we switch to organic. There's nothing wrong with organic. You know, it's, an admirable goal. But I think there are trade offs and to say, Oh, I'm doing the right thing by eating organic is not necessarily true. And there are ways to improve it, we need to pay attention. The fact is, the Gulf of Mexico is being polluted by nitrogen runoff that runs down the Missouri and Mississippi River. That's, that's a very real and it's a bad thing. But can we just eliminate nitrogen fertilizers? Not if we want to feed everybody on the planet? So we need to, to me, we need to have a discussion, we need to say what are the priorities? And I think that the people who are the organic people raise important questions about how we should be doing agriculture, but they don't have all the answers.

Is it possible that the degree to which consumers will accept measures that are taken to address problems is sort of related to the severity of it, and I'm thinking of the wine industry, when all the everybody was all vines being wiped out? And they were, what they found was a pretty nasty set of inorganic chemicals that were good at it. And I'm not sure that if people were faced with that today, they would say, okay, that's That's all right. Go ahead and spray that. Like, was it copper sulfate? I think?

Yeah, well, copper. So well, copper sulfates can be used organically.

Yeah, there's some irony to that inorganic compound that can be used organic.

That's right, because it's natural.

Well, I mean, I think part of it is understanding on both sides, right, the consumer and the scientists that really everybody in the end is working towards the same goal, right, of having a healthy, you know, sustainable, that's a loaded term food supply. And there are these evil people unnecessarily out there, although there are some bad actors that are, you know, trying to manipulate the food system, right. I mean, you like you said, when you were working at Monsanto back earlier in your career, the scientists there had good intentions, right? The evil empire, and the people who are trying to, you know, grow organic food or purchase organic food, are trying to do it, because they're trying to do the right thing. Right. So it's ascribing good intent to the majority of people, and then how can we work together as scientists and consumers to make progress?

So yeah, one of the things we have to recognize, though, is sort of there isn't any one goal, right? I mean, so I think that's another trap, we can fall into, Oh, we're all trying to accomplish the same thing. No, I mean, there's trade offs, like even about affects the climate we just talked about, right? Sort of, you know, greenhouse gasses versus pollution, right, you know, nitrogen runoff versus feeding, and there's no, there's no single goal here at all right? And then everybody's got their own interest, of course, right. You know, if you're a grower, right, it's, you know, you care about the economics of, you know, your own family, for example, right, you know, and so, and these things do not always, they cannot be achieved at the same time, this this fact of living in a society. Right. And, and also, like, what are the different goals? I mean, I think we're hearing about sort of a lot of the different ways and there are trade offs. And that's, that's even harder, right, then what you just said, Right?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I don't think that there's you're never going to satisfy everybody right. But I think you know, having the cheapest, most nutritious, abundant food supply overall. I mean, would I mean that's sort of a panacea right? It's that yeah, that's not gonna happen. Because you like you said, I mean, there are people who are gonna buy that cheap tomato regardless because they don't value the $3 Tomato over the $1 Tomatoes, right. So maybe there isn't one single so it's a good that's a good point. We want to be respectful of your time we know you have a busy schedule we really appreciate you taking you know close to an hour to talk to us if there were people listening who want to get involved with your tomato program what would be the best way for them to get in touch.

Oh, you can just google me and tomatoes and you'll probably get to our webpage

and I will put some links to your lab page.

Yeah, yeah. Anything else you'd like to say before we end?

I think you, what you said at the end is variable. portant to me, you know, we're all in this together. And I think we've become a very polarized society. And what we see with the federal government today is very similar in science. You know, this is the same phenomenon as vaccinations. There's some bad information out there and there's some very polarizing people and I don't know what the answers are, but we've got to try and bridge the gaps.

This has been a great conversation.

Yes, thanks.

Thanks for the time and you're very welcome.

Thanks. Okay.

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. Jessie Vipham is a K-State alumna and food microbiologist currently serving as the faculty hire in global food systems and nutrition for the USAID Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sustainable Intensification (SIIL). This was a fantastic, wide-ranging conversation that started with Jessie's graduate studies using direct-fed microbials in cattle systems and then moved on to the work she does now managing food safety projects in several developing countries around Africa and Southeast Asia. Some of the highlights include how she tackles large challenging issues related to food safety, the importance of trust to the success of a project, and the benefits of bidirectional learning.

For more information about Dr. Vipham and SIIL check out their website at: https://www.k-state.edu/siil/about/people/index.html

Transcript:

Research in the Developing World with Dr. Jessie Vipham - Food Safety

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of global food systems. It's produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Jay Weeks PhD candidate in the Department of Agronomy. My co host is Scott Tanona, an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy who specializes in the philosophy of science. Hi, everybody. Welcome back. We've got a great interview for you today with Dr. Jesse Vipham . Jessie is a microbiologist by training focusing on food safety, and currently serves as the faculty higher in global food systems and nutrition. For the USAID Feed the Future Innovation Lab for collaborative research on sustainable intensification here at K State record a lot of ground in this conversation starting with Jesse's graduate work using direct fed microbials and kettle systems, and then moved on to the work she does now managing food safety projects in several developing countries around Africa and Southeast Asia. Jesse is a brilliant, thoughtful lady. I really appreciated her perspectives and things like how to tackle large challenging issues related to food systems, the importance of trust in the success of any major project, and the benefits of bi directional learning for countries like the United States that are invested in international development. This intro doesn't even begin to do the full conversation justice. I have no doubts that this will be one you'll enjoy. We're happy today to be interviewing Dr. Jesse Vipham. Welcome, Jesse.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

So I will have introduced you briefly in the intro before starting this. But we'd like to have you describe yourself a little bit and your background and how you got to where you are today.

Okay, that's easy enough. Well, I am trained as a food microbiologist, so a lot of my background is in food microbiology, food safety training. I have my PhD from Texas Tech University, as well as my master's degree, my bachelor's degrees actually from Kansas State. So being here on the faculty is a little bit of a homecoming, it's nice to be back in Manhattan, I was raised on a registered Angus cattle ranch in northeastern Nevada. So I've been involved in agriculture and agricultural pursuits most of my life, food safety, food microbiology felt like an opportunity for me to remain in that environment, while also getting a chance to kind of move into more laboratory based sciences. And so that's been a really nice career choice for me, because it's kept me with my roots, but also allowed me to do some different things. I'm currently in involved in the USAID Feed the Future innovation labs here on campus. So my position has moved me a little bit out of domestic food safety, and into international food safety. And so I do research mainly in Southeast Asia and Africa on food safety questions, as well as food systems questions, agricultural production questions. So that's currently where I'm spending most of my time.

Great. Yeah, we want to get into all of that. Obviously, was there something about microbiology when you were younger, that really fueled your interest? And what was it about the lab?

So actually, I didn't fall in love with microbiology until I got to my master's degree. My background for my bachelor's degree is Ag Econ. And so I, I remember so vividly, I was walking across campus, it was getting super close to graduation. And I was thinking to myself, Oh, my goodness, what am I going to do with my life? And I decided I was going to go to get my master's degree in meat science. I don't know where that came from. But I went over and spoke to Dr. Melvin hunt. And he said, Yeah, you should check out Kansas, Texas Tech. And that's what led me there. And actually, Dr. Mindy Brashears, is who I got engaged with there. And she's a food microbiologist, I started spending time with her. And I realized that, you know, microbiology is super cool, because there's a lot of questions that are left unanswered in that science. And it's a very investigative type of research because you can't see what's happening. And so you have to sort of go through a lot of critical thinking, to try and identify, Okay, what's the best way to test what we need to test? And then how can we use what we know about the discipline to lead us to our conclusions because we can't see what's happening. So we get to do this really cool lab based stuff. And then there's just this interesting, investigative evolving piece that comes with microbiology that love. It's kind of like a puzzle. It is a puzzle.

It's such a people sometimes think about science so much is about sort of, you know, the observable things, right, sort of the directly testable things. And I don't think they quite realize how much in fact, I mean, it's not guesswork, but you're making all these inferences about exactly what he said things that you can't see, right? It's absolutely, it's a neat endeavor, but complicated, right?

Well, and when you take something like microbiology, and you apply it to something like a food system, the complexity just becomes more interesting. Because you are moving from, okay, we have these complex things that we're trying to understand about these microorganisms. But the food system in itself is a complex evolving, you know, situation. And so how do you get bored in that environment? I mean, I think it would be really hard to so. So that's, I guess why I'm into it. And, and like it.

So are there things that you were working on in the Masters? And then sort of early in getting your PhD that you're still working on now? Or have you kind of shifted away from some of the earlier work?

Yes, and no, so my thesis and dissertation research was really based in more domestic food safety questions. Like I said, I'm from a cattle background. So I'm really interested in the beef industry kind of, you know, that just feels very comfortable, comfortable for me. And that's where I spent a lot of my time. But during that time, Dr. Breshears, spends a lot of her time in Central America, doing research for food safety there. So Honduras, Mexico, she's done some different stuff in Panama. So she's really engaged in food security style research. And I got to be involved in that, although it wasn't directly any of the projects I was doing. And I think that that's where I kind of caught the bug for that recognition of, you know, in domestic food safety, there's a lot to be done, but you're sort of moving the needle just a bit by that you're making a really good system just that much better. Versus there's all this space for improvement, particularly when you're talking about developing nations. So that I think just felt really exciting to me to go into a space where people weren't really doing research. And there was a lot of room to move, versus kind of trying to, you know, pick away at important questions, but maybe not as big of questions.

So the possibility for a bigger impact was greater than before?

Yeah, absolutely. And they're both domestic and international food safety research is super important and super valid. Sure. I just became a little more interested in the international side.

So before we get to the international stuff, your PhD dissertation title was reduced burden characterization and RNA gene expression of salmonella and bovine sub biliary, iliac civilian lymph nodes associated with administration of direct fed microbials.

Oh, that anyone's ever read that.

But my question is, with a direct thread microbial, I mean, were you was it like a probiotic sort of thing? And what are your views on the kind of in the building industry around probiotics?

So yes, so a direct fed microbial would be a probiotic for animal use. So probiotics are for human use thought that would be where that name would apply. And then direct fed microbials applied to animal feeds. So same thing, but it's we have it kind of categorized differently. So what the question that really came up during the time that I was in my dissertation, was this question around the Harbour Bridge of salmonella and E. coli, in bovine lymph nodes, and there's a lot of lymph nodes within, you know, a carcass. And it's really challenging to remove all those. And so for the most part, they ended up being part of ground beef, it's totally fine. It's totally safe. But that there is this opportunity for pathogens to sort of evade the the typical interventions that we have within beef slaughter, to, you know, show up in ground product. And so that was a big question that a lot of researchers that are involved in beef safety, were investigating at that time. And so Dr. Brochures and Dr. Guy Lonergan, who's also at Texas Tech, they had done a lot of research on on these direct fed microbials as far as pathogen shedding in feedlot cattle, and thought that, hey, you know, maybe there's something going on, that's, you know, more systemic than just, you know, through through the shedding in fecal matter. And so that's where that dissertation came up. I think that there's a lot of promise to direct fed microbials. But I think that what what this conversation that I would like take advantage of a little bit is that there's a A lot of value in food safety to what we call multi hurdle intervention approaches. And so I think where direct fed microbials come into play is that it's a way to sort of from a pre harvest on farm perspective, begin to start paying attention to food safety issues, whether we realize it or not. And there's also

even before it gets the slaughterhouse, I'm sort of thinking about it ahead of time,

right, before we get into a situation where we're bringing large loads of pathogens, potentially, into a slaughter facility, is there anything we can do on the farm or at the feedlot level, that has an impact on that, and it also just so happens, that direct fed microbials help, you know, with cattle growth, so you can actually see benefit in feeding that from their growth perspective. And so it was, it's kind of a win. And, and like I said, I think it's a really nice proactive way to begin working on food safety, before we're trying to clean it up, you know, right before the consumer buys it, or something along that line. And that's, you know, that's a very typical practice that we see in us, as well as European and, you know, other food safety systems around the world, this sort of multi hurdle value chain approach to food safe.

So you say multi hurdle, you mean,

So it's kind of that concept of, you know, if you have someone running down the track, and you have a bunch of hurdles, hopefully, eventually, you'll trip them up. So, so the purpose is, is that if you have an intervention a lot, you know, at certain points along a value chain, and hopefully, it's a strategic position that you're putting that intervention in, so where there's potential for contamination, you're, you're hopefully reducing either the presence or the concentration of pathogens as they move through that chain. And we have lots of points of contamination where, you know, product can be safe until that point of contamination, we can clean it up. And then there might be also more points of contamination as we move through that chain. So having interventions throughout that space, can really help us to ensure that food safety is a part of what we're doing, as we practice throughout.

You don't have to rely on any particular point, sort of to totally take care of it right, sort of, but you're hoping.

Yeah, well, it's also a little bit of that, you know, it's easier for a lot of people to carry a big load than just one person. And so how do you kind of get an entire value chain, from a food production standpoint to say, Okay, we're gonna, we're playing our part in reducing the chances of bacterial pathogens getting to the food supply, and we're hoping that others along the way will, too.

The other big thing that people will the public hears about is antibiotic use. Right. So how do you how does the feeding cattle, the microbes, right, so basically, the probiotics sort of how does that mesh with that? Is this an alternative? Or is it sort of to work with it? Or how does that how does that work?

Like? So I think that that's a really great question, we spend a lot of time really focusing on antimicrobial resistance. From a food safety perspective, I won't comment too heavily on that area, because I don't spend a lot of time that's not my expertise. And so I would probably inevitably, out, you know, speak out of turn. And so I think that, but there are some really fantastic researchers at Kansas State who are looking into those things. I'm Dr. Apley, in the vet school would be, you know, one of probably the top people. But I do think that, from a food system perspective, we are always attempting to find alternatives. And that's not necessarily saying because we want to stop using something eventually. But there's, there's definitely contexts in which certain interventions or certain applications have, you know, more, they're better suited for that situation, or that context. And so I think providing the food industry with as many different tools as possible, is always a valuable pursuit. And I think that, that there's lots of science being done in order to try and identify, you know, what are some of the different strategies that we can use, and give options to people as well as I think, you know, try to be forward thinking and attempt to say, Okay, how do we see changes in the food supply, impacting what we're doing now, and vice versa? And so I think that that's what I would say from a probiotic or direct and microbial perspective. I think it's just another tool that can be used to help to support the health and the safety of our food.

Farmers are incentivized because the faster growth rates and the better health of the cattle and things like that overall, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that it comes down to just that, but there definitely is a dual purpose there. And so, you know, the direct fed microbials, there's data that is published, that shows that, you know, it's, you know, a good product to feed. And honestly, quite, it's pretty standard practice. I mean, also, most farmers are doing this now, well, not necessarily farmers, but from a feedlot perspective, it would be you'd be hard pressed to find feeders that are not incorporating some form of a direct fed microbial, or eye on a four or something like that in into the feeds that they're feeding is part of,

they're just like powders that get blended in, or what does it look like? Or is it all kinds of stuff?

So direct fed microbial is actually a culture. And so you would have some type of usually lactic acid bacteria is what gets incorporated. So it would be actual live culture.

How long has this been, you know, technology or tool that's being used sort of semi-commonly?

I mean, it's a pretty common technology. And so, you know, I would speak incorrectly. But I mean, for at least, you know, since I was doing it's been well, before that, so I mean, it's been around for quite some time, and there's been a lot of research that's gone into really identifying, you know, what are the specific strains that should be used from a direct fed microbials standpoint, if you jump into probiotics, and probiotic use has been around for a very, very long time.

Foods, all of that, you know, have a some form of, you know, probiotic involved. Right.

Right. And it's like, what, last couple of decades or something, right, sort of a fad in terms of human food now, right, right.

Well, it within our culture, you know, that you can find a good point. So I just got back from Ethiopia. And, you know, one of the super common foods that they eat, I mean, it's I'm common, I mean, it's the staple food is injera, which is a fermented teff product, usually, sometimes wheat, and they make kind of a bread out of it, and they consume that with absolutely every meal. And that's been, you know, what their culture has done for probably longer than our culture has been around. So.

Yeah, well, I just I'm sorry, I had to ask you about things. I'm fascinated by the microbiome stuff and all that. So I wanted to get your take on.

Well, things. So no, I just, you know, I think that that is a super interesting area as well. And so, but, you know, I always tried to say, you know, and reiterates, you know, it's a tool. And, and there's lots of other really great things that can be used out there from an intervention perspective.

So, you know, one of the main reasons we wanted to talk to you is your work with the international work, as you alluded to before, so you work for the USA, Id Feed the Future innovation lab are one of them here on campus?

Yes, I'm with the sustainable intensification innovation lab.

So I guess, just to start out, what are the USAID Feed the Future labs?

Okay, so the Feed the Future program is an arm of USA ID. And so really, that arm is probably the smaller arm when you really look at their entire portfolio. And it's specifically designed to do it's a research for development arm. And so it's designed to engage with US universities, in order to create research projects to investigate certain questions that kind of perpetuate issues in food systems around the world. And so we currently have four of those labs, I think there's like 26 of them total 24 of them something like that. And they're, they're scattered around the United States, certain universities have multiple other universities have, you know, one and and they are targeting either specific value chains, or targeting certain concepts that apply to certain value chains. So a concept based lab would be like the sustainable intensification innovation labs, so it's more of the concepts around sustainable intensification as they apply to agriculture production food production, versus the sorghum and millet innovation lab that we have here is is focusing on how do we see improvements in sorghum and millet within the target countries.

And I want to ask when you said value chain so you mean a particular product or stock?

Sorry, I didn't really know that's good. As we've talked a lot about value chains I'm sorry. Yes. So a value chain would really be you know, how does a certain product like sorghum or wheats, meat milk move from farm all the way into a consumers home.

So specifically, what does the sustainable intensification Innovation Lab do? And I guess more broadly, how do you define sustainable, right? That's a word that gets thrown around a lot.

Yes. And it's not that's not the first time anyone's ever asked me that question. So it's really what the sustainable intensification Innovation Lab is focusing on. And the definition of sustainable intensification is, how do you keep up the level of production from an agricultural perspective, or at least, you know, keep it up or increase your productivity without increasing the amount of land and resources that you're using to do that. And so it's really looking at, you know, as we move forward, we're not getting more land, and we're probably not getting more resources. And so how do we conserve the resources that we have, while also maintaining really productive food production, because the population is going to increase as that those constraints on the resources continue to happen. And so that's really what sustainable intensification, innovation labs looking to do. And so we've got different types of sustainable intensification, projects happening all across the world. We have six target countries, to in West Africa, which are Senegal, and Burkina Faso, to an East Africa, that's Ethiopia, and Tanzania, and then to in Southeast Asia, which is Cambodian Bangladesh. And so we have different value chains that we're targeting within those countries, we have different practices being used, but they all apply back to that concept of, you know, sustainably, creating agricultural production without causing more stress on the resources that we already have limitations to.

So what are some examples of projects that you're working on one of these countries.

So I personally am not engaged per se on a given projects. So that's the other thing about innovation labs is that Kansas State is the management entity of the sustainable intensification innovation lab, or the sort of minimal Innovation Lab. But as part of that, there's sub awards in which we have given to different institutions in order to conduct research. So we're involved in the research, but not I'm not necessarily a lead on, say, a given project or a coPI i on a given project. And so some examples of what we are doing, though, is we have projects in Senegal that are really looking at Integrated Crop livestock systems, and how can you use sort of resource recycling in those systems? And what are the major opportunities or constraints within that type of a system? In Cambodia, we are focusing on horticultural production from a smallholder perspective. So women are really engaged in vegetable production in the country of Cambodia. And that project is specifically working with women to see how, you know, if you engage women in a project, does that then, you know, increase their knowledge and capabilities and the resources that they have to to be stakeholders within a given value chain. And so that project is really looking at can we use conservation ag practices on vegetable farms, and then engage women in order to see if that has any impact on the sustainability as well as the production level of vegetables there? And, and we have lots of others. And but I think that I, like I said, not being super intimately involved in some of those projects, it's hard for me to kind of comment exactly on all of them.

Sure. So, since you're involved with a lot of the projects, what are some of the biggest challenges that you that you see? And what are some of the ways that people are going about trying to solve them?

So, you know, I think from my perspective, personally, there's a few major challenges that I think we face from different levels. And so I want to start off by sort of highlighting the challenge of conducting research in a developing nation context, because it's not as straightforward as we think about research here at Kansas state's right. So if to put it very much in my realm, if I wanted to do a project to look at the prevalence of salmonella in a certain product in the United States, it'd be pretty straightforward for me to to do that. Right. We have the lab capacity for it. We have the student workforce for it, we have the Compliance Office is here to support us in all of that. And, and so you have, from an administrative perspective all the way down to undergraduate help you have the modalities for that. We spend a lot of time working on capacity development from a research perspective. And that becomes a lot more dynamic than it sounds. Because you begin to start having conversations like, okay, there is no governing board for biosecurity levels in the whole country. But I need to make sure that I'm bringing good practices in and that I'm not teaching students that it's okay to throw pathogens in the trash, right. And so you still want to be able to create that capacity. But you sort of have to do it without your common, right without the infrastructure. And so that's definitely a challenge. And I think the more we move into some of these research areas, such as food safety, or even that medicine, where some of those those laboratories become a little bit, not as straightforward as say, doing some agronomic work, where you kind of have the land space, and you can do some of those trials, it does become more interesting to begin to say, Okay, how do we not only bring research projects into wherever it is that we're working? But how do we also, you know, create that capacity so that when the projects over our partners have that sustainability in what's happening? I think so from a second perspective, trust. And I think that everybody kind of boxes me a little bit when I kind of go into this, but I'm learning more and more that research and collaboration is very much based on mutual trust. And whether or not you and your collaborator recognize that, that you're both there to support and to help in that situation. And I do think in development work, we need to be really conscientious about creating the same types of trust and collaboration that we would with any US based partner that we would engage with. And there tends to be some challenges in some of that, because you have to spend a little bit more time than you naturally would. So it takes time for someone to go okay, yes, I believe that you're here to help support me and that, that we're going to work collaboratively collaboratively on this. And so that might mean a few more trips to Cambodia than you had anticipated. So that you can build that trust. And your partners do feel like you're there to partner with them. And be engaged for the long term and not just sort of show up say here, here's a project, here's some funding and we need the final report by August's, you know, I think that spending time on the ground is really, really valuable. And in that can be a challenging thing. From a, you're trying to manage a position within your home institution in the US and also trying to really create that level of trust with your partners in other countries. From a food systems perspective, we are lagging behind in research, specifically for animal source foods. So it's it's challenging to do, say like a livestock feeding trial in in some of these countries that we work in, because where do you find 30, similar cows to put on a feeding trial that you can, you know, do all the randomization that you need in the blocking that you need to make sure that you have control of all the other variables? Right, salutely. And again, like I said, and not to suggest the agronomic data is super straightforward to collect, but you you don't necessarily have the same challenges in saying, okay, you know, we were going to take some of these fields and get some people engaged. And we'll do some trials from a agronomy perspective, livestock is a much more challenging resource to find. And people tend to in developing nations look at livestock as somewhat of like a kind of a walking bank. Right? So they're valuable. Yeah. And so they're a little less likely to be like, sure, take my cow, because no, I need that cow. Because if something happens, I know I can take that cow and sell her for $800 in comparison to the, you know, maybe couple, you know, 20 $30, I'll get for a few bushels of wheat. And so I'm not going to just kind of throw her around to anyone who's asking for and so that would be one area and then I think as we move more into issues of like, food safety, that medicine, that those are under researched areas in developing nations.

So I've got a lot of questions about this. But one of them is related to this bit about trust. And so one of the things that you highlighted there is that you don't always necessarily have the same goals. Right. So there's other things right, sort of, you know, you want to study and learn something, right. But other people have to be worrying about other things, right, sort of as they're being involved in the study. Right? So how can you say more about sort of how you negotiate that, and sort of, you know, that there's, I mean, this happens in a lot of research, right, sort of human subjects research is sort of sometimes like this, right? Sort of, you want to learn something, but you have to ensure that, you know, you're taking care of the patient, right, and that the patient's health is coming first, right? And, you know, sometimes those come apart a little bit, right, you know, jeez, it would be really neat if we could learn this thing, but we'd have to put people at risk. So we're not going to do that, right? Could you like highlight some other ways that like some ways that happens and the kind of research you're talking about?

Yeah. So I think a really good example that we had happen is we work pretty significantly in Ethiopia. And that's a country where I have several projects happening. And it's that country is very near and dear to my heart. But it has definitely had some challenges in the last few years from a safety perspective, just because there's some differences in opinion from a political standpoint. And so it's really been challenged in trying to create cohesiveness from a full population level. And so you kind of get into these situations where you begin to start asking, Okay, well, it's not super safe currently, to just be traveling around the country. We do have research sites in all these different places, because that's how rigorous data is collected, right, we do some sampling here and there. And that's how we're able to, you know, have our random sample that's hopefully indicative of the whole population. But I'm working, you know, with a certain region, and it's not necessarily safe for them to go into another region at this point in time. And so you begin to start saying, Okay, so what's the right thing to do? Is it to try to hold off on our timelines? Or do we need to try to stick to our timelines? And sometimes as a scientist, that's hard, right? Because you want to say, No, I've been trained to, I want to do it based upon the timelines that we've identified this as the proposal we turned in, these are the documents that were being held accountable for. And we have to stick to these things. But at the same time, you kind of get into this place where it's like, but I'm not going to risk, you know, the health of my colleagues, or put them in a position that makes them super uncomfortable to make sure that we stick to our timelines, because I'll tell you one thing that doesn't translate Ethiopia very well, from a cultural perspective is just timelines. They are I mean, they've got this new common phrase, they say chigger, Elam, which means no problem. And they kind of live in this space of, it's okay, if this doesn't happen exactly now, or exactly how we said it would, because we'll get there it's going to happen. And in the US, we tend to not think that way at all. It's No, you said this was going to happen today at two o'clock. And it's 205. And it hasn't happened. And so you know, there's a big learning lesson for me in that, which is that I am, even if I am the lead of a project, I am there as a support team member to the incontri institutions, because, because that is how it needs to be. Because if we want to see development in the ways that we want to see it, it needs to be my own country, colleagues who are really gaining the opportunities. And so I can't just drive that point and drive over them in order to make sure that I'm keeping to say, a US based timeline that I think is really important. And so that's kind of one example that we've particularly had to manage. And I've just had to kind of learn to take some deep breaths on things, and learn how to just be honest in reports and say to our funding group, this is happening. We're managing it to the best that we can, and these are the strategies we're using to manage this. But we're in a situation where our colleagues really should not be visiting that research site at this time. And we can't tell you when that's going to get better. And it's going to depend upon all of these factors that we can't control and I'm sorry.

