What's for Dinner?

Tonight's Guest: Jana Carp (part 1)

The first of two holiday-worthy conversations with Jana Carp - suggesting that slow movements needn't be elitist and offering enough sustenance for your moral self to bolster you for 2016.

Using the conceptual framework of resilience theory to understand the Slow movements' roles in social change, Jana's views are liberating for activists. She describes pleasure as a legitimate and necessary objective of the slow movement, implying that the authentic benefits of slowing down make pleasure a legitimate objective for any activist. She makes you realize there's good reason to let go of the need to have your ducks in a row before initiating a project and points to low income people as being the U.S. community where resilience can be found today.

Tonight's Guest: James Carp (part 2)

Concluding our series on U.S. beginning farmers with more about how locally determined start ups are.

Noelle Fogg matches beginning farmers with land - a multi-player effort" with many moving pieces: farmer, landowner, community members. She sees it as "a fundamental piece of the local food equation" because a sustainable farm is a source of potential community and local food production for years to come. James Carp believes insights that come from the actual work of producing food are critical for making choices to get to the kind of future we want. He describes insights about life raising chickens has brought him, and insists that non-farmers must also "remember where they are from" - if only from volunteering a few hours weekly at a community garden.

Tonight's Guest: James Carp (part 1)

James Carp, last in our beginning farmer series, has extensive agricultural know-how but must save up to start his own farm.

James developed passion for agriculture woofing (Live and Learn on Organic Farms) on several U.S. farms. The most formative was an Illinois farm still being worked by the original settler family. Their particular relationship to a specific place crystallized his desire to start a farm that can be passed on for generations. After interning in California to learn production skills in agriculture, James is now a "climate refugee" in Oregon, where he is not farming now but saving money to start a farm "with deep human roots and insulated from the stress from climate change".

Tonight's Guest: Jana Carp (part 2)

Our New Year's show celebrates the holidays with the delightful scholar Jana Carp, who makes you want to learn more about resilience theory and gives a credible argument for believing in projects that come from the heart.

Jana divides her time between documenting the development of Cittaslow (Slow Cities) in the U.S.and using resilience theory - which concerns how we live in complex adaptive social-ecological systems. She describes a wonderful cluster of projects in the Sonoma Valley where slow initiatives enabled people to re-establish meaningful connections with each other and the places the live, effectively offering a kind of template for resilience. Jana teaches at St Mary's College of California and specializes in planning, sustainable development, and urban theory.

Tonight's Guest: Karen Hansen-Kuhn

Bill Moyers has called the TransPacific Partnership a "corporate/investor rights agreement, not a trade agreement". Debate about threatened citizen rights and national sovereignty began in earnest with publication of formerly secret terms this fall, many worse than expected.

Guest Karen Hansen-Kuhn cut her teeth on trade and economic justice working on NAFTA in the early 90s; she has seen one proposed deal stopped. Now she directs trade, technology, and global governance for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Karen describes the contact with representatives that will matter between January and the up-or-down Congressional vote this spring and gives an encouraging context for US resistance by describing mobilization against TPP in other countries.

Tonight's Guest: Kristi Behrenbeg-Janzen

Training new farmers and getting them onto the land are pressing challenges in US agriculture. Having the land for them to farm is part of the problem. One-third of owners of U.S. farms are 65 years old or older, and when these farmers retire, going prices for farmland are so high that much intentionality is required if farmland is to be kept in the family or as part of family-sized operations.

Kristi Behrenberg-Janzen married into a farm family that has put attention into preparing the extended family for a "farm transition" for a decade. She describes their approach of establishing an interim management set-up, giving them time to wait for a relative to come forward to farm the property.

Tonight's Guest: Dena Hoff (part 2)

Raising livestock, wheat and non-GM corn, Dena Hoff is a national and international family farm activist and board member of the National Family Farm Coalition who has been a friend of What's For Dinner for many years.

Dena spoke with us this summer about farmers and ranchers work with the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) to protect land from mineral extraction-related environmental devastation. Tonight, With her cooking borscht and Susan describing bits of her family's farming past, they reflect on more facets of Montana farming. Dena discusses local activism around fracking, light-hearted and serious aspects of her family experience with farm transition questions, and exchanges with Thai and Indonesian farmers.

Tonight's Guest: Ben Burkett

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives is one recipient of the 2015 Food Sovereignty Prize. Its work addressing racial discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture demonstrates a principal form food sovereignty work has taken in the United States.

The Federation emerged out of the civil rights movement in 1967. For decades discrimination againt Black farmers by the USDA contributed to the decline in Black farm ownership from 14 to 1 percent since 1915. In response the Federation's members in 10 southern states helped bring a discrimination lawsuit and supported African-American farmers to become plaintiffs. Guest Ben Burkett, farmer, director of the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives and President of the National Family Farm Coalition describes this work.

Tonight's Guest: Mary Hendrickson

Mary Hendrickson is a rural sociologist who has demonstrated "Communities of Practice" in agricultural regions in the American midwest and KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

Mary has pioneered this non-hierarchical approach to gathering agricultural stakeholders that builds new agribusiness partnerships. And teaching sustainable agriculture to many University of Missouri students from conventional farming families, she addresses solutions to challenges of food production in a changing climate similarly, in non-polarizing ways. She describes how small and large corn and soybean farmers can reduce weather-related revenue losses AND mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. And she recounts market and local economy-building opportunities for commodity producers in consumers' interest in eating more GM-free food - for instance, sorghum, a GM-free grain, as livestock feed.

Tonight's Guest: Wes Jackson (Prairie Festival)

Wes Jackson committed himself and the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, to spend as long as it took to develop perennial grain in polycultures. They succeeded in less than 50 years.

The Land Institute has an annual Prairie Festival at the end of September. We describe this year's festival and then hear Wes discuss why it took 10,000 years for development of perennial grains and where perennial varieties of all the major grains are being cultivated today, part of his remarks at the June ecological conference Seizing the Alternative. We end with Wes and John Cobb comparing old and new scientific paradigms for how nature works.