What's For Dinner?

Tonight's Guest: Tonight's Guests: Ken Fox and Noelle Fogg Less than half of principal operators of US farms are under 55. Tonight we begin hearing how people in the new farmer pipeline are getting their start. Ken Fox is a new farmer working incubator farm plots in eastern Massachusetts. He and a partner still have fulltime jobs; they began with large home vegetable gardens and hope eventually to farm for a living. With resources at Tufts New Entry Sustainable Farming Project they're learning to scale up and will be matched with farmland. Noelle Fogg does this farmland matching for New Entry, and she describes very situation-specific needs of farmers and land owners. Hearing both sides shows how very much goes into recreating farms and farmers on the landscape.

Tonight's Guest: Pat Roy Mooney Pat Mooney, Executive Director of etc Group, is an accredited consultancy delegate at the Paris climate talks and is giving "lots of workshops" for people outside the hall on geoengineering and climate smart agriculture. Scientists' urgency about climate crisis has been stifled; government commitments will be too low; carbon capture and storage is a dream. But civil society actions - in Africa and Asia developing strategies for food system resilience - give Mooney hope. etc Group is revered for hard-hitting focus where power, technology and vulnerable human and natural systems intersect - e.g. on the new bio economy: "what is sold as a 'green' switch from fossil fuels to plant-based production is, in fact, a red-hot resource grab...".

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.

Tonight's Guest: Nancy Alexander (Part 2) Previously ran in April, 2015, we will be revisiting our second interview with Nancy Alexander. Nancy Alexander monitors the Group of Twenty (G20), the forum whose member countries account for 85% of the world economy, 76% of global trade, and two-thirds of the world's population, including more than 59% of the world's poor. Specializing in "economic governance" for the North American Office of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Nancy stressees the importance of activists' following the money. She focuses on how financing approaches used to achieve economic goals - economic cooperation, financial reform, improved global economy) shape the outcomes and must be carefully framed to meet needs of all proposed beneficiaries. Tonight she describes megaprojects for infrastructure development - the model used now for strengthening developing country economies. She emphasizes the importance of provisions for sustainability, participation, transparency and gender equi

Tonight's Guest: Sanusha Naidu (part 2) In August, 2015 in Johannesburg, South AFrica, Third World Network AFrica and Hienrich Boell Stiftung South Africa hosted civil society representatives for discussion of PIDA Program for Infrastructure Develoment in AFrica. Tonight's show is our second covering the 3 days of meetings. Sanusha Naidu explains how new initiatives calling for inclusive growth in Africa wont eliminate the paradox of Africa being so rich in resources and yet the poorest continent. She describes current economic arrangements that mean new infrastructure will keep supporting resource extraction and export, in particular the way financialization of development in the form of projects identified for PIDA is unlikely to strengthen economic relationships within and among countries so as to build up local economies.

Tonight's Guest: Sanusha Naidu (part 1) Infrastructure development in Africa has always favored extractive industries and supported agriculture for export commodities. New energy, water, and transportation infrastructure proposed by leading world economic bodies is similar, except project structuring may leave African small farmers even worse off. Development finance institutions propose using public-private partnerships and making projects an asset class (think when food was speculated on as a commodity in 2008). A specialist on China and emerging powers at Fahamu, Sanusha Naidu works to empower social justice movements to address opportunities and threats posed by competition among countries and institutions to invest in African economies. She opened recent Johannesburg meetings to strategize about civil society responses to the newest thrust for infrastructure development in Africa.

Tonight's Guest: Ben Grosscup Ben Grosscup coordinates the 41st Northeast Organic Farming Association's annual summer conference, happening in two weeks. Describing key speakers, events, food, and opportunities for fun, Ben shows how state and regional organic conferences keep driving the evolution of sustainable agriculture as practice and policy. For example, soil microbiology's role in delivering nutrients to plants is a leading topic today; the decisive role of human gut bacteria in maintaining human health is an emerging issue. Conference speakers bring together these topics. And another plenary speaker uses the current state of gm labeling efforts as context for emphasizing the need for cross-issue movement building. Ben also describes sessions on skill-building for farmers and consumers in the upwards of 140 sessions offered.

Tonight's Guest: Dena Hoff Dena Hoff is a Montana farmer and activist whose activism expresses on the ground the ideas shared by Wes Jackson and John Cobb Jr.in the last two programs. Dena describes experiences from her work promoting sustainable agriculture, economic viability of small farms, justice for small landholders in the rest of the world, and effective public process for communities defending natural resources from extractive industries. Dena's work crosscuts "silos" and connects values to action for sustainability. She farms in eastern Montana where she has raised sheep, cattle, alfalfa, and non-GM corn with her husband since 1981. She holds leadership roles in the National Family Farm Coalition, the Northern Plains Resource Council, and La Via Campesina North America.

Tonight's Guests: John Cobb Jr. and Wes Jackson (Part 2) John Cobb wanted Wes Jacksoon as final plenary speaker at Seizing the Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization, because "getting agriculture right", while insufficient for living sustainably, is where to start. Both are concerned with continued currency of 17th century philosophical views about the relationship between subjects (humans) and objects (nature). They contrast a holistic pre-Enlightenment utopia with Francis Bacon's, which aimed to understand and conquer nature, and thus to accomplish "all things possible". Jackson faults all agriculture for ecological harm but believes the consequences of reductive science - exemplified by GM crops - can be avoided. Perennial grain in polycultures is an example, an ecological approach guarding against harm by taking emergent possibilities among ecosystems into account.

Tonight's Guests: John Cobb Jr. and Wes Jackson (Part 1) 1300 plus scholars and activists gathered in Claremont, CA, in June to discuss the approach they believe can avert worldwide environmental catastrophe. Entitled Seizing the Alternative: Toward and Ecological Civilization, the conference focused on alternatives to free-market capitalism and value-free western scientific thinking. In our first report, American philosopher, environmentalist and theologian John Cobb describes Chinese policy-makers using Alfred North Whitehead's work to rethink China's industrial agriculture. And biologist, botanist and geneticist Wes Jackson - winner of MacArthur "genius" and Right Livelihood Awards - describes the reasoning behind his successful 50 years of work developing perennial grains in polycultures. Really understanding the systems relationships in ecosystems means working with their emergent properties to make agriculture sustainable.

Tonight's Guest: Jill Lindsey Harrison (Part 2) Jill Lindsey Harrison describes her book, Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice, and 2014 article,"Neoliberal environmental justice: mainstream ideas of justice in political conflict over agricultural pesticdes in the United States". Jill's subject tonight is the environmental justice activists - farmworkers, poor residents of towns repeatedly affected by pesticide drift, and others who see the problem as structural and racial oppression. Many, unlike traditional eenvironmentalists, lack the choice to buy organic, move away, find other work, or even, if in the country illegally, protest accidents. Jill says observing their work to increase legislative and regulatory protection was the heartening part of her research and gives examples of what this activism entails.