Do you think funding agencies recognize the challenge of doing research internationally like this? So they're understandable?

I do I, you know, so we work with both USA ID and USDA, FAS. And they are, in my opinion, really easy to work with from that perspective, they're, they're very willing to say, okay, you know, we work in this space, too, we understand the challenges of doing research in environments where you can't control all the parameters. And you know, we just need, we just need you to write us up a paragraph that tells us what, what is happening, and we can support you as we move forward.

It's great, because I come from experience in the past, or they have tried to really control things. And it's just resulted in the collapse of projects completely, or

I think that there's a lot of lessons that have been learned from a development research for development context, and no mean and just a natural development context. And if you look into development, research and work that's being done, there is evolution that is really beginning to happen. Where, you know, maybe in the past, we haven't really considered too much. From a truly agricultural productivity research standpoint, we haven't stepped back and said, Well, how does human nutrition have impact that? How does you know the role of gender influence some of the outcomes? How does the role of climate and resources and economics and I think that that's the if you look at the types of projects that are being funded across the board, from a development standpoint, those are all becoming factors that they want you to address that Hey, weren't we're not really interested in you just testing X y&z varieties of wheat? We also want to know whether or not that's appropriate for the people who are looking to use it, whether or not it's appropriate for the community or the country in general? And does it have any impact on health or on social dynamics, cultural dynamics? So I do think the development has kind of done a trial, air look back, adjust trial air look back adjust approach to how they've moved forward.

From a research standpoint, it's not all just about, in fact, a lot of the issues have nothing to do with the particular variety of wheat or whatever, right, sort of their, their social and economic and right, you know, all these other things. Yeah. So, one of the major things that you mentioned a bunch of things, but sort of in the difficulty of doing some research, but what do you most want to learn in some of these areas that you're working in?

Oh, that's such a good question. Well, so you know, my interest always comes back to more of a public health perspective. And I do think, and there is a lot of movement currently happening from that side. Right. So what does this all mean for human nutrition? What does it mean for enteric? Disease? What does it mean for child development? So that's very much happening, something I want to learn and would love to see become, you know, a major part of what we are looking to do in development is how do we create better food safety systems that are contextually appropriate? Right? So not just saying, well, here's how we do food safety in the European Union. Here's how we do food safety in the US plug this in, it'll work that's currently happening.

And it doesn't work. Yeah.

Surprise, surprise, right, you look into I mean, I can go right now to the Ministry of Ag, or the Ministry of Health for any given country in Africa and find a pretty well thought out food safety program. And that's not to say that they don't have the full intention of actually making that happen. They just, at this point in time, don't have the capacity, from several levels from a agricultural production perspective, from a ministry and governance perspective. And from a private industry perspective, you just don't have the same system. And so for me, I would really love to learn, how do you do that? What are some of the things that do translate quite well? And then how do we kind of take the things that translate, move them into other countries other regions and and start to see that grow? And I think that that is going to be a lot of what I will hopefully spend most of my life doing.

We'll see. So how do you measure progress and things like this, right? I mean, I mean, you're talking about very big thing, big social problems and that sort of thing. What are some ways in which you guys assess that you are moving forward?

Number one lesson of my career And, and it was a hard learned lesson, you cannot focus on some of these big things that you think you want to focus on. Right. So I think when I was being trained, and coming up through my PhD, right, I measured progress very differently. And so you kind of want to see all of a sudden, a new food safety program happening in a given country and you you want to see people engaging in that, and you don't want there to be corruption, and you don't want there to be, you know, all of these things that play into why certain food safety programs are not successful. And that's just not going to necessarily happen, probably even necessarily my timeline. And we think of Norman Borlaug a little bit, right, because I don't think that he, I think he knew that he had an influence, but I don't think that he recognized in his lifetime, the impact that his research really would ultimately have. And, and so I think focusing on some of those big things is just maddening. And so, from my perspective, progress that I tend to try to measure is things like, again, I know that I'm kind of moving back into social perspectives, but you know, does the university that I'm working with in a given country have higher laboratory capacity, then when I started, are my colleagues in, you know, whatever country I'm working with, gaining more access to publications, gaining more access to attending international meetings, where they'll benefit from the conversations that are happening, you know, it has to be those things, because those are, those are the most tangible things that are in front of you at that time. And, you know, we may be doing some really great stuff that 10 years from now will come into fruition, the challenges is that there's this whole value chain that needs to occur, right, so we might produce the data, you know, now, I mean, one of the big things that we're seeking to do is there's very little data on just, you know, what is within from a bacterial pathogen standpoint, within a vegetable value chain within a meat value chain for a given country? And then, you know, how do we create good surveillance programs, you know, that's we're very much in the grassroots of a lot of that. And so that information may be taken up 10 years from now, the right governance is applied, and then things start to move. But that's 10 years from now. And so I think, for me, progress has to be measured in these small things, particularly students, you know, I mean, students and getting maybe get a little bit, you know, emotional because the students that we're engaging in, in some of these countries are just so wonderful, they are so excited to be given the opportunity to engage in the research and to meet someone that's outside of their culture, and to try to understand something that's, you know, that is new and fresh, and they're just motivated beyond belief to show up, right, they'll show up on a Saturday, they'll show up on a Sunday, they don't care, they want to be there for it. And so for me, it's like, great, we're training, you know, so we have a project in Cambodia, where we're working on laboratory capacity with the Royal University of Agriculture. And we have about 25 undergraduate students that have showed up to absolutely every sample collection that we do every lab day that we've done, and I know that we're going to leave that project, and there's going to be this whole group of undergraduate students who, you know, without the project may have had access to all of that, but may not. And I know that as I leave that, that, that they did, and that I learned a lot from them in that process. And my graduate students learned a lot from them. And, we hopefully bestowed a lot of information and, and talents or sorry, skills is the right word that they can use.

Credit and gratitude can be a pretty powerful thing, right? I mean, that's something we kind of take for granted, maybe in the US where access to education resources is, you know, much more ubiquitous and easy, right?

There is definitely a level of gratitude that you can witness in a very big way, in a lot of the work that we do, and I do think, you know, I think our poor students sometimes get a bad rap, but and they have, you know, I think that there's a lot of gratitude to be had in the US too. And you know, and part of that is we, you know, I just got back from Ethiopia and I taken a undergraduate students with me that had shown Lots of interest from the first time she showed up on campus. And, you know, she'd written me this, this thank you letter. And so I, you know, I think that that's, that's kind of the to hinge part of the gratitude, right. So I think there's a lot of students here at Kansas State, that would be very grateful for the opportunity to go somewhere like Ethiopia or Bangladesh and, and not just go to around and see, but go and sit in on the meetings and, and conduct the research and be a part of that. And then the students in those institutions within the countries we're working in, are very grateful for the opportunity to work with those young people, because they see you right there. I mean, it's really easy to look across at someone that's the same age as you and who is similar to you, and have this really rich interaction versus, you know, me and a young student, there's, you know, we kind of get into a little bit of this, you're, you know, you're a doctor, and I'm just an undergraduate student, and so there's not maybe necessarily that same level of camaraderie in it. And so I really do believe in sort of taking students with me and giving students there that opportunity to to interact with a student from Kansas State, because it's really powerful thing.

So you said, you mentioned that you do have graduate students? Do you have a sort of a structured approach that you take to including them? And that sort of thing? Or? Or do you just kind of is it just kind of project dependent?

I think that they would probably suggest that I don't have very much structure to anything that I do. I am, I'm one of those professors who's super lucky, because I have two students that are just wonderful. And so might as well just give a shout out to them right here right now. They're, they're both wonderful. I would say that what I, the approach I took was that I needed students to be engaged in these projects that I have, in a way that I felt they could sort of take forward some of the research, right, so that I wasn't focusing much on, you know, on the ground, you know, sample collection methods, those types of things, even though I mean, I try to be as heavily engaged as as I possibly can. I also really wanted to provide an opportunity for the two of them to, to begin to start connecting the dots in a lot bigger way. So I'm a really big believer in critical thinking, my trainers, my trainers, my advisors, they're kind of like, my advisors, we're big on that as well, right? It's not just about, here's the research, here's how I did it, these were the findings, but then how does that fit into the greater concepts that exist. And so I really wanted them to have an opportunity to not only be trained, technically Well, in food, microbiology, but to also have a chance to go and be in a country for periods of time. And so you know, they've gone and they've spent a month before they've spent, you know, a couple weeks here and there, they've made several trips, they've made relationships. And so I think that they're starting to really see how what they're doing in the lab really translates back to some of the bigger questions that we have from a development context. And and so I don't know, I think maybe I went off a little bit from what your question was asking. But so I kind of had a two fold, if you will. So they are they do train in a lab, they know how to do you know all the food, like you gotta have the basics, right? But they've been asked to do it in this very uncontrolled environment. And the two of them have just exceeded my expectations. They've gone in to lab that didn't have anything in it. And they've made it this functional lab that has pipettes and vortexes and all the cool lab stuff. And that's all based upon their hard work and effort. And I couldn't be prouder of the two of them. They're just fantastic. Very cool.

Nice job graduate students. Keep up the good work.

And if you know any great graduate students that are highly motivated, we'd love to take them on. So.

Excellent. Sounds good. Well, we want to be respectful of your time. But is there anything else that you think that people should know about the kind of work that you're doing or that they may not understand? They would like to look to a topic you'd like to approach.

Well, I was talking about bi directional learning. And I think that is an important piece to what we do. And and sometimes I do think it gets a little bit forgotten. But there's a lot that we can learn from the research that we're doing. And sometimes I get into conversations where people tend to, you know, not necessarily wrongfully think but think that, you know, Kansas State is taking these researchers to Cambodia to Ethiopia and providing, right we're bringing information we're bringing them in. And we absolutely are. But there's a lot of really highly trained people, technically savvy people that we're working with all the time. And we learn a lot from those endeavors. And I do think that a lot of the research that we are seeking to do doesn't just answer questions for Cambodia. It answers questions for Cambodia, but it also I think, gives insights into how does that translate into something that's powerful for the United States or something that's powerful for for the European Union's so I think particularly from a food safety perspective, right, the more we understand about, you know, foodborne pathogens throughout the world, the more we understand how those pathogens move and end up transmitted. And so, you know, there's a trade issue, there's a public health issue there. And that doesn't just that, you know, that's not border controlled concept, that concept impacts all of us. And so, and I think there's a lot of examples of that throughout the Feed the Future programs is how do we do research that definitely supports development helps you move people along, but is super important for just global food production, and global health? And, and I think that that's been a mission of mine, all along the way is, you know, how do I do things that helped me learn and grow? And, and hopefully, I'm engaging with colleagues that see, you know, want to do that with me. And I think we've been very lucky to, you know, we've got such great collaborators around the world, really intellectual and interesting people who helped me see the world in a whole different light. And I feel like I've grown, you know, 10 years in the last three, because I've had these opportunities to sit across from these super wise people who understand things differently.

Yeah. So how much of that is the different context the different different problems that they've been dealing with? Or sort of, you know, the different infrastructural contexts, right, so for the food safety bait, like, we've got all this, as you said, infrastructure, so they're, they've been investigating other ways of handling some of the same issues? Is it? Is it? Is it a lot of that?

Yeah, you know, I think that and honestly, there's a lot of nations around the world that have issues that are threats to the United States, and when we are lucky, not lucky, because we've got great people working on the safety of our food supply, and our animal supply and our green supply. And so, you know, that's not just happening, it's not just a coincidence, but there's definitely so you know, I always use the example of Foot and Mouth Disease, you know, we are we've, we've had really great strategies to keeping that out of us. But it's always there, it's always a risk. And there's a lot of nations around the world that that they deal with it all the time, right foot and mouth disease is, is a disease that exists within their country, and they're having to manage it. And so there's a lot, there's a lot we can learn. And I always use the example of you know, the sorghum and millet innovation lab actually got to be involved in engaged in something very similar to that, you know, based on the great work that they're doing, there was a pest an insect that came into the US maybe, see, I'm gonna get the story wrong. But, you know, that came into the US it had never been here before, it was a very serious threat to sorghum production. And, you know, one of the researchers here at K State was just happened to be engaged with with researchers that knew all about it. And they were able to get ahead of it and and do the, you know, the appropriate steps to try and manage that for you know, sorghum producers in the United States. And that was because of, of a collaboration that was because of mutual trust. And and this hard work that the sorghum and millet Innovation Lab and Kansas State researcher had put in, and so we're learning things all the time. That's very cool. Yeah, help us.

So the message is partly, there are a lot of issues we all have. We all share we have to work together to address right and there are a collective group problems, right? But also, then the knowledge is, you know, it's gonna take all of us, right. So there's absolutely not just us saving the world, obviously, right?

You know, I mean, I do, I just think that there's such a value to, particularly from a food perspective to really understanding how food moves and the challenges to food production around the world, because we're not going to be able to, to not participate in the the challenges that are in front of us. And I do think that those challenges have been fairly well characterized at this point in time. And so and I do, I think Kansas State researchers agree, I think we were excited to be engaged in research that's helping to overcome some of those challenges or fill gaps. And the more people that we can engage with in different spaces and different nations around the world, it just, it helps the world it helps Kansas, you know, it helps us all individually. And so I'm a big believer in, in the research that we are doing, and activities that are happening. Excellent.

So I have to ask, is there been any, like amazing food you've been exposed to around the world that you wouldn't have otherwise been?

I'm a foodie. So you have to understand that about me. So I love Southeast Asian food. And there's so there's this great quote by Anthony Bourdain about how, you know, he was meant to slurp noodles out of a bowl, sitting in a colorful plastic chair in Southeast Asia, and I couldn't agree more. I just I think Southeast Asian food is really fantastic and dynamic. And nine times out of 10, there's a head involved, but you know, I've grown to kind of like get past some of that stuff. And and really recognize, like, particularly Asia, just the spices, and the types of ingredients that are available to them are really just dynamic and beautiful. And I love food. Anyways, in would describe food as beautiful. But their food is particularly beautiful in the context of of all foods.

Yeah, it's important. Remember that perspective, right? I hit on a plate or something is normal to some cultures for their food system?

Well, I think that, so this, this could be a whole podcast. But I do think it's also interesting to begin to start to look at, you know, how do people eat around the world, and, it's definitely different. And there's no better or wrong way. But there's definitely differences in how people eat. It was funny, we had some Cambodians who came to visit, and they're always treating me to just beautiful food. And I tried, I really did. Try and find some foods that I thought would be fun. And they were super gracious and tried absolutely everything. But by the end of the trip, they were interested in maybe getting some Thai food or something that, you know, in some way, looked like home. And I think that that's kind of one the more beautiful things about food is that we kind of want to put it in the sciences production perspective, all the time. And there's just such a beautiful emotional connection, I think with food that everybody has, whether they want to admit it or not, you know, there's, there's something about home, in, in the foods that we eat, and the foods that we like, in foods can take us to such a place and memory. And I think that that's a special thing about food, which is why I believe in producing it and, and saving, you know, keeping it safe and and making sure that people all people have access to it, because I think that's a beautiful part of human existence is that you get to share in food and food consumption.

It occurs to me, I wonder how much sometimes food safety seems to me to work against the beauty of food. Right, you know, right, and art of cooking. And so, how much of the way, the way you're just talking about food there and you know, being so focused on food safety is kind of curious, right? In a sense, because they're two very different ways of approaching food. Right. And then it and internationally. I imagine some of the recommendations, some of the food safety recommendations might not play out nearly as well as they would sort of maybe here where we're more used to hearing certain kinds of recommendations, right, you know, don't eat food, you know, unless it's been cooked to a certain amount or you know, whatever. Right. So how does that play out? You think in New York.

So I mean, I have several food safety friends who love oysters, and they're just always gonna love oyster There's raw oysters. I love them. Yeah. And I personally, I mean, I think it feels like swallowing a looky loo. So I don't have nearly that personal connection with rosters, but they love raw oysters. And I think that people can tend to think that food safety is more about the do's and the don'ts. But for me, you know, I think food safety is a really dynamic discipline. And there's always a risk to be calculated. Right. And so I think that that is entirely risk free, nothing's risk free. And I think that individual people can kind of calculate that risk for themselves. And so for me, I always tell, you know, people that hey, I'm a pretty good risk assessor. And so there's certain foods that I know, probably, I have a high likelihood of vomiting, and I don't like to vomit. Now, my friend, my friend, Dave, he seems to not worry that much about vomiting, he kind of can push through it, and he would rather eat the street food is valuable to him. Now, does that change the science around it? No. I mean, he's definitely a public health stat. I mean, we're gonna keep we're gonna put him in a number of foodborne diseases. But at this point in his life, you know, he is young, he's healthy. He doesn't have you know, any, you know, immuno compromised disease, you know, or he's not immuno compromised. And so he vomits. And that's about it. Now, as he gets older, he might want to think about that differently. Right. And so I think that people tend to kind of think about food safety as, as that we're like, the people who are there to say, No, you don't get to do anything fun. Versus can we take what we know, to apply strategic interventions to a value chain to try to make it as safe as possible? We can't make there's no such thing as 0% in food safety, but we can make it as safe as we possibly can. And then what's the role and responsibility of consumers in their decision making? And so you know, I think we've got a lot of great science that can help us get to that food value chain, and safe food value chains perspective, and then education extension programs that can help consumers think through what is their risks associated. And then I think there is a part of it, where you sometimes you end up vomiting, particularly if you're gonna eat your street food.

But you know, maybe sometimes it's worth it.

Well weigh that risk a little bit. And I by no means him, you know, cheering anyone on in that area, as I think as a food safety scientist, I wish to just, you know, maybe don't do this, I really don't do this at home. I'm not a big believer in like swallowing raw eggs, and things like that. But then again, like I said, I've got lots of, you know, epidemiologists, food, microbiologists, food safety scientists around me that eat things like gras, oysters and tar tar. And they just say, Hey, I've assessed the risk, and I don't I'm not that worried about it.

And just one one last question that I have for this sort of off topic. But one thing I've heard a lot is that there are foreign corporate entities that are investing a lot in agriculture in developing countries, is that something you've seen at all in the countries you've worked in? Or no?

So which, which companies?

Are you not even necessarily like, chemical companies or anything like that, but like wealthy individuals buying up large tracts of land, you know, whether they be from China, or I know, Brazil is investing a lot in South and Southern Africa, is a way of providing possibly another source of food for their own home country, as anything that you've witnessed or not really.

So yeah, I mean, to some degree, in most countries, even our own, you can see things like that happening, where there's investor foreign investment occurring. And I mean, I think that there's someone wiser to comment on some of those issues than me, what I think is very valuable from a global food systems perspective, is that we try to manage equity as best as we possibly can. And equity is always a huge question in lots of different areas, right. And equity is different than equality a little bit, you know, and so we're looking at how do we kind of help support certain groups so that they have the advantages that are maybe afforded to other groups? And so for me, I think that there always has to be a question of equity involved in the things that we're doing. And I do think that there's a lot of private industry investment that's seeking to do Things like that. So I think that lambda lakes would be a really good example of that. They have obviously, their, you know, products that they produce that they have interest in. But there's also this really cool research arm that they have, that has a development perspective to it. And they're doing some really great things, particularly in East Africa, looking at milk and kind of butter production and some of those things. And, you know, one of the questions that they commonly ask in the research that they're doing is, you know, how do we help creates opportunity for for the people that we're working with and around? And so I guess that that's where I will, I will come down on that, as I think that no matter who the development group is, whether it's research, whether it's private industry, whether it's government, NGOs, which would be non government organizations, you know, that we kind of always have to go back to that question of equity. And are we engaging in a way that helps everyone get involved.

or the capacity building we were talking about before?

Absolutely, and private industry. And I know, I'm just talking, talking, talking, but private industry has a huge role to play and it's very unengaged, not necessarily, from because they don't want to be engaged, but I think that there's been a lot of challenge in identifying how private industry can engage in some of the development that's happening. And, you know, where's the benefit for both sides in that? And so, you know, there's a lot of discussion around, you know, does it make sense for private industry that already exists in places like Brazil or the United States European Union to go and engage there? Or does it make sense to kind of try to do some grass roots entrepreneurship, particularly with youth, there's a lot of discussion around youth entrepreneurship in different contexts, to create that private industry. And depending upon who you are, I think You think differently about both those two sides. But from my perspective, it's a underdeveloped part of development. It's super necessary. And if there's anyone from private industry listening, I think that, you know, take a look, lots of opportunities, lots of opportunities there. And there are lots of young people in some of the different countries that we work in, who are really energetic, motivated, bright people, and they don't have the opportunities that are as vailable in the United States. And so I think you would find a workforce that is super excited to get an opportunity.

Great. Well, we certainly appreciate you taking the time to talk to us, is there any way people can get in contact with you, they would like to share where they can find more information? Sure, yeah. I mean, your email address anything like that.

But what I will say is, that Kansas state's, you know, is highly engaged in this conversation, I think that from all the way up, from an administrative side down to a researcher side, down to a student side, we have people who are really excited to do these types of activities. And that's if you want to look into what the innovation labs are doing, as well as just what individuals at Kansas State are doing. There's a lot of cool stuff happening, a lot of great researchers that are doing really important, robust science in this area. And I couldn't be prouder to be involved in Kansas state's efforts here because I think that it's a a exciting new frontier that Kansas State has decided to engage in. So please look into what Kansas State is doing from a global food systems development perspective. Great, thanks. Thanks a lot. Thank you. It's was really fun.

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.

Our guest today is Dr. Segenet Kelemu. A native of Ethiopia and alumna of K-State, Dr. Kelemu is, by training, a molecular plant pathologist. Following a postdoc at Cornell University, she worked fifteen years as a senior scientist with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) where she eventually became the leader of Crop and Agroecosystem Health Management. In 2007 she decided to move back to Africa to work on agricultural development. Currently, she is the Director General of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, Kenya. Our conversation digs into some of the major issues African farmers are facing and the fascinating insect-centered solutions that Segenet and her team have developed.

For more on Dr. Kelemu and ICIPE check out their website at: http://www.icipe.org/about/staff/segenet-kelemu

Transcript:

Insect Innovations: Solutions for Africa and the World with Dr. Segenet Kelemu – Insect Physiology & Ecology

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of global food systems. It's produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Jay Weeks PhD candidate in the Department of Agronomy. My co host is Scott Tanona, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, who specializes in the philosophy of science. Everybody, welcome back. Before I introduce today's guest, you will hear an additional voice in this conversation and many more moving forward. Hopefully, I'm happy to announce a new member of our team. Since I recently finished my degree, I will be leaving the podcast at some point in the future. And Dr. Jon Faubion will be one of the hosts that takes over. John is the Charles Singleton professor of baking science in the department of grain science here at K State. He has extensive experience in the food industry and academia. So it's really nice because he brings a different perspective to the discussions from Scott and myself. So welcome to the podcast Jon. Today's episode features a truly fascinating discussion with Dr. Segenet Kelemu, a native of Ethiopia and alumna of K State. She is trained as a molecular plant pathologist, following a postdoc at Cornell University. She spent approximately 15 years as a senior scientist with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia, where she eventually became the leader of crop in a row ecosystem health management. In 2007, she decided to move back to Africa to work on an agricultural development in her home continent. Currently, she is the Director General of the International Center of insect physiology and ecology in Nairobi, Kenya. Second, he has received many, many accolades, I encourage you to check out her full CV online, just to highlight a few. In 2013, she was elected a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. She was one of the five recipients of the 2014 L'Oreal UNESCO Women in Science Award. In May of that same year, Forbes Africa listed her as one of the top 100 Most Influential African women. And last year in 2018, she was selected by Bill Gates as one of the five heroes in the field, recognizing her work fighting poverty, hunger, and disease to provide opportunities for the next generation. Over the course of our conversation, we cover some of the major issues farmers in Africa are facing, and some of the really interesting solutions that she and her team are developing. It was a real privilege to speak with Segenet. And so I hope you all enjoy. Dr. Segenet Kelemu, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. So I will have introduced you a little bit ahead of time for other listeners, but we'd like to get your perspective and your background. So why don't you introduce yourself a little bit and talk about where you come from?

Okay, my name is Calum national, Ethiopia. But I currently live and work in Nairobi, Kenya.

In you work at the you're the Director General of the International Center of insect physiology and ecology, correct? Yes. So what do you do there?

So what I do is I'm not an insect scientist, but I have a huge number of insect sciences in Tamala G, so I direct the organization, overall, I'm responsible for the financial management, the scientific program, the translation of science to impact overall, I'm responsible of the institution, as the CEO of the of the organization. And so we work in, we have research and activity in 41 countries, African countries. And we have over 300 active partners globally, including 43 universities. So it's a very vibrant science research for development organization that focuses on agriculture and, and health and the environment. So it's a it's just extremely relevant and impactful organization with high quality science that contributes to the global scientific community.

Great, and so what are the kind of the big problems that your organization is trying to tackle?

Yeah, so we're a relatively small organization, but we tackle major issues facing Sub Saharan Africa, in for food production in human hands like malaria. Dengie yellow fever In crop pests, and the diseases side, insects, they transmit and, and also on also we work on beneficial insects like bees that are really critical. Carlos was pollinators not just only income generated by producing honey, we were called. So Africa now has also moved into silk, for example, silk production. Africa, many countries have aspiration to be producers of silk, and exporters into Asia, particularly China. So, we are also the only organizations that have effective program or research program and silkworms as well. So, we tackle relevant and really major constraints production system has constraints that impact multiple countries, we cannot do one constraint that's very important in one country, but it has to have a major impact on the continent. And also multiple countries at effect, such as certifies in, in cattle that transmit parasites and they're really, really, really major problem. And also on crops, we work on horticultural crops because horticultural crops like fruits and vegetables are really important as export income generators, but also for nutrition, they're extremely important. They can't live just on staple crops on maize and sorghum is so not just food security, but nutrition matters also to improve the diets of the population. So so and so we work on all these things. So horticultural crops, particularly, they are vulnerable to many pests and diseases. So farmers supply a lot of pesticides, which leave residues into the pesticide register in the final product, which are fixed trade, which affect also helps also, the so we were our major focus here is to produce and, and help generate bio pesticides, that are natural products and that are effective also against pests, control. So we have been really effective in those areas as well.

So what are some examples of the bio pesticides that you've worked on developing?

Yeah, so we have four or five bio pesticides that are currently commercialized and sold across Africa by our private sector partners. Okay, we are a research organization, we produce a technology product, but we are not equipped to commercialize them. So we work with private sector partners, they sign an agreement with us. And they commercialize it in Africa and outside of Africa. And they give us a reality out of a certain percentage of the sale, which goes into the research back into the digital that is effective. So our products are so effective. Now, the the the company originally that signed an agreement with us, which was a Kenyan based company, it's so successful, and almost all the products are they sell come from us that a Belgian company purchased the, the this company, essentially so we told them, okay, now you are going to sell our products in, in Europe, but we are actually we developed it for Africa. But you're going to pay us a lot more, because you're going to make more money. So we renegotiated the agreement, so they're going to pay us more.

