Agriculture Adapts by ClimateAi: Recent Episodes
ClimateAi
Every week we speak with industry leading executives, farmers, and academics to get a 360 view of how the agriculture sector is innovating to stay ahead of a changing climate. We belong to a small team of climate and ag entrepreneurs trying to make farming more resilient, profitable, and equitable as we transition to a new age of agriculture. This podcast is our journey as we explore the hurdles and opportunities that lie ahead for the industry that feeds the world. To learn more, visit us at www.Climate.Ai
Between 40 to 50% of our population is alive on this planet today thanks to fertilizers. However, fertilizers are also one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters and when managed poorly, can also contribute to the nutrient pollution of lakes, rivers and streams.
This week, we sat down with Pablo Barrera Lopez, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Communications at Yara International, a leading Norwegian agribusiness and chemical company on the forefront of the sustainable and ethical production of several types of fertilizer. Lopez takes us through the history of the fertilizer industry (hint, modern fertilizers were invented at Yara), how the invention of fertilizer prevented mass hunger, and the complicated relationship of the life-saving product with climate change. Lopez also walks us through the top innovations taking place in the industry to mitigate its impact on climate including everything from renewable-energy fueled fertilizer plants and high-tech precision application tools to better farmer education.
In addition, Lopez works with the World Economic Forum, where he promotes corporate sustainability and works with global youth to help them develop talents and skills to be responsible forces for good in their communities.
For more information: https://www.yara.com/
Angela Santiago is the co-founder and CEO of the Little Potato Company, an innovative and fast growing company focused on colorful, tasty, mini-potatoes that taste delicious. We talk with Angela about the mechanics of the potato world, the obstacles climate change is creating for the industry, and what it takes to build an agriculture business from the ground up,
This week in Agriculture Adapts
- Breeding for diversity and flavor
- Your french fries, chips, and table potatoes all come from different types of potatoes, specifically bred for their end use
- Increasing weather uncertainty, more frequent extreme events, and a potato production moving north to escape the heat
- How small changes in weather can bear significant impact on the way the crop turns out
website: The Little Potato Company
facebook: The Little Potato Company
*This episode is a repost
This week we sit down with Stuart Woolf, the President and CEO of Los Gatos Tomatoes, one of the largest tomato processors in the world. Stuart gives us an inside view into the science, technology, and logistical genius that enabled 3x higher yields in the processing tomato industry over the last 50 years, all while reducing labor requirements to a fraction of what they once were.
We cover everything from decades of tomato seed breeding efforts to the 120 day, 24/7 harvesting sprint-marathon that results in 325 million lbs of tomato paste every year. If ever there was a 1 hour crash course on processing tomatoes, this may very well be it.
Stuart is also the President and CEO of Woolf farming and has served as Chairman of the California League of Food Processors, the Almond Board of California, and of the UC President’s Commission of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Stuart also currently serves on the board of the California Chamber of Commerce, the Western Growers Association, and Marone Bio Innovation.
https://www.woolffarming.com/
http://www.losgatostomato.com/
Over the past 10 years, there has been a mass exodus of banks in the UK pulling out of short-term lending to farmers. This has made it harder and more expensive for farmers to get the capital they need to run their business and keep producing essential crops.
We sit down with Tim Coates, Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer of Oxbury Bank, the UK’s only 100% agriculture focused bank to discuss how Oxbury is revolutionizing agriculture banking and the impact this will have on farmers + agriculture sustainability throughout the country and beyond:
- The history behind the broken agriculture banking system
- How technology is enabling cost and time savings for farmers using Oxbury
- Turning savings into sequestered carbon
- Driving sustainability effortlessly and automatically at the farm-level
- Similar banking challenges are playing out in numerous countries around the world
https://www.oxbury.com/
Hey listeners, hope you all enjoyed year 1 of Agriculture Adapts as much as we did! The Ag Adapts team will be taking a short break before returning for year 2. We really appreciate everyone's support and we look forward to many exciting episodes to come! If you have any thoughts or feedback please feel free to reach out to media@climate.ai. See you all soon!
Since the 2008 financial crisis, agriculture has become a hotbed for investment: food consumption withstands recessions, demand is expected to double by 2050, and agriculture has largely proven to be a low volatility investment that can serve as an inflation hedge (as inflation goes up, so do ag land values)... But not everyone supports the institutionalization of ag land ownership.
