Agrarian Futures

Gabe Brown didn't set out to revolutionize agriculture. He set out to survive it. After four consecutive years of crop disasters left him $1.5 million in debt, he had no choice but to question everything he'd been taught. What emerged from that reckoning became one of the most influential farms in the regenerative agriculture movement, and eventually two organizations working to spread those lesso...

You can't understand the modern food system without understanding the policy that shaped it. And you can't understand US food policy without understanding the Farm Bill. Judith McGeary is an attorney, farmer, and the founder of Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance , a national organization that supports independent family farmers and fights corporate consolidation of the food system. In this conversati...

Our guest today, Fred Provenza , has spent his career listening to what animals can teach us: about landscapes, about food, about the deep intelligence woven into the living world. Fred is professor emeritus of Behavioral Ecology at Utah State University, where he directed an award-winning research program that pioneered our understanding of how early experience, family, and landscape shape the fo...

Our guest today - Judith Schwartz - has spent her career showing us that the natural world is more resilient than we think, and that we have more power to restore it than we have been led to believe. Judith is a journalist and author whose books , Cows Save the Planet , Water in Plain Sight , and The Reindeer Chronicles , have taken readers from the degraded hillsides of China's Loess Plateau to t...

Many of us have lost the thread that connects us to our food. Glenn Elzinga is spending his life trying to pick it back up. Glenn is the founder of Alderspring Ranch, a certified organic grass-fed beef operation in the remote Salmon River country of central Idaho. But describing it as a beef operation barely scratches the surface. Each summer, Glenn and his family, along with a rotating crew of in...

Steve Gabriel joins us to unpack one of the most consequential myths shaping how we grow food in America: the separation between forest and field. As a co-steward of Wellspring Forest Farm in Mecklenburg, New York, author of Silvopasture , and researcher at the Cornell Small Farms Program, Steve has been listening. Through a SARE-funded project called Farming with Trees, he's been in conversation...

Regenerative agriculture isn’t just about how we raise animals. It’s about whether the entire system around them makes sense. Smaller, regenerative producers with meat businesses, have traditionally lacked an economic outlet for hides and other byproducts. That missing piece can be the difference between a system that works for regenerative farmers and one that doesn’t. Jim and Mark Kleinschmit ar...

We walk into our local grocery store and most likely barely consider what’s on display in front of us. Forty thousand items. Stacked, uniform, produce. Cuisine from around the globe. Open often 24 hours. As author Benjamin Lorr points out, that can be considered a miracle. In The Secret Life of Groceries , Ben dives deep into the hidden machinery behind that miracle. He spent years inside the syst...

I’m willing to bet that most of our listeners - like us - have traditionally seen acorns as food for squirrels, not people. But as Elspeth Hay points out in this conversation, that assumption says more about our food system than it does about the acorn. For much of human history, acorns were a staple. They fed communities across North America, Europe, North Africa, and Asia - and in some cases - s...

We’ve spent a lot of time on this show digging into the dire state of modern farming and ranching, and the challenging economics for those trying to build a regenerative future. Our guest today, Cate Havstad , is no stranger to these challenges as a first-generation farmer and rancher. That experience led directly to an innovative solution that could be an important missing piece in this economic...

Joel Salatin is one of the most influential voices in the modern regenerative farming movement. As the founder of Polyface Farm in Virginia, he’s become known for building a radically different model of agriculture, one rooted in ecological systems, local markets, and a refusal to accept industrial “efficiency” as the end goal. In this episode, Joel shares what he’s learned from decades of farming...

Fish have long been one of the last wild foods, a source of nourishment that connects us to the powerful ecology of the planet’s waters. But as journalist and author Paul Greenberg chronicles in his award-winning book Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food , our relationship with the sea has dramatically changed over the past century. Once nearly all of the seafood we ate was wild; today, nea...

If you want to understand what it takes to build a healthier local food system and bring rural communities back to life, you talk to someone who’s actually done it. Bob Quinn has spent decades farming in Montana, rebuilding soil, creating local markets, and pushing back against the idea that small towns and small farms are destined to disappear. Through his farm and the Quinn Institute , Bob is ex...