Yeah, say more scientists. Have you hired after that?

I think that's a good point. I think our majors major problem is actually recruitment. Yeah, yes. So there is a really global shortage of good scientists. Well, that's certainly true. Yeah. So it is really difficult although we give internationally very competitive package tax free salary and a lot of good package we pay a really very good proportion of their base salary into their pension plan contributions. is still I think it is a really difficult one because there is a shortage in the sense of more options, where to go to. I think also there is this bias concept that maybe can't do really high quality science in Africa. So we have first class, like anywhere else, facility, everything else. And yeah, they have a lot of opportunities, you have students who also to support and supervise and so on. So all this combination, but once they come, we persuade them to come and they don't want to leave. So but getting them there is difficult. So I think the European science or science are a little bit more open than others. So the largest number of scientists we have outside of Africa, Europeans, particularly Germans and, and French, the French also that's through an agreement we have with the French, the French in his research institution. So yeah, so we have a lot of products. But I think what distinguishes us from universities is the university you know, you can supervise students, you can publish good paper, and you're not accountable to make sure that it that your work is also goes to, to make impact or to change lives. For farmers, our whole sector or whatever, for society. But we are required to do that. We're not a university, but we are required to have really high quality publications in science in nature and all these things, but in medium to long term that has to be also translated to really solving constraints problems in society, in agriculture, and so that I find it really very gratifying. But also the other also thing I like is also the science or not just political science, this. So it's not just entomologists, we have entomologists virologists, we have economist this we have gender specialists, this we have anthropologists, we have all kinds of expertise. So why do we have all these things because that when you develop a technology, that uptake of the technology, it's not always easy, it's not straightforward. So, there are gender impacts. So and gender is not neutral always to all the technologies there are issues societal issues and that influence uptake of the technology. So, we incorporate all this expertise from the beginning. So that we don't go all the way in generating a product and or a technology and then we can scale it out because there is no there is no acceptance, could you just..

Yeah, could you describe something like an example like that where you know, there's a gender or social potential issue with social uptake that you know, how that designs the science from the beginning right rather than thinking about it.

Just to tell you notice specific from our organization, but in the previous organization, I have have been, so, they develop breeders developed beans, bean variety, high yielding variety, and then they tried to release it for uptake, but there wasn't a demand in the market, because demand the preference in the market is like a certain seed color, okay. Sure. So, also for women also to take it also particularly in Africa, the beans have to cook faster. Yeah. So if it is takes forever to cook then next time though, they will not not be exactly they will not pay the price to do so this if it was incorporated early that earlier the market prefer and farmers if there is no market acceptance ever going to produce the next time because it is business also we agriculture is not just feeding them. It's a business.

That's very much the same sort of reason that the introduction of sorghum in the United States failed for a whole variety of those very same reasons. Absolutely.

Yeah. And so one of the things also we are doing is this is a new program, which is just five years old is that we with saw that in across Africa and in Asia and Latin America also that traditionally people consume insects is a delicacy. His high protein nutrition is a lot of things. So what we notice also that this is not accepted maybe in Thailand and in China apart, but Thailand has mainstream that you can buy a package of any insect cricket another you want in supermarket, but in Africa, this was not mainstream. So, it is on the delicacies, insects are collected from the forest by women and children and seasonally and so, what happens is that the overharvest also from the forests and it becomes it causes imbalance also, because some of these insects also edible once they play a role in the ecosystem also. So, it contributes to also the depletion of the biodiversity of insects. So, recently my organization has experience in mastering over 100 species of insects for research purpose. So I said, why don't we start the program insects for food and feed. So chicken organic chicken, they go around in our garden to pick what the pick is. So this is not the thing. So if we translate this applies our experience to edible insects in mass reading them on substrates that are easily available, that are cheap. So we can mainstream this so people can produce it like chicken like fish in their backyard, and the enhanced nutrient, also the nutrition and also security, because food system is not just filling your stomach with starch, you have to forget as a nutrient so. So we started that, and that is now our fastest growing program. People got really fascinated donors really would like something in us automated testing, and approving our proposals, and so on. And I think the beauty of this is also that we manage the influence policy as well. So based on our work on chicken feed production, with insects, so Kenya and Uganda now developed a policy authorizing the use of insects in the for livestock feed, oh, for chicken feed. So following that action soon after that, also, FDA also approved I'm not saying that the affiliates decision was influenced by Kenya and Uganda, but I think this is now a trend globally as so because and this protein economy that protein source of protein becomes a key issue. So Kishu for boosting, nutrition and so on. So, and I think the way we are producing food, the way we are accessing protein source and nutrients, in the long run with population grows, it's not sustainable. So we have to do things differently. So we see that insects replacing a lot of this particularly in feed in animal feed also.

That's interesting. So you're actually in some of these cases you're really serving as the proof of concept. Yeah.

Yeah, no, actually, now the chicken feed for based on black soldier fly actually is now is mainstreamed in particular in Kenya and Uganda because there is a policy now in the private sector, the feed sector is taking up this technology. But one one thing also this black soldier fly was that we invited all these feed producers private sector to my institution and we are discussing how we can't improve and to learn from them what is what are the issue in the marketing of this? So they said there's no issue if we if they could actually produce fast enough in a large scale that the market is there and it's millions of dollar market but one issue they said technical issue they told us is a the the insect this black soldier fly produces so much oil they had difficulty grinding it into into powder it guts take it as Oh, yeah, great idea. Soon after I finished that. That meeting, I put the chemistry team to look into the oil content of the edible insects. Fascinating, fascinating. So now we have a paper to publish that these edible insects have really high quality oil. So we compare them the oil content to the quantity and the quality is a component as well to fish cod. Fish oil to olive oil to sesame oil, by far these are superior. Okay, in What characteristics does Omega three all the sessions Pauline surgery? Yes, yeah fully saturated ones, antioxidants, vitamin D. So these can actually play in high quality diet but you can literally drink it actually, it's really amazing quality. So, there is nothing in the literature so okay now we are going to publish on the visa first to do but this is going to open a whole nother area business and job creation and helps implement they have also like a the the insects say the black locust desert locusts has also this very beneficial husband if shall steroids so it consumes on consumes the plant products, grass and weed seedling and water whatever. So we analyze it also the feed how much of these compounds exist, like weed seedlings, they have very minute amount of steroids. So this we put that the desert locusts on this strictly with seedling died. So they fit on that, and this minute amount of the sterols that are very beneficial and you know for cardiovascular health and para hustling, and they multiplied to 40 fold to sales. It's like a little factory. We don't know. Yeah, we don't know the mechanism how they did. So we published a paper on that. And once we did, we had all these journalists, CNN and Al Jazeera and Rosie Sosa Can you cook for us? And they were filming there and so on. So there is I think a whole lot of things we can do different diets, different outlooks say. And I think we can learn a lot from traditional so the natives and traditionally what people have been consuming. And we come in and put the science behind it also. So there is they don't know the science, but they have been consuming for a generation. Yeah, yeah. It's true to them. Yes, foods, but it just has so much that so many useful things.

Could you see the insect oil being co product or a byproduct if it was extracted? So you'd have like a defatted. Insect or is or is it the is the content enough that it's appropriate that it's unnecessary to de fat?

Like for no goodness, right? You can use it. Yeah. So but I think the beauty of it is also you can extract the word do high market and you can use it or in the cosmetic industry also all the moisturizer sub oil. And so if you see this oils, moisturizer, anti aging, whatever cream, he can't stop it but so, those are so they have to infuse antioxidants in vitamin D from other sources. But this one is completed as it is. So I think we can license it. We are thinking to approach L'Oreal to those guys and generate the income into our research for that. But I think the beauty of this also once you extract the oil, the byproduct there also the protein the fiber, you can repackage it for feed also. Yeah, so it's countries anything. And what we have done is also when we are developing the insect rearing methodology, we are looking also different substance subsidies that are cheap, that are also easily accessible. So we are producing them on restaurant waste kitchen waste issue in the restaurant industry.

Yeah, those things. And we are doing it also on brewery West also. Amazing. Yeah, and these Potato Potato industries are the companies that produce chips and everything they produce massive piece of waste. And that we found that actually is fantastic for a number of these insects. So you can clean up the environment, while you're also converting thing into high production. So this is a religious when we know what so we're not advocating this just for Africa things this is should be a global trend as for from many angles.

How does the world taste? I mean, this consumer.

I haven't tested it, but I'm going to test it. So, but there we are not, at the moment they are producing it enough for chemical analysis. So, but I was telling this story to the president of Ethiopia who is with a friend of mine. Oh, she says, Can you please give me like 10-20 meal, I want to try it on the moisturizer. She says, Let me try it on me first I don't want to take so. But I think it's just really exciting thing to do. So just to tell you where the threads are, there is a delicacy of a a Ganden delicacy. This green grasshopper type thing, people during the season, they go crazy, harvesting it and everything else so and slowly so 100 gram of that it costs about $3. So more than chicken more than anything. So I said, well, let's just do this thing. Actually, the Minister of Agriculture asked me personally, if we could do this mass reading thing on this thing. So and so we looked into the three literature many people have tried to in the past, to try to mass read it, it was impossible. Our own scientists tried it also impossible. So I said no, it can't be impossible. So so we have to try it. Because yeah, so this graduate student, marvelous graduate student did something that nobody has thought about. So the reason that people felt the mass rate was they assume because it is a grasshopper, they assume the insect on the live donor grasses and all this. So this guy goes out in Uganda, collectors from different ecosystem these insects then he starts dissecting looking into the guts to see us through DNA analysis to see what this insect has been consuming. So it's not just grassy desert it was eating grass, it was eating other insects. Ants and so on. So I say great. So he said from the different college college consumed and he looks at the proportion what this insect has been eating because it was looking for proteins from other insects so based on that he designed the diet now we can master it doesn't work major breakthrough Yeah, I'm like this guy.

Give him his degree. Yeah.

This is like so no, we are going to make it faster so that the uptake would be just like that because it makes a lot of money. It's nutrient so one of the oil analysis nutritional analysis we did also was on this particular it's very well it has also a lot of micronutrients as well. Zinc regeneration time for the Yeah, this is variable among the various insects so so for this particular insect so we're trying really hard to perfect the system so that we can we can really boost the colony size as well the colonies I see low Oh yeah, but the generation time for most insects is really not more than like four so five weeks.

Do you have to trick them into believing that it's winter or not winter or is this hot tropical?

Tropical tropical around January yeah all year round, but we what we try to do is to imitate the nature the natural habitat where they have been and diet also we raised them also is a also tries to meet it in their natural diet also. But we have to see also how so the one one thing also we notice is that when you're putting them in a confined space, there's a lot of cannibalism. Yes, they eat each other. So we are learning in the process a lot of things we're learning also so and how we can do this and make it more effective. So we look at also when we put them in a different diet. We look at also the nutrition profile whether that affects also the nutrition and nutrition content at the end. It says really an amazing, exciting thing. So yeah,

yeah, no, that's I mean, that's, that's amazing. It's really interesting. So assuming you're perfect this system, right? You'll then go to wheat then like, roll it out to smallholder farmers so that they can they can grow them or we try to work with a company to do this at a larger scale a little bit of both. What's the process? Excellent question.

So I think it will be both sides. But they the smallholder farmer, it will be maybe for consumption, their own consumption to feel to enhance their nutrition. But they can also sell. So this really good question that you're asking because that modality also matters. So we got a relatively good side funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to this five different models for this year. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the models who are testing is actually the companies, because then we talk to the various companies also on the ground, so what would you like to do so? So one of the things that they have preference is to set up outgrower system, where the contracted farming, where the contract selected farmers to produce high quality insects, and with a guaranteed market and supplies the companies?

So something like Tyson would do here in the United States for chicken? Exactly.

Are you producing hops or? Yeah, so the producers do also, I think we see that would be really a win win for one, it would give a guaranteed access and market to farmers to produce and generate this produce and supply the companies. And they have a guaranteed income. Yeah, hard the other one they can produce also and the consumers themselves. So we see that model may be the win one.

What are the major different kinds of impacts you're thinking about when you're thinking about these different models when you so like, which one works, but works for what like so impact? Impact on farmers, you looking to sort of feed as many people as possible, like okay, yeah, there's something about the different kind of variable?

Yeah, yeah, excellent, I think, excellent question. Again, I think I'm impressed as you guys. Know, you're easily. So this is? This is a really good question. So I think from our perspective, that one, we really want to boost the nutritional quality, the access to nutrition to people. So in most people, you know, the diet is not diverse. So starches, like heavy consumption of starch and just for energy, but I think that is not good enough, you know, you have to have a balance. So nutrition is really important for us that they have access to a balanced diet and nutrition where they can get micronutrients, they can get protein, they can get vitamins, and so on, and so on. And insects happen to provide all this in one package? The answer is, I think, so people don't just leave on food only. So we have also to make sure that they have income, the income so that they can send their kids to school, so that they have better quality of life. And education is like yeah, what can you give to your kid better than education, for a lifetime of gifts of livelihood and knowledge and so on. So that is really important income really important. The other I think, which really matters to me personally, is also reduction of labor to women children. So if we men in Africa really given a disproportionate amount of task, it's just from morning to night, it's endless.

So this, which affects the possibilities for education and then back this like if you are women to just spend a chunk of their time just on labor. Go and fetch water going Feature Feed to animals go and fetch insects from the forest right the green Yeah, Brenda green Andrews is saying you're really short chaining also sick kids. So it's study after study shows that if you really invest in women in the education and data you are investing in the next generation of people also because women spend their income on their kids, on their families. So this is really important. Also, if you reduce the labor, enhancing income to the family, you do a lot of different things and you will improve the society, you will improve the education and life in the hands of the next generation of the kids. So this is important for us as well, for me personally, because I grew up also in a village doing all this grinding work, and school was just an afterthought. Okay, when you finish, you can go to school. So, this is really important.

So we look at all these components, you lived here for a while. Yes. So you probably found that the farmers in this part of the world are pretty conservative. Yeah, thanks. Is that the case? In Kenya and Uganda as well? Do you have to? Is it difficult to convince them to make a change? Yeah. How do you account?

Absolutely, I think here, they can afford to experiment because they have government support, they have larger land, they have a lot of things. In Africa, it's a lot more conservative, because you know, experimenting with any technology or product is a luxury. So they can take that type of risk and the risk is greater right, the risk is too high for them to experiment with something new. So, I mean, it is one thing I me, me going in a four wheel drive to the firemen telling them what to do and then I go away. So, that conservativism comes from being risk covers, and they have every reason to be discovered. Yeah. So so we try are many different ways. So what they do, they are very smart, actually pharmacy, we learn a lot from them. So what they do is that if they we have to put like large demonstration sites to show them and we do it together with them to show them actually, you can do this thing and at harvest time, you can go and you can come and visit us how the plants grow and the maize is doing well and everything and later you can harvest and see how much actually you can have this compared to yours. And so even after he shows them all that you have to they're still they're doing it on their farm is like really shaky. So, what they do is that they divide their plots show them several demonstration maybe sometimes two three seasons, say divide the plots and then do the experts science in this area. So I asked that we have this one fabulous technology I think you were there my seminar, the push pull technology so I said to I go regularly to farmers in different countries to see also and to learn and what can we do other things for them and to assess also the technology how it was. So I said let me go take me to a farmer who is a first time adopter of this technology to see so they took me to this farm and the guy had the small plots of this bush full day as I say it just regular and this one they are Galera just so pathetic. This one is really booming.

So for the listeners who aren't familiar with this push pull it's a really fascinating system. Would you mind describing it?

Yeah. So the push pull technologies, it is a very knowledge intensive technology but the stablishing it is fairly straightforward. It's so, the crop you have this maze, it uses two companion plants, one a legume called desmodium and it is intercropped with maize. The other one a grass forage grass is a feed for animals it is planted in the border rock surrounding the field. So how this is done is a lot of science, a lot of chemistry is behind it. So I'm not going to try to explain that. So, the plant that is more than which is planted in intercrop tourism is it naturally emits volatile compounds into the air which insects hate. So it repels it so it is a push that's good. The grass produces other set of compounds that they smell in this attractive to the insects so they ran away from the maze. Because of the because of this intercropped plant and then the grass they go to the grass, they lay their eggs, but the eggs cannot develop. So because it The grass actually is not a real horse. They're just fooled. So that cycle just completely fascinating thing. So this was developed 20 years ago by us a by sippy long before I joined to control one major pest called the stem borer of maize. But over the years that we discovered that it actually does a lot more than symbol, it controls a very nasty parasitic weed called Striga, which has no control. Other control, it controls has a pistol seat, it is a high quality feed for animals, it improves the soil, it fixes nitrogen onto the soil, it is just a technology which is it reduces aflatoxins. It sounds too good to be true. But when you go to the field, even when you are in the air, if you are going to fly up there, you can easily tell which one is pushed. Which one is not. Yeah, it's just amazing technology. So but even when you see that the farmer satellites I have to see. So this one time, the first time I adapted farmers I went to visit so that so he divided his plot to experiment with it. And they say then is like this is conventional field is just pathetic maize and sorghum this one is just a push pull is just three times better four times with so I said to him, why didn't you do there is and he said, Yeah, you see, Madam I'm doing all this now. I saw how it works. Now I'm, expanding it to the rest of my field. And he said in one season, now he has a Holy Year round enough feed for porridge for his family, and even sell. So just in one thing. So this is such a rewarding. So we won multiple awards on this technology over the last several years,

It's a really elegant solution.

So eight countries have adopted it all across Africa, but our plan is to expand it in many different things. So it's a win win, it's a so during the drought season also it just provides a lot of because these are companion plants are perennial, perennial crop plants. So feed to feed is a huge issue to cattle. So this is solving that also. So and in areas where there is no problem of this particular pest against which for which this was developed, people still adopt it because of the feed value. Yes, this is amazing. So this is a long answer to the question. So that risk averse, the and and also this conservatism is even even more than because they don't get farmers don't they're on their own in Africa, they don't get subsidy for profit. They don't have corruption or they don't have access to finance from the banks. So because agriculture is seen as high risk. So of course, they have to be very conservative, right? You just have to be able to prove that and to really support them all the ways. Right. So yeah.

It's great stuff.

We know that you're short on time here, we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. I'm sure we could go on for hours and keep on talking. But yeah, is there anything in the last few minutes here that you'd like to say that we haven't covered that you'd like our listeners to know?

Oh, I think we covered a lot of what I want to say. I think I just wanted to say if there you have listeners, young people out there who don't know what they want to do with their lives, I think agriculture is a really novel, novel field. Because food comes first. If you don't have food, you don't need anything else. Right? That's a priority. So this is a novel field I need to go to. And it's gratifying. And, I encourage young, bright people to go into college of agriculture. Seriously.

Yeah.

I think a short talk would you what you would convince a lot of people. Oh, okay.

Thank you. So, that's been great.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you so much.

I really enjoyed also, I think you are you guys have right on the mark. Questions are amazing. Yeah.

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. Melanie Derby currently holds the Hal and Mary Siegele Professorship in Engineering where her research focuses mainly on thermal-fluids problems. She is part of the newly founded KSU R3 NRT team that is looking to leverage interdisciplinary collaboration to tackle some of the greatest challenges at the Food, Energy, and Water Nexus. In today's interview we cover engineering approaches to improve water use efficiency in both the agriculture and energy sectors as well as Melanie's experiences in science education.

For more about Dr. Derby and KSU R3 NRT please check the team's website: http://nrt.research.ksu.edu/

Transcript:

Working on Water with Dr. Melanie Derby - Engineering

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of global food systems. It's produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Jay Weeks PhD candidate in the Department of Agronomy. My co host is Scott Tanona, an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, who specializes in the philosophy of science. Welcome back, everybody. Before I introduce today's guest, I have a quick ask. If you're enjoying this podcast, please leave us some ratings or comments on whatever platform you happen to be listening on. we'd love your feedback on how to make the interviews more interesting or useful to you. Scott and I are really having fun with these conversations. But ultimately, we want to make sure that we're serving you the listener. So please, we'd appreciate it if you took a couple minutes to do that. For today's interview, Scott and I had a great conversation with Dr. Melanie Derby. Melanie currently holds the Hale and Mary Segal professorship in engineering, where her research focuses mainly on thermal fluids problems. She is part of the newly founded KSU, our three NRT team that's looking to leverage interdisciplinary collaboration to tackle some of the greatest challenges at the food, energy and water Nexus. Most of our discussion covers how an engineer thinks about improving water use efficiency in both the agriculture and energy sectors. Now, but we also talk a little about Molly's experiences in science education as well. Hope you enjoy. Today we're fortunate to have Melanie Derby from the College of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical and nuclear engineering here to talk to us. Welcome, Melanie.

Thanks, Jay.

Melanie, so we'll have introduced you briefly just before starting the podcast here. But in your own words, what's what's a little bit about your background.

I'm a mechanical engineer by training, I have a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from anthropology technic Institute, as well as a Master's and PhD. And my area of expertise is multiphase flows. So liquid liquid flows, liquid vapor flows, vapor liquid flows, so, and primarily in condensation as well. So this is like when you're taking a hot shower. And you notice the mirror is foggy that's because it condenses happens to me every morning. Yeah. And so that's a process that we study a lot.

So how did you get to wanting to study multiphase flows and things like that it's something from when you were a little girls and what you always wanted to do?

Well, I grew up in a family of engineers, which of course meant I didn't want to be an engineer for a while. But Junior physics kind of set the course, you know, I started doing extra problems, homework problems for fun, you were doing extra physics problems. And my father said, you know, that's not normal.

Depends on how you define normal.

So from there, you decided that you wanted to pursue physics or what got you into the engineering side of things.

You know, I think physics and mechanical engineering are both great fields. And I think both have different options. For me, I really liked kind of the engineering mindset that you're using math, and you're using science, but it's applied to solve problems. And I think the idea of solving problems is really what excites me, you know, in my work today, with my students, and our great research teams, you know, we're really trying to solve problems, you know, that's really the heart of what engineering is.

So would you describe that as sort of more content based, like, sort of, there's a thing that you study, and then you look to see what problems you can solve given that, or are you driven more by this set of problems?

You know, I think everyone has their own process. For me, I like to look at what's a real problem, and then start from there and use kind of our skills and our knowledge to be able to apply that to the problem.

So have you gotten into new areas of research, like because of that, right? So you found a problem and said, Oh, there's something that we're not studying it and you got to kind of start figuring that out?

Exactly. I mean, my background is in heat transfer and energy, but I pretty broad, right? Yeah, I didn't have an agricultural background. You know, then when I came to K State, I started seeing all of these heat transfer and energy problems and how they interacted with sustainable food systems. And, you know, that's kind of where that research match was made. You know, I one of the things I just really enjoy Learning.

Yeah. So that's neat when when you first started talking about your research area, it didn't sound immediately, like agriculture or sustainable foods at all right. So is that? And I know you've got some new projects that are particularly in that area. But has this been a shift for you?

I think it depends how you look at it. So something like condensation, you might think, how does that really relate to food systems, but it's extremely important in power generation, every, you know, fossil fuel power plant requires a condenser, and condensers tend to be pretty large, and therefore pretty costly. And so you're always trying to figure out how can you condense better. And kind of the starting of this research is looking at kind of the competition between agriculture and energy for water, winter energy is a pretty large water user 40% of water withdrawals in the US are to produce power. Now, only 3% of consumption is from power plants. But that withdrawal rate is important. And you start looking into power generation, you know, we all like to chart our iPhone, and you know, record podcasts, or podcasts, you know, obviously, electricity is wonderful. But in semi arid and arid regions, especially power generation is a challenge.

So just for people are curious, what, what exactly kinds of power plants use water? And what are what are they doing with it.

So, you know, the whole goal of a power plant is like, you know, the old school water wheel, right, you might think about on the river, that you're just trying to spin something, and you're spinning it producing kinetic energy. And you're using that to generate power. Now in the modern cycles, you're using a turbine to spin so but it's essentially like a water wheel. But you have fluid, which is usually water flowing through the cycle, and it goes through the turbine as a gas. And then you have to condense it back to liquid, so you can send it through again. And so that's the link to the condenser.

So that's why it's only using 3%. But there's a lot of withdrawal as a result.

Right. And, you know, in the early days of power generation, you would just put your power plant right next to a river, you pull in river water, you'd heat it up a little bit, and then you'd send it back to the river. That's the one through condenser, but for environmental reasons, you know, that's no longer the standard. And so that kind of means that as engineers, we have to look at different ways to tackle this problem.

Nice. Yeah, that's interesting. So I guess moving back to the agricultural aspect of things, what kinds of projects are you working on, in relation to water?

So one important process, in terms of growing crops is the idea of evapo transpiration. So you have some evaporation from soil, and you have some transpiration from plants. So just like we sweat to cool ourselves, plants transpire to cool themselves. So it's really a cooling process, so that in and of itself as heat transfer, and the evaporation process, that's, that's a phase change, right? You're going from a liquid to a vapor. And that's really where the mechanical engineering tools and skills we have relates. And so we're working on some projects with sponsored by the National Science Foundation. One is a National Science Foundation research, traineeships are our three rural resource resiliency. And it's a training program for graduate students. So we're looking at these idea of limited resources in food energy water systems, particularly in the context of the Ogallala Aquifer.

Is there a need for more mechanical engineers working on agricultural projects? Or is it something that mechanical engineers know that they can go and sort of, you know, apply their skills in a variety of ways, including AG.

So, you know, for engineers, you know, one of the things you're always doing is you're always trying to improve the process, right, but you're also trying to model trying to predict, you know, that's where models get really powerful when they actually represent what's happening. And so, some of our mechanical engineering expertise can help us make better models in terms of evaporation. You know, so I think that's a strong link.

So is this something you're showing to farmers or you know, how do you make that link from doing the academic work to putting something into practice in the field?

We collaborate. But in all, in all seriousness, I think you have to work as a team, right? Once you get a large enough problem, you have to work together, everyone brings their own expertise, there are challenges with that kind of teamwork. But I think it can also be really fun and really fruitful. And as part of our three, one of our CO PI's Jonathan Angular is at southwest Kansas extension. And so we're going to be sending faculty and students, and he will host us for a week, every summer where we'll get to meet the farmers, Will, our trainees will be doing sociology research, they'll be doing Economic Research, trying to ask people, you know, what are the barriers to implementing new technology? You know, as engineers, I think we have a lot to bring to the table in terms of our technologies we can develop, but we really want to understand and work together with our social scientists to understand how are people going to use these technologies?

You just highlighted a really important part of engineering, right, which is the sort of if you're gonna apply it, you have to know how what you're applying it to right, and what the interests are, and what the needs are and how it's going to get used. And, yeah, I think sometimes, people can forget that. That's a crucially important part of any sort of engineering project, right? Yeah. So I want to ask you more about that. But first, I wanted to just sort of see if I could get a sense of, of kind of specifically, like a little bit more like how that how the mechanical engineering bit applies to some bit of like, plants transfer. perspiration, transpiration, I'm just spending evaporate. evapotranspiration. Yeah, about that. All right. So like, there's a reason I couldn't think of that word, right? So are there particular issues that you're already aiming to try to solve? Or you, you know, that there's just a complex of stuff that you could find and start working on?

So it's a great question. If you go to the grocery store, and you go to the vegetable counter, right, and you see, you know, they miss the vegetables every once in a while, and you want to have a good time, like spend 10 minutes at the vegetable counter. And now it's a great time, but what you'll notice is that the water droplets don't look the same on different types of plants. So on some plants, the water will really spread out. And that's something we call a hydrophilic surface, it's water loving, the water really spreads out. Then you look at say broccoli, or cabbage, the water beads up a little more. For the cabbage, it's mostly because it's a waxy coating. But for the broccoli part of it is because of different textures. So that the actual the different textures help it be hydrophobic or water fearing. And so this is called wettability. So you've hydrophilic, water loving, hydrophobic water fearing…

and so affected both by some of the properties of the plants, but also then how we treat them and preserve them and wax them or whatever. Right. Okay.

Right. And so our ideas are looking at how can you tailor soil? What ability to reduce evaporation? You know,

gotcha for the soil for the soil. Not right,

not for the plant. But I think the plant was a good example. Right? Yeah, that's right.

Sure. So will this be something that you apply in the irrigation water? Or will you apply it to the soil before you start irrigating? Or both?

I think we will soon know the answer. Stay tuned. And I think the answer will probably be a combination. But I have an NSF Career project where we're looking at this. And one of the things that's really great about the National Science Foundation is you can start looking at a little bit more of a basic science level, you can start asking these really big and good questions. And then once you have the answers, you can tailor it, how do you apply it in the right way? So I think we need to understand a little, a little bit more first.

Yeah, you bring up a good point, right? Not everything has to be immediately applied to the field, you know, tomorrow, it could be 10 years down the road. But you know, if it makes progress, it makes progress, right?

It's an important part for everybody to understand in terms of how science works in solving our communal problems, right sort of that? Yeah, there's a lot of basic science that has had all kinds of interesting applications that we didn't even know about from the beginning, right?

And sometimes, part of it goes back to what kind of models do you have, right? You have to take the time to develop the models, sometimes use computers, sometimes use experiments, kind of our general equations. So these are all important aspects.

And, you know, you need to do this theoretical work, right. So before you can start applying it right.

But I think it's really also important we have the application in mind. Right? Right. Sure.

You gotta have something the truth, the model against right? For those who don't know, what exactly is a model, like how would you in basic terms, what are you doing when you're developing a model? has a really big question. Right SQ describe down calculation.

So I guess, you know, let's think about, you know, I think many people have grown an office plant or killed an office plant or have garden right have tried to grow in a plant.

I've never killed a plant.

I'm an agronomist. I've killed lots of plants.

You think about what are the factors, right? Sure. Temperature? Is it hot or cold? That's gonna affect how much evaporates? Wind speed, right? We can have pretty windy days, that'll affect evaporation. How Sunny? Is it? You know? And not only how Sunny is it, but what time of year is it? You know, just think about the times of the year you can get a sunburn really quickly. And there are times the year that it just takes longer. So these are all kind of factors that go into our modeling. And we're doing experiments we're doing modeling some simulations down the road. No, so these all so when you're when you're making a model, you're trying to figure out how do the different factors like sun and wind and temperature affect your outcome?

Evapotranspiration in a model is and you know, the set of those factors and conceived a particular way to write and then what you think the interactions are between them, right? And so you can't, can't always test a model directly against the world. Because, like, the way it says you're modeling it, right, so you're coming up with a particular way of conceiving the world, right? And then you're gonna see if that works.

Yes, nice. Yeah. So I mean, there can be huge complicated models, but they're also gonna be simple models to help you understand specific small components of the system. So you said your base part of the project is based out of southwestern Kansas, right. And you mentioned the Ogallala Aquifer. So why is that such a problem? And how does it relate to all of this?

So the Ogallala Aquifer spans, I think it's eight different states. And it's a key irrigation source for many states, including Western Kansas. And so it's, uh, now, based on the predictions you ask, you know, I think the general consensus is that it's decreasing. Right? There are some questions on the rate of how much it's decreasing. But the general consensus is it is decreasing. And so, you know, we think that we need some engineering innovations. And we also need some socio economic innovations to kind of help sustain the system. Right? the Ogallala supports a lot of agriculture, right? Irrigation supports yields. So these are all important factors.

His rate of use been increasing, too.

I, that's a very complex question.

Yeah, I listened to a presentation the other day about it, and some of the laws and things that have surrounded, you know, been around for the last 100 years make use of the source is super, super complicated.

So I want to ask sort of for big things like this, that means I think it depends for the answer. This, I know, is going to vary depending on sort of the particular situation. But there's been a couple times now we've talked about socio economic, social factors, right, sort of economic factors, and technical ones, right. So when you engage in, you know, engineering projects, you know, either sort of in the beginning or, you know, once you actually getting down to some nitty gritty applications, how, how much those different factors weigh, right? You know, it gets a lot of times, I think, people think we it's easy to come up with a technical solution for something. Well, first of all, it's not easy. But then second of all, even if you have a technical solution for something, it's not a solution unless it gets applied in the social system. Right? So I mean, how just generally, how do you think about sort of the interaction between all these different factors?

I think part of it depends on what's your goal? Are you a company and you're producing a product tomorrow? Are you in academia, and you're doing research? So research is creating new knowledge? And the question is, When will it be applied? Right, something that might not be economically viable now, in five or 10 years could be, and I think one of the advantages of doing research is you have that knowledge, and you're building towards that. And I think that's one of the advantages, also of being an academia is that we can think in a little bit of a longer timescale than some companies. You know, and that's one of the goals of, in my opinion, government research is to, you know, plant the ideas, develop the technologies. And things can always change down the road.

Oh, yeah, certainly. And if you develop some sort of new substance or something, there's no market to make that substance on any sort of scale, right? So that's what will help to drive the cost and things like that in the future. So you mentioned you're going to be. You're going to be doing some a lot of graduate student research training, how interdisciplinary program, like what you guys are developing is that different than a traditional graduate student experience.

So all of our graduate students will get their degrees from their home department. So mechanical engineering, sociology, chemical engineering, for example. But we're introducing some interdisciplinary graduate courses. And so part of the training will be from these interdisciplinary courses, a capstone design course, where the students will work in kind of interdisciplinary teams to solve real problems. So that's a little more on the applied end. And we're really going to be asking stakeholders, for example, you know, farmers, producers, to give us some of their problems, because we really want to be solving current problems. So that's on the coursework side. And on the research side, we have different research teams that we're bringing together. And the team will be working on some more of that basic research, right, increasing our understanding, increasing our models, and being able to use that information in the field.

So do you have a core facility for all this to be going on? Or is this all gonna be happening in respective labs and different departments and that sort of thing?

It'll be in respective labs, but we're working together.

Sure, you are just bringing on a new cohort of students, right?

Yes. So our first cohort will start in August. Great.

How many students out of 18? Excellent. That'll be interesting for them to be starting right at once. So you have some experience with other types of education. Right? You were involved with the GK 12 Fellowship? In when you were at RPI? Right? Yes, yeah. Tell us a little bit about that. And how, again, how it's contributed to getting you here.

So the GK 12 program was a fellowship were sponsored by the National Science Foundation, where they would send graduate students into middle and high schools in the local community. I really had a great time and worked with Carl to Cesar. And he and he were a fellow, I was a fellow. Yes, I was a fellow. And so I worked with a high school teacher, a middle school teacher in the technology area. So he taught technology classes, actually, he still teaches them. And working with students on kind of technology, and pre engineering education. And this was a really great experience for me. Time to really learn how to be an effective teacher how to interact with students. And I think you're always asking, why are we doing this? Right? Students always want to know why. And I think it's important that we know why.

And they can sense it, right? Yeah.

Teaching is one of the hardest things, right, you have to actually be able to answer lots of questions. So NSF isn't doing the CK 12 program anymore? I think, right?

Not anymore. But as part of most NSF projects, they expect the researchers will also be contributing to education.

The so I was involved in one of these to a little while ago here at K State. And I know that one of the goals was, was to not just get the graduate students sort of better at teaching and better communicating, but But part of the vision, I think, was that it changed their view of science, partly, you know, because teaching you have to really think through things did did it have an effect on you that way to you rethinking kind of what you're up to, or why it was important, or answering some of those kind of out in left field? Why questions?

I think it gives you a different perspective. And that's, in my opinion, always a good thing. It's one thing to sit in the lab with your peers who understand everything about what you're doing and talk about your work, or your faculty advisor who understands, but it's another thing to talk to someone who's a ninth grader, and who's really interested in what you're doing, but maybe hasn't taken the same courses yet. Hasn't doesn't have the same perspective, right. But you still want to be able to, to bring them in, right to show them what's cool, what's exciting, how this can really make an impact. You know, I think, in terms of research, one of the big questions is how can this make an impact? Right, and we have to do this basic science, we have to figure things out before it can make that strong impact. But, you know, how do you communicate this to other people I think is really important. And that was something I learned from gk 12.

That's excellent. Were you always interested in Her teaching and kind of engagement and making sure the work is eventually applied to or is this partly also influenced? Do you think by that experience?

I would say I had an excellent graduate training experience. You know, I really respect both of my advisors. And I think they taught me very well. And I'm continually thankful for that. And so our research group was a more interdisciplinary group. And so in our research meetings every week, we were having these conversations, you know, and I think we all benefited from these different perspectives. So, I liked that aspect of my graduate research. And then I think they gk 12, just added to that.

That's great. And, this new project is partly a graduate training program, too. So rip, broadly, do you think there are major things that we need to be adjusting in graduate education, like more interdisciplinary, more engaged? Do you think we're doing a good job in general? What's your view about the status of graduate training in general, in the sciences and engineering? It's a big question, I put you on the spot, right, sort of, but you know, take your time.

So I think there's a lot of good, and there's also a lot of room for improvement. I think the good is that faculty mentors, care very much about their graduate students, and have a lot of one on one mentoring. And this is something you may not get in undergraduate experience that you get as a graduate student. And so I think that is really a huge benefit of a graduate degree. One thing that we're going to do is to have different graduate mentoring as well. So that as a graduate student, you'll have faculty mentors from outside your department. And one reason is, we really want you know, sometimes an outside perspective can be a good thing, it can help you get a little unstuck. But it can also help you think about what are my career goals? You know, so we want our trainees to be thinking about what are their career goals earlier on in the process, rather than, you know, pretty much right up to when they're graduating.

When they're defending?

Yeah.

Are there other some common traps you see that graduate students falling into, that you're trying to fix in this program, besides, you know, thinking about a career too late.

We're also interested in training graduate students to be good science communicators, you know, that is an important part of life. And particularly engineers, you know, it doesn't matter how brilliant you are, if you can't tell someone else about it. And so, you know, sometimes what we do in engineering is fairly complex. But to be able to distill that down to what's important and be able to communicate it to someone else is a skill.

It's a hard skill to learn.

But the good news about it being a skill is you can learn it. So when you have like field days, and things where your graduate students can go out and talk to different stakeholders, or how, what's the mechanism of disseminating that information?

We have a whole bunch. Sure, I'll highlight a few. One is a seminar series, both to invite people on campus, but also external speakers. And as well as some of our own team. When you're doing interdisciplinary work, it can take some time to understand someone else's vocabulary. That can be a real challenge. It sounds silly, but it can be a real challenge. So that's part of it. Other things are, there are some great. There's some great things sponsored by the graduate school in terms of professional development. There's the three minute thesis competition, where you get to present your thesis in three minutes. And that may sound easy. But it's actually challenging because you have to think about what's the most important thing to someone outside my field? And how can I explain it in three minutes? And then we're also sending them to Topeka to meet legislators who are doing water policy, as well as to southwest Kansas.

What do you think about the elevator pitch or the Three Minute Thesis concept? I've always been a little bit skeptical, I'll be honest, because you know, if you distill things down too much, then you sort of lose the value of it. Right? So do you think it's good to be able to condense it down to just a couple sentences or whatever? Or how valuable Do you really think it is?

I think the thing that transcends may not be the exact science and may not be the exact equations, but what transcends is why you're doing it, you know, and I think that's where the impact plays a role? You know, I could, you know, go on for the next 20 minutes talking about my favorite equation, right? I won't, but I could, you know, you've got this is a long format podcast, you know, but I can tell you why we're doing the work, right? Why we're concerned about water usage in power plants, why we're concerned about how to work with power plants to reuse water in their plants. Why we're concerned about evapo transpiration, particularly in southwest Kansas, when substantial amount of irrigation happens, you know, and so I think what transcends is the why. And so the elevator pitch, I don't think has to involve all of the equations, but some of the basic ideas and also why, why we're doing this research.

It's easy to get hung up too much on precision, right, so you're gonna lose precision, right? But, but maybe you can get the accuracy right and sort of in accurately describe what you're up about, you know, what you're trying to do, that's really important. So I was wondering if we could get back to some of the science, we've been talking about some other things that are really interesting, but I don't want to lose out on some of that. I know, at the start of a new program, this is interesting spot that everybody is in where you've got a bunch of research and plans and ideas of where things are gonna go. But then this is really science and engineering works. It's open ended, you don't know what's happening next. Right. But, but I was hoping you could say a little bit more about that, you know, so the soil evaporation sort of like what's going on there? What are you actually trying to solve?

So we're looking at our fundamental hypothesis is how can wet ability affect evaporation from soil, right. And the idea is that once you know how it can affect it, then you can figure out how you can tailor it in the way you desire.

So the open questions still are about how it affects the preparation, okay?

So will the wettability prevent evaporation or will help get water deeper into the soil quicker to prevent it that way?

A little bit of both. So when you have a, I have a potted plant in my office, and happily, it has a glass wall, so I get to watch it. So you, you fill it up, right? You fill it up, and you have soil particles, and then there's space, right, the space can be filled with air, or it can be filled with water. And as time goes on from the top layer, you have more and more evaporation. So that first stage of evaporation just happens at the top layer, water is in contact with the top and it's just about what's the sunlight, what's the wind, what's the temperature, and that's going to govern how it evaporates. And so wettability kind of on that top layer can affect how the water beads up. And we've done some studies simulating a soil pore in controlled environmental conditions. And we have one that is glass and one so that hydrophilic and then we have one that's Teflon, hydrophobic, takes longer to evaporate from the Teflon one, kind of the next level is looking at, you know, once you dry out that top layer, you have to pull water in to evaporate. And that's called liquid liquid capillary transport. So how the water motion in basically these really small channels can be affected by the wettability right between the soil particles. And so we're doing work right now my graduate student Parth is doing some great work on that right now. We're collaborating with Hitesh Bindra in nuclear engineering. So we're using X rays to figure out where's the water in the simulated soil as it's evaporating?

Nice so to cover the capillary action quickly. So the water at the you know, is equal in the flow profile. And then as it dries out at the top, it's no it's wetter below and drier above so water goes from where it's wet to where it's dry. And that's capillary action. Yeah, right. So in the simulated soils, Are these like glass beads or the Teflon beads or like what are they varying size distribution? What's What's the experiment look like?

So right now, we're trying to do our best to control the parameters. And so that's why we're using beads rather than actual soil. But we are planning in subsequent years to kind of scale up to soil with known pore size distributions. But right now we're using these simulated soils. So we have glass beads, and then for these latest experiments, we've coated the glass beads with a very thin Teflon layer. So the diameter is about two millimeters. So that thin Teflon coating doesn't really change the diameter in any appreciable way. But when you're designing experiments, one thing you have to do is you have to think about what are you controlling? If we just use Teflon beads for these experiments, they have a different specific heat and so they absorb heat differently. And now we're not comparing apples and apples. Now you don't know, is it? What ability? Or is it the different specific heat. And so that's why we, had an excellent undergraduate who was persistent helped us coat these beads. And they turned out great, they're looking really good. But we needed to be able to control control the conditions.

That's a interesting bit of, you know, science and sort of ferocity and thinking, we're in a whole range of, you know, some people very scientifically, you know, familiar with science, and some people listening from all kinds of backgrounds. So this, that, that control, you've got these sort of very simplified models, in some sense, right, you know, but But part of the idea is, if you don't do that first, right, you're just dealing with such a complex situation, you don't, you can't sort of make any progress at that. Right.

Right. And it is, in my opinion, more beneficial to start with a simpler model, and really understand and really be able to say why this is happening. Rather than saying, we have three options, why evaporation is lower, but we can't tell you which mechanism, right, our whole goal is to really understand these mechanisms. Once we know the mechanisms, we can work with people like Jay, to implement it in the field. But if we don't know the mechanism upfront, we could guess. So what's the third one? So the third one is enhanced vapor diffusion.

So you're gonna want to explain that? Yes.

So my, my favorite, my favorite example of a vapor diffusion is, say, Sam cooking hot dogs on the grill. And you're on the other side of the deck, you know, I put the hot dogs on and close the lid, do you smell it immediately? Not immediately, not immediately, right. But at a certain point in time, you're going to get a whiff. And you're gonna say, Oh, I smell hot. Right? Right, that's diffusion. It's a very slow process, it doesn't happen immediately, it doesn't have a huge velocity, but it kind of the particles just make their way to a different position. And so what happened is there some early work in the 1950s, where people did experiments, and they, had pretty good diffusion models. And they said, our evaporation in soil is like five times greater than what we'd expect in our diffusion model. Why? And part of it is because you have the soil particles, and you would form these liquid bridges between them. So you'd have two particles and then a liquid bridge in between. And that would kind of accelerate the diffusion process. And so because there's greater surface area, it's actually pretty neat. On one side, you would evaporate and the other side, you'd condense. So that basically, instead of diffusion, you have an actual face change. And why we like phase change, heat transfer is It's usually more effective. So wettability can also affect this vapor diffusion, we think, right? And we're going to investigate it, because it can change the shape of liquid bridge. And once you change the shape, and how the shape evolves, is really important for saying how the evaporation actually occurs.

So you're looking to slow this process. Yeah. Interesting.

So that's really neat. So that's one part where your research areas sort of as applies to the soil, water, evaporation, water and soil, you're also talking about energy. Could you say something else about what's going on there?

Great. I mean, our, our interest in energy is, you know, heat transfer is really at the heart of most energy generation, most electricity production, and also this competition for water. Right. So there's a few areas where this really starts playing a role. So if you are in a dry area, and you can't reject to water, so you can't use water for your condenser, maybe you don't have the water, or it's salt water, and it's really going to be very corrosive. So you say okay, we can't reject it to the water, we will reject the heat, we will transfer heat from our steam cycle to air. The problem is you're you're doing that and you can only get the steam to the temperature of the air. So if it's 95 Fahrenheit, that's the lowest temperature you can get the steam. But then, in thermodynamics, we like to think of something called the Carnot efficiency, which is the kind of maximum like best case scenario for efficiency, and it's related to the condenser temperature. So it's one minus T condenser over the boiler temperature. And so if you have a higher condenser temperature, now you have a lower efficiency. And the worst thing is this happens on a hot day. And that's when you have the greatest electricity demand because everyone wants to run their air conditioning and

the least efficiency if you're dealing with using air, right,

you know, so this is an example of where it really plays in. And we've done some work in condensers. But one project I wanted to highlight was looking at recovering water from cooling towers. So this is an NSF project, Stacy Hutchinson bio UNAG. Is, is working with us on this one. And so have you heard about the fog collecting billboards?

Fogg collecting billboards? No, I don't believe.

So in in certain areas of South America, there's a billboard that says, you know, this billboard collects water. Right? So it's this, it's the whole idea of, of dewpoint. Right? You have some moisture in the air, and it condenses overnight, because the surfaces, maybe the grass cools, right, you'll notice condensation, you know, dew on the grass, but you won't notice it on the sidewalk, for example. So you have this condensation happening from this air. And there's this group who a couple years back, took this idea of fog collecting Billboard, and they just put it in a cooling tower of a power plant.

They put the whole billboard in the cooling tower?

Well, they put essentially, yeah, essentially, that's what they did. And they were able to get back a lot of water that otherwise would be lost. So when you drive by a power plant, you often see a cloud, that cloud is just one water, water vapor. And so we're looking at ways that we can get the water back.

So before it escapes there, you can sit down, so this isn't a standard part of a plant. Art.

It is and it isn't, our approach is a little bit different. So we're looking at how could you use. So if your one way is you can condense a droplet and other ways you can just capture a droplet that's in the air. And I think both have their pros and cons. But this fog collecting billboard was essentially just a mesh, like think of it like a fence. And they just collected water basically from the fence. But our idea is that if you can change the wettability, either all of it or selectively, so again, that wettability link, and you can shake droplets off, that gives you more room to get new droplets, and it can increase your efficiencies. And so we're looking at, you know, how do how do droplets move under some shaking under some vibrations. And in Stacy's working with us, we're testing water from power plants. And we're looking at how the effects how water quality can affect the droplet motion, too. And so I think this is really exciting to me, because I think it is interdisciplinary, right? We're we're all engineers working on this project. But we're looking at it from different angles. We're looking at it both from that scientific standpoint of what are the mechanisms of making the droplet move, but also moving towards the applied once we have this water? What can we do with it inside the plant?

So this sounds like it's closer to the applied side, right? Sort of it's it can be your, your, you're not as far down the pipeline from being able to actually, you know, bring this in to the applications cool.

What are some of the water quality issues that may be apparent and something like this?

So you can have, you know, it all depends on your source, right? Salt water, the salt can leave deposits, and we call that fouling. I, it's a foul name, right, but call it fouling. And so you can have salt water, we've done some tests with like a simulated seawater. We've done some tests with cooling, tower water, other power plant water sources. And so we're looking at so with these different water qualities, it can change the properties of water. So it can change your surface tension, it can change viscosity, and it can change density. So you're changing those fundamental parameters that's going to affect how your fluid moves.

So the idea that this water could then once it's captured be circulated back into the system, or would you have to dispose of it in an agricultural system or something like that?

I think all our options, but it depends on what's that initial quality. You know, there's a limit to how many times you can recirculate. But, again, if you're in an arid climate, or semi arid, and this helps you have a water cooled condenser rather than an air cooled condenser.

May be totally worth it. Yeah.

So if I remember correctly, you're also working in looking at the microbial aspects of some of the water dynamics and these soils is part of the project too, right? Yes. So what kinds of things are going on there?

Yeah, Ryan Hansen and chemical engineering is really leading this work. And he's doing a great job. And one of the things that we'll be looking at together with our NRT team, and our excellent students coming in the fall is kind of the interactions between water and microbes. Right. And one, one of our questions is, you know, how are the microbes going to relate or respond to drought stress? And what are the interactions with the water and the evaporation, evaporation mechanisms and how they tied together?

Okay, sorry, thinking about, you know, how you can introduce some microbes to the system and how that might impact it or just looking at the native populations and how they respond to these different things.

I think a little bit more a little bit of a gamble.

That'll be interesting. I know that the microbial and biologicals are getting to be really popular, especially in the ag industry. That time will tell what yeah, what are examined aspect for a long time, right?

Yeah, sure. Companies like, you know, Indigo egg and I think Monsanto for their buck by bear, we're, we're investing heavily in trying to understand how those things impact.

So great, great, it's all about the system, right? You can't just look at one part and I think with the NRT, this gives us the opportunity to look at the whole system. Sure.

Do you have any final last words then for graduate students who might be interested in your in your program?

You know, I think you the general life advice is that you can't win if you don't submit. Right. So if you know if you're interested, reach out to our team, particularly the faculty members in the areas you're most interested to. But if you can't apply if you don't apply, we can't give you a traineeship.

And we can find more information on your website, correct? Yes, which is [email protected]

You'll be looking to accept more students towards the end of this year for the following year. Great, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Looking forward to seeing what comes out of that.

Thanks for having me.

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.

Dan Stone is a Washington D.C.-based writer with a passion for covering all topics related to environmental science, agriculture, and botany. Formerly a White House correspondent for Newsweek and editor of National Geographic, his work has also been featured in The Daily Beast, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Vice, and Literary Hub. Additionally, Dan serves as an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University teaching environmental policy.

His book, The Food Explorer, is the story of K-State alumnus, David Fairchild, a late-19th-century food explorer that traveled the world as an emissary of the United States government. His mission: search for new foods that would strengthen the agricultural sector and enchant the American eater.

For more about Dan Stone and The Food Explorer, check out his website at: https://www.danielstonebooks.com/

Transcript:

Tales of a Food Explorer with Dan Stone

People often ask, what's for dinner? But does anyone ever ask where our dinner comes from? Or how is our dinner grown? Or even will there be something for dinner next year? As production resources are spread thinner and thinner over a growing global population? These are the kinds of questions they give us something that you.

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of global food systems. It's produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Jay Weeks PhD candidate in the Department of Agronomy. My co host is Scott Tanona, an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy who specializes in the philosophy of science. For today's interview, we have a very special guest, Dan Stone, formerly a senior reporter at Newsweek and former editor for National Geographic covering environmental science and agriculture. Dan is the author of the food explorer, a book that chronicles the adventures of K State alumnus David Fairchild, informal emissary with the United States government furchild leveraged agronomy, horticulture and botany as tools for international trade and diplomacy in an age when food diversity was limited in the United States. Oh, welcome, Dan, we appreciate you taking the time to talk with us for a little while. We're going to get a little bit into your book, and then why that's important, both to K State and Manhattan and the global food system in general. But tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, I'm, I'm a journalist and science writer, Live in Washington, DC and I work for, I'd write for National Geographic, I used to cover politics. I used to cover the White House. And now I cover sort of the intersection of science and policy, particularly related to agriculture, botany and the economy. So our food, what we eat, why we eat it, the economic principles at play, and the stories of history that explain sort of what are supermarkets look like, and the foods that we have the choice of, and the stories behind what we eat. What was it the sparked your interest in getting food and all that sort of thing, as opposed to politics? Yeah, I grew up in California, near farms, working on farms, I went to college, up near Sacramento, and at UC Davis, tech school, big ads. Oh, yeah. And I worked on a peach farm, I worked on a strawberry farm, and really loved the sense of research and innovation on farms, figuring out how to farm the soil, and how each season could be better than the season prior. Farming is very hard work, as anyone knows who's ever done it. But there are ways to make it better and easier or more plentiful with each passing season by using science. And we see companies do that we also see farmers do it. And I love that process. When I went to Washington, I you know, I mentioned I covered politics. But eventually I wanted to cover science again. And I wanted to cover stories that were not being covered, cover people whose stories were untold. And usually with scientific research, you know, it's stories that are really complicated. And that, you know, don't always have the most compelling or charismatic character behind them, but are really important. And if you could find these people, and you could find clever ways of telling these stories. They are usually stories that people haven't heard before. That's great, speaking of those kinds of people's and listening to stories that you found behind them. So you're here at K State talking about your book, the food Explorer, and that sort of chronicles the travels of David Fairchild and alumnus of K State. What got you interested in David Fincher, what sparked that? Yeah, I mentioned you know, my background in food and farming and policy and history. And I heard a fair child one day at National Geographic. I heard him described as a roving botanist, a man who traveled the world in search of new plants to bring back to America. And I had never heard anyone have that title, botanist, roving adventurer. And Fairchild was on the board of National Geographic and had written essays, stories for the magazine, and I read all of them. And I thought two things one, why haven't I ever heard of this guy? And why hasn't anybody heard of this guy? And I want to tell a story. I want to dig into his archives and find the story of his life and bring him to life. Interesting. So Fairchild was here and In the late 1800s, right in the late 1880s, what did their cultural landscape in the US look like? And what did he do? Why? Why was he important?