If regenerative agriculture is about rebuilding the foundations of our food system, then soil is where that story starts. Geologist and author David Montgomery has spent decades tracing how the health of our soil shapes everything else: the nutrition in our food, the resilience of our farms, and the long-term fate of entire civilizations. What he shows is both sobering and energizing. We have degr...

Across the south, generations of Black farmers and business owners have faced losing not just their land, but their livelihoods - pushed out by discriminatory lending, land theft, and the consolidation of power. Yet from that struggle has grown something powerful: a movement rooted in cooperation, where farmers pool their resources, share their knowledge, and build wealth together instead of compe...

What happens when you leave behind a career in food journalism to take over a family farm in Iowa? For Beth Hoffman, it meant putting theory into practice - and learning firsthand just how difficult it is to make small and mid-sized farming work in today’s economy. In her book Bet the Farm and in her daily life raising grass-finished cattle and organic crops, Beth confronts the financial and cultu...

Before industrial dredging, clear-cutting, and destructive fishing practices, our rivers and oceans were full of wood. Fallen trees, driftwood, and branches created underwater forests where fish and countless other creatures could thrive. That wood provided shelter, food, and the foundation for entire aquatic ecosystems. Today, much of it is gone, and so are the fish. Marine restoration expert Jon...

Years before regenerative ag and grass-fed beef hit the spotlight, Will Harris was figuring it out on his own land. At White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia, Will spent the last few decades unwinding everything industrial agriculture taught him: the chemicals, the confinement, the commodity mindset. In its place, he’s built a vertically integrated, closed-loop system that honors the land, the an...

We all need land to eat, but more and more, farmland has become a financial asset instead of a source of food, livelihood, and community. And when agriculture becomes just another investment, we risk losing something essential, not just for farmers, but for the health, resilience, and future of our entire society. Journalist and researcher Sarah Mock joins us to unpack the deep consequences of tre...

Are fewer, bigger farms putting our entire food system at risk? That’s the warning at the heart of Land Rich, Cash Poor , the latest book by Brian Reisinger. In it, he explores the forces—technological, political, and economic—that have hollowed out rural America and made it harder than ever to keep a family farm alive. Drawing from his own multigenerational farming roots in Wisconsin, Brian trace...

What do we lose when our food comes from nowhere in particular? For Cole Mannix, that question is at the heart of his work. He’s part of Old Salt Co-op , a group of ranchers outside Helena, Montana working to unseat Big Beef—not with billion-dollar backing or slick marketing, but with community, collaboration, and a commitment to place. In today’s episode, we talk about what it means to break out...

It’s no secret our world is in upheaval right now—climate disasters, political unrest, economic uncertainty. But in the midst of it all, there are also stories of resilience, adaptation, and new ways forward. That’s a theme Anthony James, host of The Regen Narration Podcast , has explored deeply. From an extended road trip across the U.S., interviewing community leaders navigating climate adaptati...

If we want regenerative farms and food businesses to thrive, we have to talk about money. How do we help them grow without forcing them to sell out their values? That’s exactly what Claude Arpels - and Slow Money NYC - is working to solve. Claude has spent years rethinking investment strategies to support regenerative food systems. After a first career in luxury fashion, he pivoted to impact inves...

On this show, we’ve talked a lot about how traditional banking and financial systems make it tough for new farmers or those without direct land ownership to get a fair shot. But those challenges run even deeper for agricultural producers in Indian Country. Enter Skya Ducheneaux, who’s tackling these barriers head-on as the leader of Akiptan —the first Native CDFI dedicated to serving agricultural...

In the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, the solutions we hear the most are technological ones - many of which mirror the economic and philosophical approaches that precipitated these crises in the first place. But what if that vision is flawed? Chris Smaje, author of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, challenges the dominant eco-modernist philosophy head-on. He critiques its reliance on...