Yeah, Fairchild was here because his father was courted from Michigan State Agricultural College to become the president of Kansas State Agricultural College. And so the Fairchild took a train from Lansing, Michigan down here to Manhattan. They'd never been here before. And George Fairchild became the president and young David Fairchild became the president's son and a student here, eventually, and he was surrounded by some realities in America. But here, you know, in the center in the heartland of the country, one that a lot of people were farmers to that farmers weren't really part of the prosperity of the Gilded Age, right, like railroads did really well, the banks were really growing, Washington was feeling prosperous, and emergent. Three decades after the Civil War, but to be a farmer was hard. And you didn't really make much money. In fact, the harder you worked, the less money you made, because of your output. And this was a problem of crop diversity. There were too many farmers growing too few crops, there was corn, there were oats, there was a lot of dairy, there was barley, but not a lot of diversity, certainly not in the way we think of today, when you walk into a supermarket. So farming was a really hard equation to square in those days. And Fairchild saw it here in Manhattan, and also just, you know, everyone he knew was a farmer struggling.

How widely recognized was that as an issue? I mean, was this like a particular insight by Fairchild or were people kind of seeing this as a problem, right, sort of not being part of the prosperity of the country?

People could see it, certainly farmers could see it here and elsewhere, Washington didn't quite see it, or to the extent that they needed to, and people here were really angry, you know, they said, you know, Washington's looking out for every other industry. And yet, this American notion that if we work really hard, that will be okay, is leaving us poorer. And so yeah, it was sort of a disconnect between the federal government and the states that led to, you know, pretty fiery language people fired up and, you know, pastors and activists and people making speeches about, you know, how we were left behind here in the center of the country.

So what's Fairchild story that he like, take that passion and move with it? Or does it just sit with him for a little while.

He took that passion. And that's what sparked his sense of I need to do something to help farmers in this country, because farming is really most of the economy and by helping farmers, I can help boost this country. That was one. Another thing that happened was, in the early 1880s, Fairchild had an encounter with a visiting scientist named Alfred Russel Wallace, a research ever of natural selection and evolution. Wallace had been to the Malay islands of Indonesia and Malaysia, Malaysia, and came through Manhattan, Kansas on a speaking tour and stayed with the Fairchilds George Fairchild was the president the school. And so young Fairchild meats, Alfred Russel Wallace, this great illustrious researcher who inspires him with descriptions of the other side of the planet, and the tropics, and the plants and the animals and the foods that you could taste on the other side of the world. And that really fueled Fairchilds imagination, and eventually gave life to his vision.

I can't imagine what that'd be like. It's sort of the state where, you know, everything that you see around you, right, it's so foreign in a way from what we have today with just the availability of all kinds of foods now, right? To think of hearing about these amazing things that you have never seen. Right. And potential availability. So that, that got him out of here.

Yeah, you know, I usually like to say that meeting Alfred Russel Wallace meeting a world traveler to that extent and of that renown, was like meeting an astronaut. It was like meeting someone who walked on the moon had gone somewhere that no one else you knew had ever been. Right? Yeah, amazing. So where did Fairchild go from there? Once you he finished his degree at Cal State, correct? Yes, he did. And then what he did some, some master's work in Iowa, and then found his way to Washington, DC, where he became a junior staffer at the USDA in plant pathology, finding and researching crop diseases and how to treat them. And it was in that capacity that he got another connection and he got an opportunity to work for the Smithsonian, in Italy, and to take a boat across the ocean and research at the Smithsonian Institution in Naples. And that's fair child's first trip abroad. It's his first time on the ocean, you know, on a steamer and an encounter on that trip really defined sort of the destiny of his life he met a benefactor a man who offered him a little bit of money to pursue his travels and find new and novel plants. It must have been, must have been fascinating. So, you know, he meets this benefactor, and they start traveling around after a little bit of deliberation right in parallel wasn't exactly sure that this is where he was wanted to go. You know, obviously, we can't recapitulate the whole book here. But what are some of your favorite adventures that he goes on? Do you think we were important to our food system here in the United States? Yeah. Fairchild, and his benefactor, Barbara lay thrupp go on a tour around the Cape of South America. And they stop and she lay and Fairchild picks up varieties of avocados. Avocados are native to Mexico, but he found them a little bit further. South. Fairchild later is in Italy, and he finds varieties of seedless grapes that he introduces. On another trip he's in South Asia and all the way from India. to the Philippines. He picks up mangoes more than 50 varieties of mangoes and introduces them to subtropical land in the US, mainly in Florida, Southern California. Fairchild is responsible for kale for Egyptians cotton, he picked up varieties of watermelons, in Brazil, and of nectarines in Pakistan. He's also responsible for the cherry blossom trees that were gifted from the Japanese to Washington DC. In 1912. He arranged that exchange.

So you've written that the US government got involved in was supporting in right kind of asking him to do more of this or at some point. So it was this was this something that they had been interested in before sort of did Fairchilds adventures, kind of spark the government interest in this.

The government had always been interested in plants from abroad, because plants were economic assets. You know, before you know, the days of globalization and goods being manufactured, the way a country grew was really through plants. Thomas Jefferson, even you know, in the late 18th century said, the greatest service which can be rendered any country is to introduce a plant to its culture, right, find a new plant. And so, the work of plant introduction was really the work of the State Department. That was foreign policy. The USDA didn't exist until the 1860s with Abraham Lincoln. Before that, the USDA was just run as an Office of the State Department, and consoles and consular officers were just asked as part of their other duties to just send in plants when something interesting came along. So Fairchild came with this age old notion that foreign plants were valuable, but with a new vision of how he could streamline the process and how he could introduce these plants better and faster and more scientifically, you know, Scruton this with a greater chance of success.

So in addition to the actual plants that he brought back, what would you say were the major contribution in this way was in terms of that process, right, in terms of like, how we brought them back or how we kept them or the methodology he chose for what to try to bring back.

He really defined his success with economic growth. So if you think of the citrus growers of California, orange groves, lemon groves, great fruits grown in California, that didn't really exist as a giant commercial industry, the way we saw in the mid and late 20th century, avocados certainly are now a huge commercial industry. And the economics have shifted in labor. So now we grow and import most of our avocados from abroad in Mexico. The same is really true for cotton. Fairchild introduced a form of long grain cotton from Egypt. That then became known as Egyptian cotton, right, fine luxury cotton, right. He introduced you know, varieties of mangoes that really transformed South Florida. And he introduced the cherry blossoms from Japan that weren't really a commercial crop. There's not really any fruit to sell. But they were so beautiful that now cherry blossoms grow in almost every major American city and pretty defining in Washington. Yeah. And our giant sources of tourist and economic activity, right. Yeah. Yeah, I think the case of cotton is particularly interesting, right? Because the Egyptians were closely guarding their cotton or they didn't want it to spread widely because of its high quality. Right? Yeah, it was really what helped to derive some of some parts of the US economy when they were able to get this new variety right. What's interesting about cotton is that cotton is not from Egypt never has been and Egyptians didn't really have much experience with cotton, but around the 1850s and 60s when the civil war started in the US, and all those cotton plantations suddenly didn't have the labor that they had before, the whole cotton industry in America collapsed. And Egypt, sensing the worldwide demand for it started growing cotton, and spent about three decades growing cotton and growing better cotton. Until the 1890s and early 20th century, suddenly, Egypt was the cotton powerhouse and started selling cotton back to the US. And so it was Fairchild's introduction that really helped bridge from that high quality cotton in Egypt to make it an American crop again. It's fascinating thinking about how those your politics play out how important a simple introduction can be like that. The what were some of the big challenges that Fairchild had, and getting some of these things back into the United States. He had botanical problems and shipping problems. He also had problems of diplomacy, you know, going to a foreign country and asking them for their most prized seeds or cuttings was often you know, not easy. People were skeptical. Sometimes he was arrested, he would sometimes catch diseases, you know, this was very dangerous work. But even if he got the seeds with the cuttings or the fruit, how do you package a plant to survive on a ship for two months, or and you don't know how long it's gonna be? Yeah, it could be longer. And it could go through the tropics, it could, you know, be very hot, mold could grow very easily. And so he always experimented with shipping methods. And sometimes he would take a cutting, like of a citrus plant, and he would stick it in a potato, which was sort of moist inside, and it would nourish it for a few months. Sometimes he would take like a date tree where he goes in Baghdad, and he rolls these date suckers in mud in several layers of mud so that the inside will stay wet. And the outside will harden and keep any moisture out. He also experimented with peat moss and any type of you know, packing or growing moss or material that local farmers would suggest. Yeah, so he had those issues and getting things you know, across the oceans and whatnot. He had some issues back home, though, too, when he was trying to bring some of these plant materials in, he ran into some colleagues that thought this wasn't such a good idea. Right. So what happened there? Yeah. You know, this is a story of a man who brings in plants from all over the world. And it sounds very rosy. But it also could be very dangerous, right. And actually, there was a friend of his a young man who grew up also here in Manhattan, who was a K State alumnus named Charles Merlot, who graduated here in entomology, and he became an entomologist for the USDA and insect scientist. And His concern was, well, these plants are great, but what about the risks? What about you know, what's going to happen when we introduce a new insect or a new type of fungus that destroys an entire field or a whole industry? And so Fairchild was constantly trying to combat the idea that we shouldn't be introducing plants at all, because the risks were too great. And it wasn't worth the potential damage. So that means he has roots in the reason why we have to fill out the little slip on the airplane, and we're coming back from national flights, right? So I mean, what's it been like, since you've written the book, you know, talking to people about this? Where are people like blown away that you know, this, this kind of thing had happened? And that's how, you know, our history and food are? You know, what's the response been? It surprises a lot of people the same way, it surprised me when I first learned about this. And people generally don't think about food as traveling right? Food as immigrant, an immigrant that travels across oceans or gets introduced to a country. So you know, you go into your market, your avocados, your mangoes, your bananas, all these things were brought here. And people usually say, Wow, that I never, I never thought about that. Another reaction I get, which is always interesting is why haven't we heard of him? You know, he was so influential, and he did all these amazing things that still affect our daily lives. Why don't we know his name? And there are many reasons, but one reason is that he was a botanist, right? He was a plant scientist. And we don't usually celebrate scientists of plants, the way we do say, you know, scientists of technology or industry. He was also a government employee. So he never made a lot of money. He was never rich. He never patented his work. So when you compare him to the big names of his era, you know, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, these people who made a lot of money, you know, and we're sort of the titans of their day. Fairchild was pretty modest, and he was always traveling. He never really had newspaper profiles written about him because he was abroad. So you know, he wrote A lot of things down but he wasn't really elevated to celebrity status. The way many of his peers were.

Sounds just like the farming not getting the popularity right or the attention, right. Yeah. Was from before it's like the same thing, even though he started a whole bunch of industry off right here.

Yeah, yeah. How many? How many, you know, farmers, you know, famous farmers famous farm famous would make that a website famous farmers.com. Yeah. Or, you know, agronomist or botanists, or, you know, become sort of high level, influential figures. It's pretty small.

Yeah. One of the major lessons you think the story has for today.

That our food is an adventure, what we eat and why we eat, it has roots back usually about 100 years ago, that, you know, someone carrying it on a ship, or someone introducing it in a field and growing it into an industry. That's very perilous, right? It could go wrong at any point. And usually it did. And so our food is very geographic, in a way we don't often think there are also, you know, ecological components of this kind of work that are still present today. And even more so, you know, bringing in a new plant could introduce a new insect. And that was true, then people were worried.

Did he just get lucky?

Do you think he got pretty lucky? A lot of these things were inspected. Okay, maybe not as thoroughly. But you know, there were probably also some does that, you know, small disasters of, you know, individual fields or crops, or perhaps insects that destroyed something that we were linked to his interactions. Certainly, with the cherry blossom trees, they were introduced with six types of scale insect, and they had to be burned on the National Mall, and a second shipment of trees had to be sent. And so that was a disaster averted. But today, that's even more true. Because, you know, not only are people coming into every country, but certainly our country from every port in every city, you know, but dirt on your shoe that you brought in from China this morning, you know, could be introduced into a field in Kansas this afternoon. Same with, you know, someone coming from the US to Africa, right, introducing new types of fungus, new insects, that really are the result of a more interconnected and globalized world that could be really ecologically dangerous.

Do you have any opinions on the best policy ways to address these kinds of issues?

The quarantines are really helpful, you know, certainly filling out the form on airplanes, declaring any agricultural material, if you do declare it, and it's sort of optional. Yep. is generally good policy. Right? It's better than nothing. It's not really enough. And I don't think any government really has it figured out. Oh, and what would be I mean, some of these things are microscopic. But you could introduce, we haven't had a global, you know, food disaster yet, and certainly not in a long time. But yeah, these insects can have, you know, really devastating effects over time, right, over decades.

I mean, in some sense, this is just one of the risks that we have to deal with. Right? Yeah, the global, the global system, right, the way we're all connected.

I mean, Scott and I have talked about that before just how fragile our food system really is, even though we have this global network, right, you know, if something gets brought in that, you know, shouldn't be there could have devastating effects. But yeah, the upside is that now we have far more advanced science, and that we have researchers and microbiology labs, who can sort of solve problems. But you know, the upside to 100 years ago is that they just didn't have this constant flow of potential contamination. So, you know, the modern world comes with positives and negatives of, you know, problems we can solve and problems. We can also you know, launch, you know, create.

So, one of the good alright, so, one of the things you were saying about Fairchild at Fairchild's time the farming of the time was pretty there a few crops right. They were everybody was trying to farm right. Yeah, other lessons there today for us in terms of diversity food. I mean, some of the things people are concerned about with monocultures are different. They're not just the economic ones that we're all eating the same thing. Right. So there's more questions about sustainability and the ability to resist, you know, issues like we're just talking about here, right. Are there lessons that we can draw about diversifying our food system from Fairchild or is it a different world now?

Our food system is pretty diverse, now far more diverse than it was 150.

Partly because of Fairchild and and yeah, continuing actions like this, right?

Yeah, our farms are not as diverse. Certainly not geographically, right? Most of our fruits and vegetables are grown in California, and out west. Most of our cereals are grown in the Midwest, in the south. And there are exceptions. But that's in both cases, it's an effect of economics. In Fairchild's day, more crops lead to more money. and more economic growth in our economy today, fewer crops, but growing them on more acreage is what yields the greatest profit. You know, farming is really hard work. But it's also really risky. And if you're a farmer today, and someone comes to you with a new crop, and asked you to plant it in your field, and you've never grown up before, you know, that's a risk. Sure, and maybe it won't work out. And maybe you just rather stick with the corn or soybeans that you've got growing in your farm in Iowa.

Do you have thoughts about a general policies on this about how we can shift the economics of this, like what the food bill? And what do you want to say about that?

Generally, farming works best when, when it's not just big landowners doing it? Right? When you have individual land holders who can make individual decisions about their land. That was true. 50 years ago, we had more farmers than we do. Now. The trends are going, you know, farmers are getting older, and farms are getting bigger, as they're getting bought up by bigger and bigger companies. Generally, agricultural subsidies can be both harmful and helpful to drive some of these policy changes, to encourage farmers to grow new things, to create more ecological diversity, to reduce the risk of a disease coming through and demolishing an entire crop over a whole state or region. Yeah, but with the Farm Bill, you know, part of it's about food and part of it's about farming, and more people farming in different ways. Even if it's like kind of crazy ways, like in a skyscraper in Manhattan, right? That's not going to solve our food problem. But it is diversity in a way. So maybe this is a good time to transition, we'd like to talk a little bit more about you know, your experiences as a journalist and your title now as a contributing editor to national great writing graphic. Right. And you mentioned before the botanists and sometimes scientists and farmers don't get a lot of recognition. So you know, what do you see as the role of journalism in the media in the, you know, the environment, ag food, you know, community and that sort of thing. But you know, what do you think about that? Yeah, farming is usually a really hard story to tell, because it's really complicated. It's not always, you know, the sexiest story out there. It's really important. But you know, it's not as vivid or salacious, as, you know, stories of tension, you know, with politics or with sports or religion, right. Usually, I find the best stories about farming and food to come from people, if you can find people willing to tell those stories, someone in Kansas who has experienced, you know, a farming problem and can give voice, right, someone in Manhattan who's starting a vertical farm, right to grow lettuce, that person has a passion and a reason for doing it. And they usually are the best spokesperson for why they're doing it. Farms are, you know, dying, as we've heard, right? So farmers are getting older, and they're selling their farms to big companies. So what is it about farming? That doesn't really attract younger people? Right? What is it about? Farming that attracts mostly men? Right? These are stories about people that explain this industry in a more narrow way.

What are you trying to accomplish? When you pick a story? Just tried to like anything that would interest the reader or you. There's something you're trying to get at?

That's deep? Yeah. Here's the philosophy. Yeah. You know, I'm a storyteller at heart. Most journalists are, you know, I want to tell a good story that someone's gonna be interested in. That's, that's one. But journalism is also powerful. You can teach people things, you know, you can drive change in a way that's maybe not political change. But maybe it's, you know, like a form of ecological change, or a way we think about the planet, you can raise awareness for an issue, that's not getting it. I used to cover politics, and covered the White House, and I liked it, but I didn't really like it that much. Because, you know, 50, other reporters are sitting in that same room, trying to get their questions answered. And you're not really telling a story that's unique. But with science writing, you know, you have the potential to go out there and find something that's happening, and maybe raise a red flag about it, and maybe vocalize it in a new way. Maybe tell the story of someone who doesn't usually get their voice heard, you know, and with farmers, they don't often get hurt, you know. So I think telling the stories of the voiceless is fascinating and usually leads really great stories. So do you spend a lot of time in the field, like looking for these types of stories or finding, you know, to find people I know, in the past, you've done, you know, trips, like up to California, where you've reported every day and, you know, and sort of interesting things that you found and that sort of thing. So how do you go about, you know, finding assignment and then and then, you know, what do you do to delve into it? I usually start with trends, right. And I read a lot of reports and studies, you know, kind of really dense academic publications. about farming and food. That's where you start. Yeah, because it's, you know, those aren't the best stories, see what's happening on the ground? Sure. As opposed to just, you know, if I were to leave from DC and kind of drive here to Manhattan, Kansas, you know, I'd probably meet a lot of quirky characters along the way. And maybe I could tell a story of one of them. Sure. But if I want to tell the story about America, or how it's changing, or the economy of Kansas, or you know how climate change is affecting farms across the country, I'm probably going to see that in some changing statistic, or I'm going to see it in in a new trend that's emerging and farming equipment, or a new crop that suddenly is being imported, you know, at twice the rate that it was before, because there's a new market for it. And once you find that trend, then you could go find people who sort of embody it. And when you start talking to people, usually they recommend other people and then other people and other people. So you know, you can find those compelling and quirky characters in a much more targeted and efficient way. Do you find that people generally want to talk about their about their story, some do, some don't, you know, some people have never been asked by a reporter to give comment. Some are very wary of the media, right, they don't want their words to be misconstrued. Some people are very enthusiastic, you know, I've had the doors slammed in my face, I've been invited in for coffee and tea, and everything in between. So, you know, the part of reporting is not that you always get nice treatment. But if you try, you know, and spend enough time doing it, you sort of meet the people who have the stories to tell. Do you think that the when you're reading those scientific papers and things that scientists could use a little help, you know, a little little journalistic help in telling their stories, I think it would be more effective that way? Yes, scientists are usually very good at what they do. Communication is not always a strong suit. And the best scientists, the most effective ones are the ones who really can convey their research and convey the importance of what they're trying to accomplish and trying to find. And the scientists that, you know, can go on TV, or do podcasts or write articles for newspapers are really the ones with the best chance of not only raising research funding, but also being heard and being seen.

So one of the challenges I've heard people talk about with this is that a lot of the science that gets done, it's hard to find a story there, right? I mean, so you're finding some facts, or you're discovering some phenomenon, you're, you know, whatever, right. But then you can always turn this into the story of what you in your lab discovering. I mean, like, what's where, because that says, a journalist, you keep on talking about the stories, right? Sort of, like, let's find the person, let's find who's affected by this. Right. Do you have any tips in terms of how to turn that general? You said, You look for some trend, or, you know, there's so there's a sense a, a story out there about America or about some new technological change, but then you have to change that. And you have to make that personal. Yeah. So think about that project.

Well, like Gene research that sort of yield some, you know, super complicated genetic difference between different races, you know, like that. Those are hard stories to conceptualize. So you don't have to take every finding and every study the same way seriously. But you know, we do all sorts of stories, a National Geographic and one that comes to mind to your question, we did a story maybe like three years ago on dung beetles, and how dung beetles, effectively, kind of were these, they researchers put silicone boots over their legs that allow them to walk over hotter sand, right? And it's like, who cares, right, like, but it's also sort of fascinating. So like, here's the way you would tell that story. Maybe not. You wouldn't talk to dung beetles. You might not even talk to the researcher, maybe. But photos or videos of dung beetles wearing boots, right? I mean, I click on that, right? Right. So pictures visuals really help you know, can you bring this to life? Can you show a beautiful photo of you know, a dung beetle at sunset? You know, when it's a story about, you know, prairie grass in western Kansas, you know, that's, that's not like the sexiest story, but if you can pair it with beautiful photography, with stunning portraits of people affected, you know, usually that'll draw in the eye and once you have people's attention, maybe they'll read the story.

This is one of the things National Geographic has been so good at for so long, right sort of photos.

We invest a lot in the photography and a lot can sometimes be months or years 1000s hundreds of 1000s of photos to try to get a dozen or a couple dozen that are really hard work. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, with the photos though, there's sort of an emotional component to right I mean, that's, that's drawing people in. So how do you think about you know, using emotion in your articles and things like that to kind of drop linby was still told, you know, an objective story, right? Is it okay to sort of lean one way or the other? Or, you know, how do you how do you go about thinking with optics of that we want to get their attention, we want to be honest and how we do it, you know, we don't want to put, you know, a photo of, you know, a salacious photo of like a half naked person, right. Gotcha. Now you got it. But, you know, we want to draw them in with, like you said, emotion, you know, with a sense of, here's why you should care. So maybe with a dung beetle, it's the photo, or the video that shows something you've never seen, that sort of makes you full of wonder, right. With an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, maybe it's portraits that make you see in someone's eyes, something similar that you feel right, and sort of makes you feel that the world isn't as big as you thought, and that these cultures are not as foreign or distant, or exotic sized, right? As you would think. So it's using visual storytelling to connect with people in a way that they are interested, and is honest, you know, and not every single person is going to be interested in every story. That's not our job. But in the magazine, you know, to find a story or two that someone can read and look at and just stare at the page and go, wow, wow, about the earth or a culture a place? Yeah, that's the goal. And when we get it, you know, it's really gratifying.

What do you think about the state of culture today in terms of openness to science reporting, particular agriculture reporting, there's been a period of time when people thought science journalism was, you know, on its way out, right sort of newspapers had their science gig or whatever you call it, right. And sort of, you know, those things got lost, right. And those are gone by the wayside. So people have been worried about science journalism for a while, but we've got a lot of new, modern new ways to reach people today. And things maybe look different with podcast landscape with National Geographic is reaching out, it's not just the print magazine, right? It's a web presence. How do you feel about the state of science journalism, and just the popular interest in science reporting and science stories?

I think it's a good time for journalism. And it's generally a good time for journalists. That's not true. For every small town newspaper, not every website can survive, right? But there are more people reading more news now than ever before in history, science, sports, business, whatever it is, people have this hunger, and social media has made it easy to feed that hunger constantly. So we have more news out there, we have more reporters digging for more things, the business of news isn't the same. It's much harder to make a profit in those and that drives our decisions. What stories are worth investing in and when which aren't. But one other side effect that really challenges journalists and science journalists is, you know, the believability. You know, how we're perceived by readers, you know, in this era of fake news of people miss trusting either the mainstream media or just the media in general, is that facts are subjective, that a story that is reported rather objectively could be seen as propaganda. Right. Right. That's, that's new. And that poses challenge, because even, you know, 20 years ago, you know, a story that was printed that had a series of facts and quotes in it was generally taken as the way the world was. Now we have almost anyone can produce news and report news on social media at any time. And that leads to kind of a crisis of credibility for a lot of what we're reading and getting right.

It's been one of these things that I've been a lot of people are thinking about, sort of scientists are sometimes worried about getting out there in the public and sort of advocating right and, and being engaged in policy debates and engaging, as Jay was saying, on the emotional side of things, right. So you might understand that you need that to reach people, but it's taking another step, at least outside the comfort zone, and maybe outside the zone of what you feel your responsibility as a scientist is right to sort of stay objective and neutral, right. And it's an interesting thing that we're now at a state where, like, even if you're staying objective and neutral, you're in the same in some sense, you're being perceived the same whether you went out there and resized or you just stayed totally neutral. And I don't know what that means for the state of scientists communicating and advocating and getting engaged in policy but it's for sure, a different world.

Yeah, I don't think the role of a journalist either to be neutral or objective. Neutral means sort of standing in the middle, right? Even though the middle might not be where the debate is raging. Right, right. And objective means sort of considering both sides Kids with equal weight when both sides might not, you know, have equal levels of research.

By now that both sides tell both sides stories. It's a real problem.

I think the role of a journalist is to be skeptical of to take every set of facts and be scrutinized, and whether you believe them where they come from who's coming up with them? And usually the people who have kind of the most evidence for what they're claiming, are the ones who are right. You know, and the people who don't have much to backup what they're saying. Don't have much to backup. But that speaks for itself.

Yes, has something right. Yeah

So I mean, you mentioned that the trust thing and in you know, and there's the emotional component, some people like reading what, you know, what makes them feel good, or what they agree with, right? So do you see? What's our sort of path out of this? If everybody can be saying what they want all the time, right? You see journalism going in a sort of different direction? Or how do journalists make sure that the people perceive them the way they want to be perceived? I don't know. It's a really good question. And it's sort of you know, our whole democracy kind of rests on the answer to it like, what will happen if people become more fractured, in what they believe and where they're getting their information? I do think eventually, this kind of national fever we have right now of partisan divisiveness will end eventually, I think it usually has in history. And we'll get to a point where we sort of settled on a new order and status quo. But you know, social media has done something that has never been done before in world history. It's it's democratized media. And it's enabled anyone anywhere to spread something and gain traction, not based on fact, but based on popularity, right. So I don't know how media is going to change with that. But my role as a journalist and the reporters that I edit, is not to try to change the news, business and change all of journalism. It's to just keep doing the best job we can. And hopefully, that's good enough. And if it's not, we'll know, but there's really nothing else we can do. You have any advice for young people who want to get into journalism? Run? I don't know. And I don't mean that. Journalism is a great, great, great field. And it's so rewarding. And you know, my journalism professor in college told me, he said, go into this field, if you want to have a front row seat to history, right. And that's it. Yeah. I mean, how, why when that captured your imagination, and he was right, I mean, seeing political events, seeing, you know, big cultural shifts and events and being able to talk to fascinating people. I mean, that is the major upside. The downsides are that it's really competitive, you won't become rich. And it'll be hard to grow a career, especially as more and more people want to be want to be journalists, younger and younger people generally have, you know, the skills for multimedia that older people don't, right, sure. But hey, there are more people reading news. And there, there's more of an appetite for news than ever before. So you know, if you want to go for it, absolutely. Go for it. And I think you'll have a lot of fun doing it. That's great. We want to be respectful of your time, but we really appreciate you know, taking a few minutes to talk to us then, you know, thanks so much. This has been great.

Thanks to the conversation. Thanks so much. 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.

Dr. Jon Herington is a political philosopher of applied ethics focusing mainly on the concept of risk within the fields of science, health, and technology. In today's discussion we cover the definition of security and what it means to be food secure as well as why simply labeling food as containing genetically engineered ingredients may not actually be in the best interest of individual consumers.

This interview was recorded in late 2018 before the USDA made a final ruling on the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Law. The standards have been set since, but we still feel that listeners will find this conversation interesting and useful. More information about labeling requirements can be found at: https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/be

For further reference to Dr. Herington's work, you can check out his personal website: https://www.jherington.com/index.php

Transcript:

Food Security and GMO Labeling with Dr. Jon Herington - Philosophy

Hello everybody welcome to the Global Food Systems podcast brought to you by Kansas State University's Office of Research Development I'm Jay Weeks.

Discussion that I've been really looking forward to we have double helping of philosophy today. As always, we have my co host, Scott Tanona from the Department of Philosophy. Hey there. And our guest today is John Harrington, a moral philosopher from the department of philosophy here at K State as well, you may be thinking philosophy, what does that have anything to do with the global food system? Well, let me tell you. His research focuses on moral and political philosophy with an emphasis on public health ethics, emergency ethics and security. This is a really nice opportunity to look at the food system from a perspective that, you know, we might do we don't often consider. So Jon, in your own words, how would you describe yourself?

Well, I'm a political philosopher, working in the department here at Kansas State. And most of my research is in Applied Ethics, and particularly, the ethics of risk. So that involves research on risks from really big global phenomena like climate change and pandemics through to risks from scientific research, and new technologies. And, as we'll probably get into today, a small part of my research has to do with the concept of food security, and some related kind of technological issues like GMO labeling.

So we definitely will be talking a lot about your risks and the work that you do. But how did you get into this initially? Like, what, what sparked your interest in philosophy? And then how did you kind of work your way to where you are now?

So, so in high school, I was part of the debate team at my high school. And as we know, you know, if you've ever participated in high school debate, there's a lot of kind of the kinds of questions that you that you're asked to deal with things like, you know, what should be the limits of free speech? Is there a God? You know, how should we respond to terrorism, these kinds of big questions, and the goal in debate is to these to win, right? It's to score points. Right? I was a terrible debater, because my approach to debating was to try and figure out what the right answer was to the question. And so it's kind of it's kind of tortured by like, a lot of these questions like, well, you know, what is the right answer? When it's free speech? Or how should we respond to terrorism? You know, I would kind of obsess over these questions. And so in a lot of ways that made me a terrible debater.

You ever score points for the other side?

But almost I certainly was kind of exercised by thinking about the objections to my own view and, and wanting to be honest about it. I was a terrible debater. But once I went to university, someone turned me on to the idea that maybe I should take a philosophy course if I was interested in this and the rest is history.

Are those interests? Where does that interest in and sort of the right answer sort of thing? Is that come from parents or is it doesn't you just inherently it was inherent to your being? I guess.

I think it just comes from a kind of natural inquisitiveness, that a lot of people share. It's that same kind of inquisitiveness that I think a lot of scientists have, which is, you know, they want to find out what's real. You know, what's true about the world, philosophers have the same kind of impulse where we kind of want to know what's real and what's true. But when kind of exercised by much more abstract questions in a lot of cases, you know, questions that aren't really easy to adjudicate, just by looking at a set of data, right, or looking at or collecting a bunch of specimens or thinking about kind of empirical facts, although empirical facts are often very important to plus. And so I think, you know, it's just a kind of the same impulse that a lot of people have, who go into a research work, which is just, we want to know what's true.

We keep on applying it, though. We never give up as philosophers, right? So it's important to just say I don't want to, I'm not going to try to give answers here. So I should let John speak for himself, too. But it's one of the things that I think is interesting about philosophy is that there are a lot of really important questions and I think Jon shares the same view. I should say, also, by the way, before I keep on talking is, John and I are working on some projects together, too. So there are, there are things that we do that are quite separate, independent, but there's a few projects that we're working on together. The so I know, he's got some similar views about some things, right. So a lot of these some different lenses. For sure, we know some of these too, right? Yeah. So the one of the things that's interesting, though, about a lot of the questions is that they deal with not just like the facts in the world, but also conceptually, how we thinking about things and values, right. So I think some of the things that I want to ask you about are about like, what, what certain things mean, basically, right, sort of a big philosophical question, right? So you want to say something about, like, how you got turned on to, in particular social political issues and sort of concepts of like security and health and food issues?

Yeah. So, you know, I think I just want to echo, of course, what you're saying, which is that that philosophy, you know, a lot of the work that philosophy does, when we're talking about kind of these concrete practical questions, we should back up a bit and say, you know, one question that people have is like, why is philosophy useful to practical questions at all? You're interested in these abstract questions, how do they apply to these practical questions? And I think that the discussion that Scott just gave us, gives us a way of answering that. One is that, you know, a lot of these practical questions rely on unexamined concepts, like, what is health? Or what is security? Or they rely on? hidden value assumptions? Right? You know, is it? Is it or is it good to be maximally healthy, right? Is it always the best thing to be maximally help healthy? You know, is security always valuable? And philosophers are very good at untangling first what these concepts might mean. And also untangling those hidden value assumptions that people have, and trying to make sense of them so that people can make better decisions for themselves about what they really care about.

So let's do that start to do that. On one thing, let's talk about security. Because I was just at a talk recently sponsored by global food systems, or at least partly sponsored, fully sponsored was

Yeah, I mean, it's fully sponsored. Okay.

Our speaker, the speaker there was talking about the potential for global food crisis, but then also said, a global food security crisis. Alright. So like, there's an extra word in there security, and you mentioned security. So I guess, sort of as the philosopher then sort of, like, what is security? And like, What is food security in particular, like, maybe you should say something about that?

Security is one of these like, kind of politically very powerful words, it motivates people to do things, right. When you hear the term security, you think, well, this is an extremely important, your initial response to think this must be really important. But it turns out that kind of defining the concept of security can be quite challenging. And there's been not a lot written on this over the kind of 20th century. My kind of take on security is that it's about the reliability of your basic needs. Right? So I'll get I'll give you an example of what I mean by talking a little bit about food security, right? So if you think about the FiOS definition of food security, which roughly put is something like it's someone is food secure when they have reliable, consistent access to sufficient food to meet their basic dietary needs, okay. What that means is that you can meet your basic needs kind of come what may, regardless of the circumstances, right, it's regardless of what you face in your life or the kinds of changes in market conditions or the change In the weather or the changes in your job status, or the changes in your family size, you can continue to meet your basic dietary needs. And we can distinguish that from two different concepts. One is how foods is secure, you can be distinguished from, like, what your actual food intake is, right? So day to day, right? You might, on Thursday, you might have to, we'll just think in calories because it's easier to think in calories, day to day on Thursday, on Monday, you might have 2000 calories of food. On Tuesday, you might have only 1000 calories of food, because you have difficulty finding appropriate food. On Wednesday, you might feast might be 4000 calories. And so there we're measuring your actual intake of food. Okay. The other thing that we might be interested in is your average intake of food, right? So might care about, like, over a week or over a month? Like what's your average daily caloric intake? That might be you know, regardless of how variable your intake is, right, it could come out to the 2000 calories. Food security is concerned with whether or not you meet a basic minimum each day. And in particular, what's your risk of not being able to meet?

So it's not just about what you're actually meeting, but about the potential that you might not be able to meet in a future? Is that right? Okay. Yeah, so this is we're not just worried about whether some people are, are starving or don't have enough food, we're worried about what the risk is that they might end up in that situation, even if they're doing okay, right now. Or the risk of they might be there tomorrow or something like that?

Yeah, that's right. Because a lot of people are able to meet the are able to actually meet their basic caloric needs each day. But they only do so because they're very lucky, right? They do so because they have kind of last minute, something happened, something swoops in to save them from styling that day, or starving that month. So in that sense, that they're a food insecure that whether or not they're going to meet their basic caloric needs, is really uncertain, right? Like, they could as a good, a good chance that they won't be able to do that. And even if they do, in fact, luckily, meet their basic needs, perhaps because some charitable organization swoops in and helps them or because the weather turns at the last minute and they're able to, you know, the weather turns in the last couple of days of the growing season and they're able to like grow enough food to meet their needs for the next month. They were incredibly insecure. Their ability to meet their car.

So is there a difference than if you turn from thinking about just somebodies? Let's say that the percentage of people who are not getting enough calories to sustain them, right? Well or to keep them healthy anyway, if you switch from that question and asking of our food systems how are we not? Who is not being served well by our current food systems and or the current market, you know? And, their income levels etc. Right to the question of who is actually food insecure? Right. So what changes when you move from like the one question to like who's starving right now to the second question, who's food insecure?

Part of it is that you're, you're now capturing a logic class, you're not now capturing a larger group of people whose lives are being shaped by their access to food, right? Whether or not you are on average, malnourished, right? Or whether or not you're able to kind of meet your caloric needs is one thing, right? That's one thing that seriously shapes might seriously shape your opportunities, your well being your health. But another thing that might seriously shape your opportunities and well being is whether or not you can rely upon your ability to meet those needs. Right? So we're shifting from when you think about food security, rather than just an inability to meet on when you're shifting from now. nourishment to Food Security. You're shifting to think about a kind of broader class a bigger problem, right that people face.

And so it's a bigger problem because these people have the potential or greater potential for being malnourished, like soon, right? Do we care about it otherwise, like, I think one of the things that people say with respect to the security, like even if you're actually severe in that edge position where you're actually like managing right now, to get all the calories you need. But if you're insecure, it means, like you said, you have to spend a lot of time thinking about this and working at it to get it done. Right. So there's a risk, but there's also some costs for being here. Right? Is that one of the things we should be caring about?

Yeah, so one reason you care about food insecurity is because there's a higher risk of being malnourished, right? That's the basic reason you might care about it. But there's all sorts of other benefits to security that we can kind of immediately appreciate. Right? I'll give you two. The first is, along with insecurity of any important good, comes a lot of anxiety, right? So to give you an example, if any of you have ever worked on a zero hours casual contract, right, if you ever worked a casual job, or you've ever worked as a server, where your hours are not fixed week to week, and if you're if you've relied upon that to pay your rent, one of the things that I always experienced as a casual workout, it was a tremendous amount of anxiety on Thursday, when the outshoot came out. Because if I didn't get the hours that I needed to make rent,

or the right shift, or the right or whatever, or the right shifts, or whatever,

I would be in serious trouble. Right. Now, it so happens that I did in fact, always get enough hours. Barely sometimes, but by and large, I got enough hours, right. But that didn't. The fact that I in fact, actually got enough hours didn't alleviate my anxiety each Thursday, because the risk of not getting enough hours was still there, right. And similar thing happens with food and security, if you even if you're able to meet your nutritional needs. If you are food insecure, you constantly have this risk weighing upon your shoulders that you won't be able to, to grow enough food to eat, or put or make enough money to purchase food at market prices. And that for a lot of people, I think has a kind of substantial mental health burden.

So how much does the role of perception play into something like this? And Azuro? Is there a way that, you know, people can maybe manage their anxieties so that, you know, even if they are on the cusp of insecurity, they can still improve their well being? Is that? Is that something you work with?

Yeah, so I think there is a lot of the benefits of security come from the kind of subject your subjective sense of security, what your how, what your subjective, how you appreciate or understand the risk. And as we know, it's often the case that people are pretty poor judges of the risk of some event occur.

Just look at your perception of weather, right? I mean, people get upset when it's, you know, 80% chance that rain and it doesn't rain.

Right. And this is like the plane versus the car to thing right. shootings are right, yeah, right.

Right. Right. So your planes are massively safer to ride in than cars, according to the statistics, even so many of us have a kind of anxious feeling when we bought a plane in a way that we don't when we bought a car. And I think there's two things to say about this. It's true, of course, that our subjective, what matters here for our people's anxieties, their subjective appreciation of the risk, and often that's at odds or can be at odds with what the actual risks are. It's not always though. And in fact, I would argue that often unless being objectively food secure is kind of necessary in order for you to feel secure. The second thing to say is, you know, we would like it to be the case that we could simply educate people who are already food secure about this fact, right, so that we could go up to people and say, look like, there's no need to worry, you. You know, given the insurance schemes, we have available, given the kind of charitable organizations that exist or given the kinds of, you know, social insurance schemes that that, that we have, you will always be able to meet your basic food needs, that's something that we've committed to. The problem, of course, is that telling people information like that is often not very effective. You need to do a fair bit of thinking about how you kind of educate people about this, this issue.

This is about people who are actually food secure, but they're worried like they're anxious, right? Sort of, okay.

So, and I should say, that's gonna be a relatively small boss of people.

But we can look at this from from another angle, right, and people who think that they are food secure, but you know, the food system could be a little bit more precarious

Right, so in fact, maybe more of us are food insecure? And in at least some sense, I think.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably, although I do not have any survey data to back this up. But I would suggest that it's likely that there are more people who are food insecure, but do not believe that they're food insecure, than there are people who are in fact food secure, but believe themselves to be food and security.

So one of these things gets down to sort of what you mean by secure. Right. So and I think that's something that we might want to ask you a little bit more about. And I think also, we should, we should ask questions about what you think about sort of the general food system, right, sort of like the you know, there are, there are plenty of conditions under which since we get so much of our food from from far away, right, you know, relatively far away that, you know, there are a lot of sort of catastrophic breakdowns, that sort of where we would be like we would be, you know, and have a tough shape, and have a tough time delivering our own food. Right, you know, so. So I want to ask you about that thing. But first, I think you said I don't want to lose the second one. You said there were two reasons to worry about food security, right? So like, there was the one was the anxiety, shake, you know, say, hey, look, being food insecure comes at a cost, like you're anxious, and you have to be worried about this. But there's a second, so we missed that somewhere.

Yeah, so that first part, the anxiety is a kind of like, it's the emotional response that we have to insecurity. But there's a kind of deeper worry about insecurity, which is that it really complicates our ability to form and pursue our plans. Right, especially if we if there's insecurity of basic needs. I'll give you an example. Right? Imagine you are a farmer, and you're deciding whether to plant a corn crop or a cotton crop. Right. If you plant the corn crop, then you can be reasonably sure that you'll be able to, to meet your basic food needs right corners, the subsistence crop your so long as it grows and produces a reasonable harvest. But I should say, depending on the size of your crop, you probably won't be able to meet much more than your basic food themes. Cotton, on the other hand, is a cash crop, it's likely that you'll be able to grow enough cotton and sell it at a reasonable enough price that you'll be able to both meet your basic food needs and make a substantial profit. But there's also a risk that the market for cotton might collapse, you might have difficulty growing enough cotton, and then you really won't be able to meet your basic food needs. In that kind of a situation. If you decide to grow the cotton crop, you're left with severe uncertainty about whether or not you're going to be able to meet your basic food needs. Right. And that's going to ripple through all their other plans. Right. So should you buy another tractor? Well, it depends upon whether or not you're going to need to store up a little bit of money to make sure to hedge against or insure against the possibility of your cotton crop failing. Should you get married? Well, if you can't meet your basic food needs, maybe you should delay getting married until you're able to ensure that you can provide for a family should you have another child should you send your child to school or should they stay at home to help you plant a second food subsistence crop to insure against the failure of your cotton crop. The idea being that if you're insecure with respect to a basic need like food, that kind of complicates the entire universe of your life, right? All of your other plans become your infected with this risk that you won't be able to meet your basic needs.

So for the everyday person that's food insecure, not not with respect to like the farmer, but sort of somebody, right, working on the job buys our food from the grocery store, etc, but doesn't always have enough money to do it and sort of has to think about these things in a way that that their food insecure, they don't they're not sure how much they're going to get the next day, right. So part of what I hear you saying is that we should be caring about that as much as we should be caring about it, we should be caring about that fact that there are people who because their food insecure, that affects their livelihood, their well being right, their ability to plan their ability to do things, right. And we should care about that as in addition to caring about people who are actually malnourished right now. Yeah.

Yeah, that's, that's right. So the kind of basic fact that if someone's food insecure, if someone in someone's income is variable enough that they may not be able to buy enough food. And we don't have a kind of social insurance scheme like snap or a scheme where, which enables people to always have access to the basic food needs that they require, then those people are going to have to constantly strategize about how they're going to use their meager savings. And in particular, they're going to have to hold back some resources in order to insure against the possibility that they won't have enough money next week to buy basic groceries. So instead of investing in their plans, or investing in a small business, or investing in their education, or their kids education, they have to hold back $100- $200 to ensure that they are able to meet their basic needs, week to week.

Well, there's even some evidence to suggest to that not only does this disrupt plans like that, but actually having this background, you know, anxiety or worry, or inability to plan actually impacts cognitive ability to write. So it's an additional handicap, so that they, you know, even though you have this tremendously complex issue, your cognitive faculties allow you to not deal with that as effectively as you would otherwise. Right.

Yeah, yeah, there's some really great behavioral economics, and cognitive science literature that's, that's been developed in the last couple of years, both in the context of modern urban societies that looked at the cognitive effect of poverty, and how being poor seems to kind of, or being unable or at risk of meeting your basic needs seems to diminish your capacity to think clearly, essentially. And also, there's been a lot of good work in the developed world, as well as the developing world as well, that's looked at, you know, how this kind of cognitive loading affects the lives of people like subsistence farmers and people who are trying to invest in their communities.

And by the cognitive load, I mean, part of it's just because you have to spend time thinking about like, how you're going to get the next meal, right. I mean, that's like, that takes up part of your time. Yeah. So what are so what are the biggest, like ethical and social political issues surrounding like food? And maybe you know, health more broadly, because you're talking about food in the context of health and well being both right. So like, what are the biggest issues there with respect to our systems and food systems?

So I think like you can't really talk about the social and political philosophy of food without talking about it is a kind of microcosm of broader social and political trends, right? Food Insecurity is both a kind of cause and a symptom of a number of really complex kind of social and political problems, right. And so when I think about food as a social and political topic, I think that the kind of number one thing to think about is a problem of absolute deprivation. So there's, there's a lot of people, roughly 800 million last time that FAO Did, did a survey that are severely malnourished, right? They're unable to meet their basic food needs. And, that's not a problem of production. In the aggregate, worldwide, were able to, to produce enough food to feed everyone adequately. It's a problem of distribution. It's a problem of how we distribute the food resources that we generate in abundance, really. To my mind, that's the kind of like number one bottom is, how do we think about ways of alleviating that absolute deprivation?

That our fair and just, which is not just about how do we produce more food? Right?

Because no, I mean, it's it's not just about how we produce more food, in part because of other issues that I think are equally important. So the kind of second big issue that I find when it comes to food and social and political philosophy is this trade off between the well being of currently living people, people who are, who are living around the world now. And the well being of future generations. At the moment, our food production processes, relatively fossil fuel intensive, it requires that we put a large amount of carbon up into the atmosphere, and that you might argue, ultimately undermines the well being of future generations. Or at least there's a serious trade off between feeding everyone now. Right, and being able to feed everyone in the future. And I think that that kind of trade off is that kind of trade off that social and political philosophers find really kind of interesting is one way to put it but at alarming is another way to put it as a kind of deep problem that we haven't I think grappled with sufficiently yet.

Is that question, so how dependent are those kinds of questions on how able we are globally to increase our production? Right? Sort of? Because one answer is just sort of well, right, we hope we figure it out and just figure out ways to produce more food in the future as population grows, etc. Right. But you're talking about sort of other issues that are sort of kind of run alongside that?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think, like, we shouldn't discount for the fact that, you know, producing more food is potentially part of the solution to this problem, right. Or at least producing more food in particular areas of the world, right. And places that are closer to those are more accessible to those who are now nourished, right, producing different kinds of food crops, or transitioning towards food crops that are or reallocating the way in which we currently use food crops. So perhaps traditional transitioning away from using a large amount of grain for meat production, out reallocating grain production or towards caloric intake amongst the malnourished. So I think, definitely producing more food might be part of the solution. But a lot of it is just about how we produce the food, where we produce the fish, and how we distribute what we produce right now.

So some of these problems are political, and could be potentially influenced by governmental influences. But also some of it, it's personal choice, right? You know, if you want to eat less meat or more meat, that's, you know, when you go to the grocery store, that's so how do we approach some of these problems from an individual or governmental issue? And where's the balance there?

Yeah, so I guess as a social and political philosopher, this is like one of the classic questions of social and political philosophy, like how should we balance? How much power should the government have over our individual choices? There's two kinds of questions what are our obligations as individuals, right? Do we have like moral obligations to reduce our meat consumption or change the way in which we purchase food so that it is grown and harvested more locally or is contributes to helping to feed the globally nourished? So they're our kind of personal moral obligations, and they might actually, hopefully shape our choices? And this is the second question, which is what happens when we when we collectively fail to meet those obligations, if we collectively are unable or unwilling to do what we ought to do? Is there a role for the state to step in and kind of not just in the right direction, or legislate to restrict the kinds of products that are available to us, or to change the way in which food is imported or produced in this country? And I think that's a difficult question. Right? It's a really difficult kind of trade off.

Yeah. I mean, so as it is now, I mean, so how would you describe are, at least in the US that? Well, so you're talking about the trade off between individual decision making and sort of governmental guidance or legislation? Right. And you're talking about it in terms of food production, and consumption and distribution? Right, you know, all these kinds of things, right, sort of. I mean, I think a lot of us sometimes, you know, we note certain areas where, where the government is involved in, you know, I mean, we notice when taxes come out of our paycheck, and we noticed certain rules that tell us we can't do this, or, you know, whatever, right? I mean, are there areas where you think they're sort of big failures of, of the government to be involved or areas, or conversely, areas where the government is, they're involved in ways which most of us don't notice, like in the shaping of the distributions, either, I'm leaving that open to your first sort of take your pick of like, what you want to say there.

So I think one, one thing to say is, how involved the government is, in particular areas of the economy is, in a lot of ways, not very principled at this point in time. So, you know, there's a lot of intervention in some areas of the food marketplace, and a lot less in others. And there have collectively been a lot of choices made about that was a choice that we made, kind of collectively or a choice that was made for us. And we could choose otherwise. As a political philosopher, the kind of thing that you ask yourself is when is it legitimate for the state to intervene? And there's a lot of different answers to that question. Right. So I don't want to I don't want to brush aside the differences that philosophers have over this, this question, not gonna solve it right here. So the question of state paternalism in 40 minutes. But one thing that most people agree upon is that the state ought to be able to help us coordinate our behavior, where the kind of individual incentives that we face, that what would be rational as an individual consumer to do, or collectively undermine our well being or collectively undermine a kind of a good. The classic example of this is a thing called the tragedy of the commons, which I won't kind of rehearse here. But the idea is a view. Each of us had this, it's this incentive to purchase a product or use a particular resource. If all of us use that resource, then that resource is likely to collapse or degrade or become non existent overfishing is overfishing is

the air quality, right? That's another issue. Yeah, quality,

one person polluting a little more doesn't make a difference. Right, right.

But collectively, we all make this difference. And so I think when it comes to food, that kind of big tragedy of the commons issue, or the big collective action problem that we face, is to do with antibiotic resistance. So there is a kind of big individual incentive for individual meat producers, if you're producing particularly swine, or chickens. To a lesser extent, beef cattle, but mostly chicken and swine, there's a big incentive to use kind of persistently use antibiotics in the feed that you give your animals in order to protect them from disease. So it's partially a animal welfare issue. But also because these antibiotics or growth promoters, though, they make bigger chickens and bigger swine and make more money on the market, and each individual farmer or individual producer who does this doesn't make a big impact. But collectively, the use of all these antibiotics is driving the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Right. So there's a lot of worry, for instance, about the use of tetracycline agriculturally, which is related to a class it is not used for humans, but it's related to a class of human antibiotics. And that's one area where there's been a lot of concern. That seems like an area where the state could do a lot more than tents right now. In fact, the CDC for many years has warned about the agricultural use of antibiotics as a key driver of antibiotic resistance.

So I was wondering if maybe we can shift to something a little different, though there's a lot to keep on talking about this topic, right. But uh, but I want to, I want to get a sample of the different kinds of ethical, social political issues or around food that you've that you've been working on. So you were talking about risk to different parts. One is the sort of the way we individually make decisions, right, sort of, we might undertake some risk, and, and to both ourselves and to others, and sort of, you know, collectively, it's not good, but you're also talking about misperceptions of risk individually. Right. And we talked about planes. But one of the things I know you've worked on as individual misperceptions of risk about GMOs, right, and as related to food, so you want to say something about that? About, about what some of that work is about?

Yeah, so, I got interested in the GMO issue about two or three years ago, during a public policy debate that was occurring at the time over whether or not we ought to mandatorily label GMOs should we require manufacturers of products that contain GMO ingredients to label them as, as such, I was a little bit concerned about the kind of way that the rhetoric around GMO labeling had evolved. For many, many years, people have had, this concern about the risks the health risks of GMOs. Some people have concerns about the environmental risk of genetically modified organisms. In many ways, these perceptions that people have are at odds with the kind of body of scientific evidence so far, about particularly the health risks that go with the health, the health risks of GMOs.

In other words, the evidence suggests there's no no little or no difference, right, in terms of actual health risk of genetically modified foods, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So the evidence could shift over 20 or 30 years. Right. But so far, the evidence suggests that there's very little additional health risk from GMO foods, right. But there are a lot of people. In fact, the latest, the last study that I looked at said about 40% of people still considered GMOs, unsafe to eat. Right. So products containing GMO ingredients to be unsafe to eat. So there's real gap between what the kinds of scientific evidence about the health risks of GMO containing products, what the scientific evidence says about those health risks, which is there's evidence so far says that there's very little.

It's important to know that the evidence is based on tests you do for other substances that we accept as being safe corrected there, the experiments are done in a very similar way.

Yeah, I mean, the the examination of the different compounds that are generated by GMO producing products run in just the same way as the the examinations of any other compounds, like a new pesticide, or a new or new crossbred plant or a new traditionally generated strain of corn or millet or whatever.

So is this just people being sort of there's a sense in which it's sort of they're, they're just being risk averse. They're just saying, Hey, there's this risk, and I want to avoid it, or I mean, you think that the ways you were talking nurses suggest that, you know, if you're going to be risk averse, with respect to this, these are just a safe as a whole bunch of other things that we do is kind of like the planes and the cars, right? It's kind of right. Yeah.

I mean, I think there's probably three different classes of people who have concerns about GMOs. The first class are people who have kind of sincere, religious or ethical objections to the modify the modification of organisms through the kind of bio engineering process. They believe that that kind of direct genetic alteration, or the kind of radical introduction of trans genes from radically different species, that's kind of morally or religiously illegitimate procedure. So that's one class though those folks, it's not a question of risk, not just that GMOs are illegitimate, right. There's a second class. And I think this is probably the largest class who don't haven't really spent a lot of time thinking about this, or about or working into the health risks of GMOs or if they have They've done a kind of simple Google search, or they've read some popular media articles about GMOs. And that class, if they are concerned about GMOs are concerned, I think about health risks. I think they're concerned about those health risks erroneously, I think that it's just a matter of them not having had the time, or the energy to really dig into,

or the appropriate information to help them or whatever else it takes. Right. Okay.

So there's a kind of misunderstanding that that group, and then there are, there will be some people who are well informed about GMO agriculture who are well informed about genetic modification and its health risks, but are simply kind of very averse to the risk, right? They think that it's not time yet. GMO contain products have only been on the market for about 20 years. Right.

So would you put in his class that people were worried about the environmental risks too? Or is this a separate thing?

Well, the maybe this photograph, but yes, I mean, I think a lot of people who are motivated by this kind who understand GMOs relatively well, who've done a fair bit of research, and understand that the scientific evidence so far doesn't point to any additional risk over conventional agriculture, that if they're still concerned about GMOs, they're worried about the kind of long term or longer children or effects of 20-30 years of eating genetically modified food, or they're worried about the long term on good to normal effects of 20 or 30 years of genetically modified moto culture, and its environmental effects. And their concern is that it's the evidence that we have so far while it says that there's no additional risk isn't the end of the story they want, they want more time to evaluate whether or not these products would have public health effects, and I think most of them suspect they would. And they're kind of risk, they're averse to this unknown.

So how does this apply to the labeling issue?

Maybe we should start with what the labeling issue? Yes.

So go from there. Yeah, sure. So. So when we talk about GMO labeling, the labeling of consumer products in general, there's a kind of couple of distinctions to get ahead of. The first is that, you know, labels that we find on our soup cans, or on our cereal packets, or whatever the Their function is to disclose information, right. And most of that those disclosures of information on the soup can or the cereal packet are voluntary, right, the company who wants to sell you this product, volunteers a certain set of information. Right? Now, the government regulates those labels in all sorts of different ways, right? In particular, it prevents people from creating misleading labels, labels that obscures the truth about what this particular product is, or give a false impression of what the product contains. So the kind of best example of this is, if you ever go to the to the the fruit juice aisle, in your supermarket, you will notice that many of the orange juice containers they either say from concentrate or not from concentrate. And the reason that they say, from concentrate or not from concentrate is because the government required this distinction to be labeled clearly. Right. So a lot of the regulations that the government makes on labeling regulations designed to kind of prevent direct statements of fact from being false, or like or misleading. But there is another class, which is sometimes the government requires the disclosure of information, it prevents the company from omitting certain kinds of information. So the two best examples of that are the nutritional label that you find on the back of most products, and ingredient and allergen information. And the government does this because it thinks that for the nutritional labels, it thinks that there's a kind of public health benefit to doing so. Right, that giving people more information will help kind of reduce, public health problems like heart disease and obesity and metabolic syndrome and diabetes. Right. And the GMO labeling issue is one of these kinds of issues. It's a question of whether or not we should require manufacturers of genetically modified products to disclose that fact, just like we require manufacturers to disclose the fat content of their product. So this, this kind of question all came to a head in about 2014 2015, after a long, long, long period of back and forth between advocates of GMO labeling and industry who resisted the mandatory labeling, the kind of arguments that advocates for GMO labeling made shifted over a kind of decade long process. So, initially, in the early 2000s, the arguments were that labeling GMOs were inherently risky. They are inherently they pose health and environmental risks. And so we ought to label them as a kind of warning to consumers, right. Just like you might think the saturated fat label is a warning as to public health. The argument that advocates of mandatory labeling made there was that public health requires that we label these things that because the scientific evidence over the last 10 years doesn't support this idea that this would increase public health. The argument shifted around 2013 2014 to the claim that it doesn't matter whether or not GMOs pose a health risk, or pose an environmental risk, we need to mandatorily label these products, because doing so would improve consumer autonomy.

So I bet you it's gonna take us a long time to really unpack that. So how about you say quickly, sort of what the line there is? So the autonomy is like, hey, look, I just want to know, right? You know, that's the autonomy, like you're gonna give me more information, I'm better off right. For my own interests, right, make my own choices.

I'm sure but you argue that that's not the case, when mandatory GMO labeling is instituted, right, and we should note that in 2016, the government did pass the National bioengineered food disclosure standard. And those final regulations are due to come out. Well, they were due to come out in July, I believe, but are a little late, due to come up with the end of the year. And the USDA Agricultural Marketing Act has defined a bioengineered food, which is what we think of as a genetically modified food, it was added in this discussion as food that contains genetic material that has been modified through in vitro recombinant DNA techniques, and for which the modification could not otherwise be obtained through conventional breeding or are found in nature. So just for people are wondering what exactly the standard is, but you're against, you know, the labeling aspect of it. So how did that all flesh out?

Well, so the the basic argument from advocates who had this kind of consumer autonomy argument was that look, people just want to know, and it's true, in fact, that if you, Paul, if you take a poll, most people, in fact, would support mandatory labeling of GMO products, it seems like a lot of people want to know whether or not something contains GMO ingredients. And so the argument was, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. These things pose a health risk or an environmental risk. Simply giving people the information allows them to make an informed choice about whether or not this product is for them.

So in some sense, that sounds like a no brainer, right? So like, why is that complicated, then?

I mean, it's complicated, because the concept of autonomy is complicated. In really broad strokes, you might think of autonomy in one of two ways. The first way is a kind of a kind of libertarian view of autonomy. The idea is that you are autonomous, when you're free to kind of make the choices that you want to make, right? You're free, so long as no, you're, you're autonomous, so long as no one is kind of forcing you to do something that you would not want to do right. Now. That's one, one account of autonomy, right? The idea is that you really kind of that you should just be left alone, right? Autonomy is about being left alone and not being like manipulated or influenced by other people, right. Another view of autonomy or kind of what's sometimes called a positive or a perfectionist view of autonomy, is that know what it means to be autonomous is for you to have the requisite knowledge And to have appropriately reflected upon your desires, and your wants, such that what you choose to do is kind of authentically yours, right? Like you're really making a choice that is, that is directed at the things that you really want deep down, but also, that the choices that you make are like a fully informed with a relatively complete understanding of the facts, right. And the degree to which you're more fully informed, and more and your desires are more authentic, the more autonomous you are, right.

So I've ate a jelly doughnut thinking that's going to be healthy for me. Right? That's not, right. Something like that is not so I'm not fully autonomous, then is the idea. So data misunderstanding, so definitely on jelly.

I mean, it's good for your well being makes me happy, right? Yeah.

So the perfectionist is going to say, look, if you walk into the donut shop, and you are under the illusion, that donuts are a health superfood, right, that they're going to cleanse you of all the toxins that are in your body that you're going to like that living solely on doughnuts would be like a, you know, a complete diet, right? giving you all the like nutrients that you require. That your purchase of a donut is not autonomous, right? Like you, you might have this authentic goal, which is I want to be healthier, right? But your understanding of what means are going to get you to that goal, what kind of actions are going to bring you closer to that goal is kind of radically confused.

So in some sense, I'm being manipulated by my misunderstanding, or something like that. Right. So I need to say before we talk more about donuts, I know, I know that people own like one of the major donut shops in Manhattan. So right, so donuts are wonderful. eating right, you know, if you do it under, yeah. So you know, right? So let's talk about the autonomy part of the like, yeah,

so, so the perfectionist, this, this second view about autonomy is going to is us, in addition to saying that the person who walks in thinking donuts or amazing super healthy food is acting non autonomously, they're going to say that if you walk into the donut shop, and you buy a doughnut, because you want the delicious taste of fried dough, then you are acting autonomously. I mean, so long as you are going into things with your eyes open. There's no kind of complaint that you're acting on autonomously? It doesn't, it doesn't require that you choose a certain set of things, right? Like you don't have to do the right thing, right? It's just that you know, enough to make the decision for yourself. That's right. It's just that you are acting with a kind of full understanding of the consequences of what you want to do.

But we are never fully autonomous when we're making all of our food decisions, right? I mean, we can't possibly reflect on every food that we've ever eaten, especially when I go to grocery store or something like that.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, so the perfectionist is a kind of ideal standard, right? They're saying that there's this, there's this ideal, which is full and total autonomy that none of us met. Right. But they're getting closer to that is what improving or respecting or promoting consumer autonomy requires.

Okay, so then for GMOs, let's see how quickly we can do this. Because I know it'll get complicated, but sort of then for GMOs, the requirement, the ideas that require GMO labeling supposed to be good for my autonomy helped me be more autonomous in my decision making on a perfectionist view than that, that doesn't hold.

Why it doesn't hold because a large proportion of the population has fundamentally mistaken views about what the scientific evidence about GMOs says. So within the last, I mean, we just we were just talking about this, the last Pew poll said about 40% of people considered GMOs, unsafe to eat. It's just not congruent with the evidence that we have so far about the health risks of GMOs.

To say that, that's true in many of these people. And so many of these people are eating GMOs and maybe don't necessarily know it, right, because 90-90% Over 90% of soy and corn in the United States is genetically modified, and about 70 to 80% of the food in a store, or at least contain something from it. Yeah, yeah.

So the idea. The idea, then is that if you're required labeling of GMOs, in some sense, that's sending a signal to people that Like is reinforcing this misconception kind of is that the major concern?

The basic, concern is that if you label GMOs with this label at the bottom that says This product contains genetically modified ingredients, that it essentially acts as a warning. And that the warning, or the warning reinforces a set of false beliefs that people have about what the evidence about GMOs suggests. And that to reinforce those false beliefs is, in fact, to manipulate someone, right? It's, in fact, to decrease their autonomy. The perfectionist would say, Look, if we're serious about increasing people's autonomy, we shouldn't just be labeling, we should be engaging in a widespread campaign of education and dialogue about what is the scientific evidence, say about the risks and benefits of GMOs? What are some of the genuine trade offs that we might point to? Right? And, you know, that kind of education process would be a lot harder. It will be a lot more time intensive than simply labeling, but it would be a way of protecting and promoting people's autonomy that didn't allow their kind of misconceptions to dominate their reasoning.

I think this is a really good example of how something that seems kind of straightforward, like how could more information be bad, right, sort of I mean, all we're asking for is just more information that actually there's many layers of here of of consideration at the sort of ethical level in terms of the relationship between the government and, and your individual autonomy, whichever version of those that it is, and sort of in general, like the social political scene, right, and this is all complicated stuff.

So I mean, just to kind of wrap up this a little bit, there are different ways in which this information can be disclosed, right, that will be allowed through this act. There's either just the label stuck on the can or package or whatever. But there's also like the QR codes, or some, I think you can offer a phone number to call to ask and that sort of thing. So I mean, is there one you favor over another? Do you think there shouldn't be any period?

So I think my view is that a kind of ingenious solution to this autonomy problem is to allow or to require manufacturers to provide access to the information should someone wish to access that information? Right. The kind of way that the bioengineered food standard Act allows for this is that manufacturers could produce a QR code, which is a kind of fancy graphic, that that embeds a link that you can access using your phone, or a simple phone hotline, where consumers would be able to ask the manufacturer whether or not the food contains or potentially contains GMO ingredients. And then what you're doing is you're allowing people for whom GMO, agriculture JNI organisms are a kind of genuine, well considered deeply held risk or conviction, right? These people who can have deep convictions about the wrongfulness of GMO agriculture are the are sincerely risk averse, that those people have access to the information without activating the kind of false beliefs of the very large number of people who have in large part not really had the time or the inclination to reflect upon GMO and kind of making a gut judgment about whether or not this this these ingredients are safe. That said odds with what the evidence would suggest. And so I think like the kind of past what's called a passive labeling scheme, where people are able to access that kind of information is an appropriate way forward.

Do you think that that's how the government's going to lay out the standards? Do you have any feeling about what the final verdict is gonna be?

I mean, I don't think any of us should be in the business of predicting what regulations are going to come out. The USDA, under the current act, I think passive labeling is one of the options that would meet the standard, precisely what the regulations say is.

I guess we'll find out so hopefully, by the end of the year, mode will be respectful of your time, we really appreciate you taking, you know, over an hour to talk to us. Just as a last note, is there anything if somebody was student or person was really interested in this sort of stuff? Are there any resources or ways that they can get more involved any books or anywhere, anything that you might recommend?

Well, they're more than welcome to read my article. Which you can find via my website, if you simply Google my name, you should be able to find my article provide links. Sure. Yeah. And it's for people who want to know what's called against the autonomy argument for men mandatory GMO labeling. It's in public affairs quarterly in 2018.

So Well, thank you, Jon. We really appreciate it and like Scott was for being here. Thank you so much.

Plant pathology is the study of diseases in plants and importantly in those plants grown to feed the world. Dr. Martin Draper shares his thoughts on how these diseases affect food sustainability historically, now and in the future.

For more information on the important work carried out in the area of plant pathology you can read more at: https://www.npdn.org/. Or read more about Dr. Draper and his work at: https://www.plantpath.k-state.edu/about-us/

Transcript:

Global Food Security and Crop Diseases with Dr. Marty Draper - Plant Pathology

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Global Food Systems podcast brought to you by Kansas State University's Office of Research Development. I'm Jay Weeks as always, we have my co host, Scott Tanona from the Department of Philosophy. Hey there. Today we have Dr. Marty Draper, Interim Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies, associate director of K State Research and Extension, and department, Head of the Department of Plant Pathology here today to speak with us about the kinds of work that plant pathologists do and why it's important, already has a impressive career past, including he was the director of the plant pest diagnostic lab and seed health testing lab at North Dakota State University, extension plant pathologist from South Dakota State University. He was the national program leader for Plant Pathology and integrated pest management at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture on Washington, DC for 10 years before coming to K State in 2016, to serve as a department head of the plant pathology.

Yeah, so what do I do, I try and make sure that all the wheels stay on the bus for the for the most part, but it's been kind of a long journey to get to where I am from being a city kid in Omaha, Nebraska, urban area, and finding my way into agriculture, where I really felt like I belonged.

So what is plant pathology in your opinion?

Sure. So plant pathology is really about the study of the diseases of plants. So we like to think of ourselves as plant doctors, folks might be surprised to realize that the same organisms that cause diseases in animals and humans can cause diseases in plants, not the same specific organisms, but bacteria, fungi, viruses, there are each of those, each of those groups of organisms has pathogens that can attack various plants. And probably the best example that people are familiar with of a plant disease crisis was the Irish potato famine. And now granted, that was more than just the disease because there was politics that came into play. But I think when we're looking at food systems, politics and policy, are also drivers in how society responds to whatever that crisis is biologically.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think the politics definitely was gonna play a huge role in a lot of this. For those of the listeners who aren't too familiar with the Irish Potato Famine, what exactly happened.

So this was about 1845 to 1847. During that period of time, the population of Ireland decreased by about half due to Immigrations and, and deaths from hunger. To this point, the population of Ireland has not rebounded to where it was in 1845. So it wasn't the cause that but the let's do the biology first. Sure. So there's a fungus like organism called Phytophthora infestans. that's native to South America. And that's where potato is native to. So potato had found its way to Europe. And eventually the pathogen found its way to Europe, on potatoes, it's an obligate organism that you really have to have in the potato itself to survive. Ireland has just about the ideal environment for this disease to develop. And when you think about where potato late blight occurs in South America and Central America, it's really in the highlands, where potato was, is, or the centers of origin are of potato in Peru and Bolivia, and into the highlands of southern Mexico. So it was just a very favorable situation than the practices that that particularly the serfs of the time were carrying out, they would just pile potatoes and it was a cheap source of food. A man might live on eight pounds of potatoes a day. If they were rotting, they didn't get thrown away, they might just get tossed into a pile. And when those rotting potatoes are in a pile, they sporulate the spores blow out, in fact more. And clearly it was a crisis. You know, most of those peasant population didn't have really even much for sources of protein. So they might have, they might have one pig or one cow, and those were kind of treats and you didn't so you, you wanted to raise that cow until you could optimize it. And you'd sell part of it and you'd save part of it as much as you could. So I want to ask about the pathology point of view sort of from the work that you do and the work that a plant pathologists would do. You said sort of the doctors So you would you be paying attention mostly to what's going on in the potato and the organism? Or, you know, how much do you think about the systems of how potatoes are treated and stored and kept? And that kind of thing? Well, the answer, that's really all of the above. So, as a, as a pathologist, you know, far too often we see things. At the end, we wind up being asked to do kind of the post mortem on it, but we would much rather be there forecasting when the risk is occurring, and helping people address the problem before it becomes an economic issue. When you look closer back to 1845, those were really that was the infancy of plant pathology, it was through that disease that we actually understood the nature of infectious disease, so we can talk about what Pasteur did. But it was really Anton de berry that first proved the germ theory of disease, and it was on plants, right. So this is important for everybody to get a perspective here. It was not that long ago, right, that we understand infectious disease are absolutely correct.

So if the late blight that caused the Irish potato famine occurred in Peru, where it was originated, why weren't they having such major issues there like they had in Ireland? Well, they did.

I mean, there were instances of failed crops there as well. But there also is much more diversity. And so, you're dealing with species of potato instead of varieties of one species of potato. And so we had a very narrow genetic base in Europe. But it's very interesting when you're in when you're in South America, and looking at the things that they call potato. They're purple, and they're red, and the flesh is different colors. And the skins are different colors, and they're modeled and they're tiny, and they're big, and they're Knobby, and they're smooth, and it's every possible variation that you can think of on those tubers. And the other thing about the indigenous populations in South America is they became very, very adapted to whatever was happening to the potato. So there's another disease called soft rot, that we would ordinarily throw the potato wafer that soft rot, they turned it into Jr. Just a preserved form of potato. Sort of, it's not pleasant to eat, as far as I'm concerned is like pickled there. No, it's a little bit like chalk. As far as I'm concerned. It's kind of it's kind of like it's kind of like a freeze dried potato,

And acquired taste. Yeah.

So is that helped with storage then? Or maybe? So once? Once it's gone through that process? What's left is pretty stable. So could you say something more about the lack of genetic variation, sort of how important that is to basically now controlling for problems like this, I think every instance that we have looked at through history where there's been a major, a major disease outbreak, it's been because of narrow genetic base. And so when we think about looking at our current crop production practices, where you have fields and fields and fields that are very similar, there is a vulnerability there. And last weekend know what the genetic properties the traits are in those crops. So another example was in the early 1970s, there was a disease called northern corn leaf blight. And the susceptibility was carried along because of a male sterile gene. And we sat we saw northern corn leaf blight from the Florida Panhandle, moving all the way up into the Midwest. And where I grew up in Iowa, there were substantial losses. So so is the the benefit of diversity, mostly just that, hey, look, if you have a wider diversity of plants, fewer of them are going to be hit with this particular disease, or is it also that because fewer of them are being hit in a particular area, you're going to see less spreading? Yes, it's both of those things. So it's, it's both the susceptibility and the inoculum potential, what we call the inoculum potential, how many spores are being produced on susceptible plants. And in fact, we have a situation that's developing right now in western Kansas, where we have a concern of an expanding vulnerability in our wheat crop, where we have susceptibility to wheat stem rust, which is traditionally been one of the most damaging diseases worldwide, where we have about 30% of the acreage in the western western portion of Kansas that is susceptible to the currently prevalent race of, of stem rust, the stemless bat pathogen, the fungus that causes it, and so you've got a narrow genetic base on the pathogen side, and you've got a narrow genetic base on the host side. We're just waiting for the environment to come together in order to have a crisis situation develop. So there's the phrase monoculture, right that people use for this for convenience, right, that it makes sense to plant a bunch of the same variety right? You know, how I mean it, maybe you could speak to a little bit sort of what the advantages of that are. And then you're talking about from the pathology side of diseases, what the disadvantages are and sort of I'm interested maybe on your perspective of like how we got here. Right, and whether, you know whether we're just ready for a change now, or we should have been doing something differently all along? Well, I think, you know, first of all, the thing to bear in mind is that the most cost effective and efficient way of managing disease is through host resistance. So where are we know that we have resistance, and we can bring it into a crop? We want that to be there. And we want it to be effective against the prevalent, prevalent genetics and the pathogen that's out there. Some pathogens are, more general in their attack of the crop than others. How did we get there? Well, I mean, it's really good to have a crop that matures at the same time matures evenly, the quality is uniform. And you can expect what you're going to get out of the field. Markets drive some fat, we want a certain protein content we want, we don't want sprouting various various traits and qualities that are going to come into play that are going to influence what a producer is going to want to plant because they want to be able to be sure that they're going to get a profit out of the deal. One of the things that when you say, hey, look, one of the one of the issues here is with how the lack of diversity that we have right sort of there that a crop, like here in Kansas, sort of we've got a pretty narrow genetic range, right, sort of in where we're open to potential problems, right, sort of, can imagine resistance back to this right sort of that it sounds like you're saying, we've been doing something wrong, right? Or that we've got right, that your practice should have been different, that starts to get us a little bit into the culture and politics. Right, right. And I'd rather you tell me how to fix this. And let me keep on doing this thing, then tell me I have to do something totally different. We'd lots of concerns, drive decisions, right? So I have one problem, I'm going to address that problem that may expose me to another problem. Maybe I don't expect that I'm going to see that problem I have made, I've made a risk decision. And I'm going to say that I am less, less averse to that risk than I am to this other risk. And we make decisions like that every day, even when we cross the street or so some of those things are just paying attention to them. Right? So Right. I mean, sometimes those things are really just part of our normal course of the day and when we pay more attention to the decision, we maybe have a better opportunity to be responsive to it and be preventative. But you know, genetics is not the only way that you can address a problem. So there may be tillage practices, cultural practices that you bring into play we may use, we may use chemical fungicides to help manage as a stopgap. Sometimes we'll use those as a preventative, sometimes we'll use those as a rescue treatment, they're never going to work as well as a rescue as they are in a preventative situation. But they become economic decisions, too. So when you look at starting the season with a crop and you've got a budget for that crop, I have not factored in this additional cost, it's hard to then plug it in at the end. I have factored that it in I don't need to use it. I'm not going to use it I just increased my profit margin. So planning and being comprehensive in that planning is really important. How much is a scientist to you? In from the plant pathology point of view, do you really want to be recommending to people say hey, look, there's trade offs, right? Sort of and you got you do one thing, you take a risk on one side, you do something else? So you're taking a different kind of risk, right? And sort of from one perspective, then from a farmers point of view, it's what they have to decide is what risks are they willing to take, right? And what do they want to do? And how do they want to plan so from from the scientists point of view, you might be just sort of giving them information to help them plan how much you think it's the job then from from like your side to help actually move along a certain kind of policy, a certain kind of policy or practice well, so we do try and guide practices every year. So our Extension specialists are frequently putting out information about we're seeing this disease developing. These are susceptible varieties. This is a response you might take a stop gap. In my previous time as the extension plant pathologist in South Dakota, I was on a weekly scouting tour of the state trying to keep track of where things were at. I was always reading the newsletters from adjacent states to see where their risks were because they were informing me on what I might expect in seven to 10 days. I spent some time in the diagnostic lab in North Dakota. And I would read the newsletters from South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas because I had in the time I was there I could kind of figure out how long it was going to take from a get from more net would get to hear to when I would see it on the next step next state. And then I could come up with a pretty efficient prediction on when I was going to start seeing it in our diagnostic lab.

So What are some of the ways in which it moves from state to state? Is it something we can prevent? Or is it solely based on things like the weather?

Yeah. So it depends on the pathogen that you're talking about. And some of them are wind borne. So when we talk about the rusts, when we talk about late blight, they're both wind borne, but the distance that can travel is dramatically different. So late blight spores are, very light color, they're very susceptible to ultraviolet light. And so they're really viable for maybe a couple of miles on a cloudy day, on a sunny day, they just aren't very viable at all. Rust spores are darkly pigmented, protected, they're melanized protected from UV light, and they can travel a long distance. Later, hundreds of miles across continents sort of scattered.

Yeah, so one of the favorite stories I used, I spent some time working on soybean rust when it was introduced, when it started making its way across the world. And it was in southern Africa. And then all of a sudden, it showed up in South America, it had blown across the Atlantic Ocean. And that's and and so as we were looking at it in Brazil and Argentina and Paraguay trying to understand, okay, what might this thing look like if it makes it to North America? While we were working on it in the roughly 2002 to 2005 range. We're watching it work its way north and we said oh, well, you know, when it gets to the equator, it's going to hit the doldrums, it's not going to be able to find its way across it found its way across there said that we said there's no soybeans there. So there's not really going to be a great threat, we found that it was actually very, very efficient on dry beans and Columbia. And then Hurricane Ivan came and brought it across the Caribbean. And so sometimes these things can move very quickly. And a lot of it has to do with the viability of the pathogen as well as its biology.

Well, some of the effects that we see of climate change with increased storm intensity and things like that, will that have any impact on how quickly these spread?

I think we could see some of these diseases driven by some of the severe storms for sure hurricanes, in particular. What we saw with Hurricane Ivan and soybean rust, the southern corn leaf blight, there were storms that were involved in moving that along you're dealing with prevailing wind patterns. But when you see that there was something that came from Florida, worked its way into Arkansas and then came up into Iowa and Illinois, that is not a prevailing wind pattern. So there are other drivers behind it that are getting it to where it's going. And a lot of it has to do with where the susceptible plant material is to is there increased risk in areas if the temperature is changing, that you know you don't have native plants that are already you know, going to be resistant to the things that might be coming in is that sort of angles and challenge. It is very interesting when you look at the USDA ARS Plant Hardiness map, we have actually seen that those hardiness zones have moved one to two zones to the north already. And we are seeing an association of pests moving along with it. So something that may have only been fit in South Florida is now moving up into Georgia and South Carolina and Alabama. So when we've seen introductions of past and sometimes we don't know why they came here, we don't know how they came here. And sometimes the there's a complexity in the disease cycle. I think about something like Laurel wilt that's affecting Red Bay in the Atlantic coast along Florida and Georgia and up into the Carolinas. You know, people used to look at Red Bay and they'd say, yeah, what is it? It's just a little tree. It's a scrubby tree. Well, it was the predominant understory tree in the coastal areas. When it died out. There was nothing breaking the wind and all of a sudden the big pines were getting blown over okay. But it's a wilt disease that's a lot like Dutch elm disease. And it's vectored by a little teeny tiny beetle. And we don't know if it came in on wood that was imported probably into savanna. Or if it can came in with beetles that were in something. All we know is that Red Bay was really susceptible. And so now that has moved clear up into Maryland. It's moved across the Gulf Coast. And one of the great concerns is that avocado is susceptible. So fortunately the Florida avocado industry is not huge, but those are the low fat avocados. that that are kind of promoted as a healthier avocado, the house avocados it hasn't moved into any areas where those are produced yet but but there is a danger and the folks in California are really concerned about it not only for avocado production but because they also have Laurel species that that grow along the coast and are really important in stabilizing the coastline. So there's food concerns along with these disease epidemics, there's also natural resource concerns. So could you follow up on that sort of what how do you make that distinction natural resource versus the food. So for example, was talking about the stabilization of the shoreline some of these plant species that we don't really think about very much vz worry about like timber and things like this too, are sure timber there are huge issues with diseases in timber, white pine blister rust has minimized the five needle pine industry, particularly around the Great Lakes. Some absolutely intriguing diseases. When I was in North Dakota, we actually had a first report of, white pine blister rust showing up in North Dakota, and it was in the Bismarck area right smack in the middle of the state. And you're thinking, Okay, how did it get here, there aren't trees for miles, that would be 10s of hundreds of miles that would have been susceptible. I don't know how it blew in one tree, 30-40 year old tree. The very interesting thing was, that's kind of a midpoint between two genetic populations. So we were really concerned that if we saw it show up there what it would actually be genetically and so we spent quite a bit of time after that tracking to determine whether or not we were going to see anything more. Not much Eastern White Pine there, but a lot of limber pine. And so limber pine is another five needle pine that's susceptible to the disease.

So when you come across something like that, what's the course of action? Is there a generic route that you take? You've identified something and then there's steps to take in place to try to minimize its impact? Or what do you do.

So it really depends on what the biology of the disease is. So in the case of white pine blister rust, just used, eradication is the first thing we're going to do, we're going to just, we're just going to get rid of it. And then we'll monitor and make sure that it's been isolated. And in fact, that worked beautifully there. Had no problems after that never saw anything more, in the case of an introduced a new introduced pathogen. So let's talk about soybean rust, USDA APHIS, the animal Plant Health Inspection Service, the plant protection and quarantine division of that agency is responsible for dealing with new plant introduction or new pathogen introductions, new pest introductions. The first thing they thought was, we're gonna eradicate this. And so they started a delimiting survey from where the first location was found in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And they found that it was in, I believe, five states. And it was blowing all over the place. And they finally said, Okay, we're moving to management. Unfortunately, we knew how to manage the disease. We sometimes we don't but in that particular case we had, we'd been preparing. We knew what the effective fungicides were, we knew how to try and stay ahead of it. And this is a case where it had to have something to survive on through the winter, and it was only going to survive on the Gulf Coast on kudzu. And if the kudzu froze back in a winter, you knocked the population way down. And you really delayed when the epidemics were happening in the spring. But if it was a mild winter, we saw a couple of years where we're soybean rust actually made its way up into Iowa by August. And so those were years when there was the potential for losses. But we were also watching for it very carefully. And producers got good warning to be able to go and spray fungicides if they felt that that was a necessary thing for them to do. So you've made the comparison of plant pathology to medicine to human medicine before right and most of the time anyway, we're lucky enough not have to worry about sort of major diseases coming in sweeping in sort of wiping off, you know, a good chunk of the population like the like the potato blight did right to the potatoes, right? Of course epidemiologists sort of do worry about the tracking of disease and there are some of them that you can be really worried about. And in other parts of the world sort of it's more of a concern right corollary I would draw with with the late light situation in Ireland would be the Spanish flu and 1918. Right. So like, what are the big like, what are the differences you see between sort of the plant pathologist job right, and somebody working to control infectious disease in humans? Well, I think that I think the biggest difference is people bulls value of what the damages mean, I'm much more concerned that my family got sick than a tree in the front yard got stuck there. And so the response tends to be much slower. When you're dealing with something on a plant. I think that people that are looking at those plants for their livelihood may respond differently. But when you're looking at a, at an elementary and American elm tree in your front yard that's wilting, you may not have the same concern about it, although just like your flu might spread from you to your neighbor to your in your other family members, that tree is a source of the disease to all the other trees around it. It was when I worked in diagnostic labs over the years, we often work with the city to do confirming tests for the presence of the pathogen. And the treatment is to eradicate to remove a tree that is beginning to show symptoms, you can use fungicides to treat ahead of infection and use it as a prophylactic or preventative treatment. So that you don't wind up losing that tree. But once it's infected, it's a losing battle to try and use fungicides. So I would do the testing confirm the pathogen and people would go out and a city would go out or whoever and remove the tree. But quite often we would get samples in that were just Stone Cold graveyard dead. And I don't know, it just died overnight. No, you this has been dead for a while. And so, you know, some of these things that are in our landscape, or just a little bit out of sight out are paying attention to we don't see them the same way until we see a pile of leaves in the yard or something like that.

Is there something we can do as scientists to impress upon people how important it is to pay more attention to these things, there is just too many other competing interests.

I think it comes down to human values. And what I value and what you value are probably different. And what we see in the world around us are probably different. And it's where we find our quality of life. So I don't know that there's a way we can address that's going to work for everybody. I think the thing that we do try and do is raise awareness. And so there's lots of campaigns that go out there, whether it's about diseases that are new, or insect pests that are new. So even right here on campus, we've got emerald ash borer signs around, and we've got some trees that are being used as trap trees. And it's pretty much the same thing. You just try and elevate the awareness.

So with the strap trees, can you talk a little bit about like what's going on there? People see those, but they're what they're doing.

I am a plant pathologist not sure

I didn't know if you had any experience in that or not. So what are the biggest plant pathogens that we're worried about today in the United States that if they get here will, will cause the biggest trouble.

So I think probably I'll use wheat as an example since we're here in Kansas. But there are two diseases that we are very concerned about. I've talked about wheat stem rust, there is a new variation, a new variant, a genetic variant in Africa that showed up in 1999. In Uganda, and it's referred to as, as Eugene 99, wheat stem rust. Well, there's a whole family of genetics that goes around along with that now and, and as plant pathologists and geneticists, we look at it more generally as the T series of, of, of wheat stem rust variants. And so we have a classification scheme that we use, that's letter based. And if the code comes out and it's got a tea at the start, we have a problem because we've got some, the resistance that we have in our wheat varieties is not as appropriate to that series of the pathogen as it is to some others. The other one is a disease called wheat blast that developed in Brazil, and has moved through central South America. We actually have a very active wheat blast research program here in the plant pathology department at K State. And recently, that pathogen found its way into Bangladesh, and it got there probably on seed. The pathogen will infect seed, it will grow off the seed it will lead to infections. But it wasn't actually seed that was in it. That was important. It was probably grain that was planted a seed. So it was probably low quality seed but there were a few years where there was a seed shortage in Bangladesh and I think that there was an effort to get something that could be planted from wherever they could get it. And so that has become established. The pictures of producers burning fields is a striking scene. But there's a lot of concern that disease is now going to work its way up into India, and up into the wheat production areas in the north of India. So you've got that happening from the south, now it coming toward India, to the west, you have Ug 99, that's moved out of Africa, from Uganda, to Kenya, into Afghanistan, but not or into Iran, but not into Pakistan yet. And so we've got these two threats coming. And so when you're thinking about global food security and the importance of wheat as one of the top four food crops in the world, that's a breadbasket in northern India. And that's really a concern. So are we away from the days where we could see something as bad as the potato blight? Like the fact that famine level kind of things? Are our systems, you know, diverse enough as our science good enough? Now to prevent that kind of disaster? Could we hit something like that? We think we could. And it depends on the again, depends on the convergence of politics with famine. But I think depending on where you are in the world, there are threats that could cause that Prop, that kind of problem of that magnitude, I would be concerned in Southeast Asia with some of the problems that can hit rice. I would be concerned in north India, if some of these things come to pass on wheat. Global trade can potentially soften some of that, but politics can get in the way. So it's possible. I think that I think there are fewer excuses for it. But I think it's still possible. So you had brought up the politics as contributing to the famine back in Ireland in the 19th century? Could you say something else? I mean, like, what just simply like, what, what were the factors there that made it worse. So Robert Peel was the prime minister at the time, and there were food shipments that were sent to Ireland that he didn't allow to come to shore, did not allow to, to come to port. So there were shiploads of corn, that were sitting off the coast of Ireland that were not allowed to come in abused for relief. They put up soup kitchens, essentially, where they were essentially making cornmeal mush and distributing that, but there was a means test, you could only get a bowl of food if you could walk to the area kitchen. So if you had family members that were very ill and couldn't walk you you had to come back and either share yours with them, or they didn't get any. So there were some it was a rare, very harsh time. So response to the problems that did not actually help address right for the people in sir for political reasons. And it do I remember something about a… but so there are factors that also kicked a lot of the farmers off of the land there too. Right. So I don't remember what it was. It was it was subdivision of land. So I mean, you were dealing with very small parcels of land that were trying to support people while those people were working for the big landowner. I would just say that the Irish people have endured some tremendous, some tremendous oppression over the years. And you know, the breakdown of the feudal society in Ireland was a good thing. So one of the biggest political issues then you'd be worried about for global food systems from the plant pathology point of view, sort of, you know, the kinds of things that I imagine are, right, yeah. You can see a risk coming a big, you know, danger or sort of something that's like actually already happening and sort of the political systems not responding right, or responding in ways that are detrimental. So Well, I think Import Export issues are a real concern. And depending upon what the quarantines might be in a country and the way that those imports might be regulated, could be a concern. And we're seeing pests moving around with trade. And so how we respond to them and how we erect our quarantine requirements can have a big impact on that and then there's the economic side of it too. I mean, if somebody is involved in that trade on both ends, so you like aren't shoes. I like on shoes. Oh, enjoy it now. Yeah, because the industry is in trouble. Why? So I would guess that may be within five years there's not going to be an orange juice industry in Florida. Wow. That's crazy. So we've been saying this for 15 years, five years from now but it really is it really is never come true. This is the problem. The wheels are falling off the machine now and the part of the part of the situation is as you wind up killing groves and and and there's more space between groves, then the slows down the epidemic slows down but there's a disease called citrus greening or one Long Bang as the Chinese name for it, it came from Asia, it's spread by the Asian citrus psyllid. This is a very difficult to detect pathogen, it was only in the last 15 years that it's actually been identified. They knew the salud was involved with it, but finally came up with technology that would allow them to identify it molecularly can't be grown in culture just only exists in the plant or in the insect. Is that how common Yeah, they can't can't grow in culture? It's not very common. Okay. There's a handful. Right? Yeah, there's a handful of organisms that we've known about for years that we knew that was the case, but we really didn't know exactly what they were. So and then I'll finish the story on oranges first here, but so it when it came into the into Florida, we it was, generally what happens is the insect comes in, we find the insect and it takes three to five years to recognize that the diseases there, because it takes that long for the symptoms to build up in the tree, the level of infection to build up to the point where it expresses symptoms. And then it's kind of funny, because the trees start looking a little bit yellow. And so there were people in Florida that said, all we just need to fertilize the trees will fertilize them more, which just mask the symptoms, the disease was still there, the pathogen was still present, and it could still be moved around. What you really need to do is remove the tree, well, nobody wanted to give up their dooryard, orange tree, or whatever citrus it was. And so it really moved across the state very rapidly. And as orange groves became unproductive, and producers went out of business, they were simply abandoned. And they remained there as a source of the pathogen to move to other areas. It's made its way into Texas, it's made its way the psyllid is in California. But I don't know that the pathogen has been identified there yet. So it's working its way across the country. There are three different strains, there's a Asian strain, a South American strain and an African strain. We're only dealing with the Asian strain in the US right now.

Is there anything that seems to be able to stop it or any promise

Oh, there's a lot of very new technologies that are being tested. But to this point, we really don't have a good approach. We want to identify it early, and then try and manage the psyllid if it comes into new areas. So it is a weird low insect.

What, what are some of those new technologies, so they're looking at using RNA interference RNA, and they're looking at a heat treatment in the roots. Very strange mechanisms that they're running across these groves, warming the soil and and during the dormant period for the tree and the non productive time for the tree. Like how hot? I couldn't tell you, for sure. I have seen the research proposals, but I haven't seen the data off of them. So there's, there's things that are happening all the time. And a lot of these things occur because we introduce a pathogen out of a part of the world where it's in stasis with its host into a part of the world where there's a new host genetics that it's interacting with, and everything is susceptible.

So are there opportunities for some sort of biotechnology, biotechnology, way of writing resistance to the new to orange trees, so they aren't impacted by this? Or like the devil? It was a papaya, right? It was just an example of being able to protect against that kind of stuff.

No, papaya is a great story. But I'll get back to that later. In the end. The answer on the orange side is I don't know. It's a different kind of organism to be dealing with libera bacteria is a fastidious bacterium. And so it's not behaving the same way as a virus would be behaving in the plant such as we're dealing with, with a buyer. For so many of us we can be really disconnected from our food at least and so I'm not totally part time gardener, I got a few plants, right and sort of, you know, I see something wrong with a tomato plants, I have no idea what to do, right? Sort of because it's not my thing, right? But at least I've got that little bit of connection, right. So but for so much of the rest of my food. I get to not even worry about how it's produced. Right. So how many of these how many? How much of my food should I be worried about right? Sort of I should be worried about orange juice. Should I be worried about bananas and coffee and all the other good stuff that I like, you shouldn't be worried you should be concerned. Okay. I think that we have answers, we have management, we could lose some of the crops that we really care about, or they may become expensive. So we could be looking at situations where if we're going to have oranges, we're going to be importing oranges, that, frankly, this citrus greening is present in majority of the production areas around the world. So I'm not entirely sure how we're going to get through to get out of that at all. But there is work to come up with resistance, we'll eventually get there, but there will be a lag and it will require reestablishment of the industry. So if you can look at something like the virus resistance that you get with papaya, that's, that was really, that was really cool, what happened there, so So basically, you can engineer the gene that that produces the coat protein of the virus into the plant and coat protein will, an expression of the coat protein in the plant will create a resistance to the virus. So it's really a strange, strange little thing. And they usually use a reverse copy of the coke protein in the transformation, but it gets into the GMO issue. And so depending upon where you are in the world and who your market is, it may or may not be an acceptable solution to that to consumer.

But virtually all papaya is available now do our genetically modified.

You know, I thought that was true. But that's not entirely true. There are parts of the world where the technology has been rejected.

Would it be accurate to say that the solution is sort of an inherent vaccine type way of looking at it?

That's a very good way of looking at it. Yeah, it is. Not exactly like an immune system. But it is a defense mechanism.

Interesting. What's fascinating. Um, so are there any like major technological advancements? Do you see like way off in the future for plant pathology? And what might those kinds of things look like? If you were to speculate? Where do you see plant pathology going?

Since when I give you the long pause, while I think, well, there's just so many advances in machine learning and that sort of stuff. Do you see any applications for that, and people talking about that for Plant Pathology application.

You know, there's some really cool things that have been talked about with indicator plants, for example, where you might have plants in the field that if they're infected by some organism, they change color, where they send off some kind of signature that you can pick up with, with your drone that's monitoring the crop. So I think I think one of the things that's exciting down the road is in the monitoring and forecasting realm, and how we're going to be able to bring in this huge body of weather data. And combine that with some monitoring and tracking to determine where our risks are, and how we should respond. If we can, if we can get to the point where we can say, Oh, I'm subscribing to this service, I can plug in the variety that I'm growing, I can tie into the weather system, I can use this monitoring system that's out there. And maybe someday that's even satellite based. If we can figure out the signatures, the biggest problem with that kind of technology is there's too many things that look alike, you're detecting stress, you don't necessarily know what the source of the stress is, that's where the indicator plants are pretty cool. But you can get a recommendation then back based on what the pathogen is, what the environment is, and what your susceptibility is in your variety. So it's not just that you've got a good environment, and you've got wheat stem rust blowing, and it's that you've got those two things, plus you, you've planted a variety that's going to be susceptible to the version variant of the stem rust that's out there. So you can really optimize any treatment you might put on the field, using the understanding of the disease not to just be coming in at the end as the pathologist but to fix things ahead of time. Right. Getting into prevention side, rather than coming in as the pathologist sort of after the fact saying what went wrong? We would much rather be on the prevented so that I bet the plants would rather you be there too. Yeah. And the hungry people tend to people, right, yeah.

So is that going to take some sort of collaboration both between the private sector and universities to get things like this up and off the ground? I think sometimes that, you know, the integration between the private sector and universities gets a bad rap, but it's essential for progress in these areas. Right.

We think I think the invention from the research side and then entrepreneurialism to get it launched into some kind of package that people can use is critical. Too often. We pursue research at a university from an academic standpoint, and it doesn't always get translated to in a way that can actually benefit society. Sometimes we get a lag. And scientists can get very excited about what they're finding. But, and depending on where we are in that research spectrum from, from basic to foundational to apply to, to kind of a demonstration and then implementation. We've got to find where our invention fits and make sure it continues to move down the spectrum and get to the point where it actually is doing something for us. When we're way up here on the basic research end, and you're looking at some metabolic process, you have to have the right mindset to figure out how that actually influences the next step down the research spectrum. And sometimes, it takes a while to figure out how you turn that on in that next system, so that it actually benefits so that it produces the right compounds in the plant that enhances the health of the individual that eats it, or that reduces the disease that you're getting or, or repels an insect past or whatever. So that makes me think of the following question. So you've been talking about extension at a couple of points and talking about plant pathology is actually going out, seeing what's happening on the ground, right. But then you also talked about basic research, sort of how much of what gets done in plant pathology is the kind of basic research where so the term means you're sitting, not thinking immediately of applications, you're not going out and sort of engaging an extension, you're not going out and helping the farmers right now, you're just trying to understand something, right. So how much apply pathology is on that end of the spectrum? And how much is, you know, really applied to how, you know, maybe here at K State and in general, right, in terms of the field? Well, I would say that here at K State, our, program is fairly balanced, we have applied, we have applied research, we have extension, we also have some pretty basic research that's largely largely in the genetic and genomic realm. phenol omics looking at the expression of these genetics, we also have some work that's done on the epidemiology, understanding the interaction of the pathogen in the environment, and the host, and how those pathogens might move. So it's all those things, I mean, you can't, you can spend all your time on the producer and the user end. But when you do that, you're in a corner. Because you've got no new tools coming. So you have to have that research feeding your next step, your next phase of how you're going to address any problem. Are there big disagreements in terms of how to strike that balance? In terms of how much? You know, if he looked overall, how much basic research? Do we need to be inoculating our food systems down the line? versus how much do we need to be worrying more right now about current problems? And I think that where you see that, in large part is in the funding environment. So funding drives a lot of what research has done, right? Not everybody thinks about this, if you're not a scientist, if you're just sort of on the consuming end of the science, right? How much actually goes on on the funding side. And so when you get to the funding side, what were the drivers that made the decisions on where the money was going to go to fund the next, the next research? That's always been a challenge. So I spent 10 years in Washington, DC, working for a funding agency, and how that how those decisions were influenced on how we were going to balance that money was always a challenge, because the perspective we might have on an on an issue might be very different than what a producer group a commodity group might have. And their concern may be quite valid. And we'd have to try and figure out a way to balance their need versus our perceived need of the entire food system.

So are we channeling money toward specialty crops or we channeling money toward conventional row crop field crop? And then some of that was driven by Congress, they would help us make that decision by where they said the money had to go. Sure. So you know, they would create a new program that was in the time I was there, this specialty crop research initiative, which wound up being one of the biggest grant programs that we had and it had specific prescription on where the money was going to go, how we could use the money So, we had other programs that were a little that we had more influence over, some were applied some more basic. And when the agricultural food and research initiative was created in the 2008 Farm Bill, they actually said, you have to have a balance between basic research and applied research, a certain percentage of the money has to go toward applied research. And I think it started out at 40%. So that had that really caused the funding agency to look differently at how they wrote requests for application, how they wrote grant programs, and how they defined applied versus basic. Sure. Are there any big eye openers? The time you spent in the funding side of things, things that you just did not expect to see? Well, you never know what surprise is gonna come to you from Congress. You know, it's funny, I think federal workers get bashed a lot, but federal workers carry the mail for Congress. Congress makes the decision. Federal Civil civil service workers make it work. And they don't always get all the information they need to make it work the best way. Again, the 2008 Farm Bill, I was managing a program that provided funds to every state to do integrated pest management and make sure that there was a presence of integrated pest management to producers at the extension level. We went into the night that the the final night of conference committee on the farm bill, and we thought we knew where everything was, and the next day when it was passed, one word was changed from shall be distributed to shall be competed. And this bill was passed in June into the fiscal year is the end of September. And now all of a sudden, I had a $9 million program that I had to figure out how to get competed and distributed. So those are the thing. And, you know, I don't think that I don't think that Congress thought far ahead to recognize the what we're gonna be right and the operational problems with that.

So what are some of the operational problems? I mean, it to an academic who deals with grants and things like that, that might make sense and why that's a problem. But what problems does that cause?

So Congress authorizes grant programs, they appropriate money to go along with those grant programs, the agencies determine what the criteria are, post an RFA, and then it goes through an approval process. And in the two administrations that I worked for, the approval process was different in both of them, I would say in, in both the Bush administration and the Obama administration's there were things that were really good they did that made it easy for the agency to do some of the things that they had to do. And there were things that they both did that were made it harder. And so depending upon who the appointees, the political appointees are that you're working for, that could determine how much oversight they had over what was going to be in an RFA how long it was going to take them to approve it. And at one point in time, the RFAs passed through our agency, they went to the secretary, they went to the Office of Management and Budget, oh, come on, we got to get this money out the door and in the process, you're burning up so much time, then you're you're left with only a short time to get the actual applications and to get them reviewed. And to get the money awarded. It's a pretty intensive process. Right? Yeah, it can be very tedious. What are the major concern? Do you have any major concerns about funding now sort of the either the process or the levels or what people are focusing on at the national level? Well, I would say I have all those concerns. There's not enough money for Food, Agricultural Research. There are gaps in the research funding that make it difficult to accomplish some of the things that we really need to accomplish. And when I talk about the food and ag research spectrum, I'm really talking about everything from human nutrition, to some of the basic research that's going to feed our applied research. There have been some good things that have happened, but in the process, as you know, so as you start looking at more applied research and more extension being added into the program, you wind up diluting some of the other end of the research spectrum. And so there are fewer new ideas that are being fed into that end of the spectrum. But yeah, so I think the challenges are the amount of money and the gaps that we have in the kinds of research that are being supported. What are the major things that you would like the average person in the United States to know more about about food systems or from particular your point of view the what goes on on the disease side plants and food production? Well, I would extend it even beyond that, I would say first of all, universe universities do a lot of very valuable research to make sure that we will have a reliable supply of food. I think producers implement some of that information, sometimes not even knowing the source, the origination because it gets picked up by private companies and implemented in their products. Food Policy over the years has been one of the things that has actually changed the standard of living in the United States and you go back to, I think, was the Nixon administration and Earl Butz as the secretary of agriculture that basically said, we're going to have an inexpensive food policy that requires there to be for some government supports for food, which some people don't like. But we have the lowest cost of food in the world, in this country. Earl Butz used to talk about it as I think the 7% solution that you would only have to spend 7% of your income on food. Well, I think that varies depending upon what your income is. And when you're very poor, that might still be a very high number, but it's a lower number in the United States than it is in Egypt, or in Gabon, or in Paraguay, right. This is, this is really important in terms of what resources you have available, right? It's not just that you don't have to spend all your time growing your food, but it's right, so then you have the time available to do other things, right. But it's pretty remarkable when you think about it, sort of you know, so this is a major driver of living life, right? You need food, right? You're not gonna make it right, if you don't have food and sort of we get it really cheap and really easy. And we get concerned about the cost of housing. Yeah. But even when food is high, dude is pretty cheap in the US compared to other parts of the world.

I mean, it doesn't feel like that. I know, for a lot of people and for sure, I feel lower income. It doesn't feel that way. Right. But it's an interesting perspective to have.

There are students out there that are they're interested in this sort of thing and want to get involved in plant path. What would you suggest as a career path for them?

Plant Pathology at Kansas State is a graduate program. But we take students from a genetics background, from an agronomy background from a horticulture background, not very often that we have them come out of the social sciences, they wind up having some background that they wind up having to catch up on. But there are a lot of different perspectives on plant pathology. Two, we have a couple of students right now that are really taking an end use consumer extension approach in their research working on Master's degrees. We have a very extensive genetics program in our department, and anybody that has questions, I'd be happy to chat with them, or we have a graduate program director Megan Kennelly, that would could also visit with them about where they might fit. Application time period is in the spring. But we'd love to hear from people anytime of the year that they think they might be interested in and pursuing a higher education with us.

Great and they should look to your website for that the website is the place to go.

And we'll link to that in the show notes. Thank you again, Marty for me. Appreciate it. Thanks so much. See you all soon.