We sit down with Martin Davies, President and CEO of the Westchester group, the #1 largest farmland asset manager in the world to talk about:
- how institutional ag land investing really works
- what separates an extractive investment from a sustainable one
- the implications of increasing corporate/foreign ownership of domestic ag lands.
- how climate change plays into the investment thesis.
Westchester has been a frontrunner on sustainability and continues to push the envelope on setting a positive standard for the industry. Westchester manages over 2 million acres and is a subsidiary of TIAA, a fund managing over $1 trillion in assets.
*This is a repost of a past episode
Katharine Hayhoe is one of the world's most renowned climate scientists-- she has a ted talk with over 2.5 million views, and in 2017 was named one of Fortune’s world’s greatest leaders. Katharine is a professor at Texas Tech University and has been published in over 125 peer reviewed papers, abstracts, and key reports including the National Climate Assessment. We speak with Katharine about the science, the impacts, and the psychology of climate change.
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
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Why the U.S. Military calls climate change a "threat multiplier"
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The impact of climate change on agriculture: risk, resilience, and profitability
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Faith based communication on climate change: the secret to a fruitful discussion is common ground
Links to topics mentioned in the episode:
- Global Weirding
- Katharine's Ted Talk
- Iowa Interfaith power and light
- Katharine's Facebook
- Katharine's Twitter
ClimateAi - Accelerating Resilience in Agriculture
The coronavirus has highlighted the importance of resilience, not just efficiency, in the long term success of agriculture supply chains. One of the most powerful tools we have to drive resilience is agricultural biodiversity... and yes, it can be done at scale.
Biodiversity is a critical sign of ecosystem health--in the rainforest or on the farm-- and has proven to be crucial for agricultural productivity, profitability, and resilience. Biodiversity has been on the decline due to a simplification of our diets, growing demand for animal feed and biofuels, and a climate that is changing faster than nature can keep up with. We sit down with food system and agriculture biodiversity expert Ann Tutwiler to explore the tangible steps we must take to systematically increase biodiversity and the outsized impact this will have on the health of our planet and the profitability of farming.
Ann has spent the past 35 years tackling some of the most pressing issues in food and agriculture. She co-developed the U.S. govt’s global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future program. Ann is also the former Deputy Director General for Knowledge at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as well as the former Director General of Bioversity International.
References Mentioned in the episode
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UN Food Systems Summit
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World Benchmarking Alliance (how are companies holding up against their promises)
Agriculture is faced with the critical challenge of reducing pesticide use, improving water efficiency, and building a food system that is resilient to climate change all while delivering nutritious affordable food for the masses. In this episode we dig in with Dave Chen to talk about how Equilibrium Capital is putting their $1B+ fund behind a tried and true technology to deliver on all fronts-- high-tech greenhouses.
High-tech greenhouses are extremely common across Europe. Meticulous optimization at the plant level has enabled 10 - 40x productivity increases with a laundry list of sustainability and resilience benefits. But these glass and steel mega-producers have yet to come to the U.S. en mass. Equilibrium Capital is fueling a movement that will enable a new era of precision agriculture with sights set on solving some of the industry's most pressing issues.
Equilibrium Capital
Between 1982-2015, the world’s population grew from 4.5 billion to about 7.5 billion while land under agriculture remained the same. More food was produced on the same amount of land but climate change and the resultant rise in the extreme weather events pose a serious challenge to the world’s food production. Is the time now ripe for a second green revolution?
Ernst Van Den Ende, a leader in dutch agriculture innovation, explains that there is no 'silver bullet' to solve the world’s agriculture woes but a focus on a combination of technology and ecology can make agriculture more productive, efficient and sustainable.
Based in the Netherlands, Ernst Van Den Ende is a renowned plant scientist and the managing director of the Plant Sciences group at Wageningen University, one of the world’s top agriculture educational, research and technology hubs. He leads a group of nearly 1,400 agricultural scientists, various corporate partners, and hundreds of start-ups in the agro-food domain, to tackle the most pressing challenges facing the future of food.
Nowadays, grocery store items are stocked full of labels: pasture raised, cage free, non-gmo, sustainable, the list goes on. But if the health and environmental problems these labels seek to address were legitimate, why wouldn't they be made mandatory? Are they just a marketing hoax or a path to a safer, healthier, more environmentally friendly food system? We sit down with agri-business expert Mary Shelman to deconstruct these questions and more.
Mary is an internationally recognized thought leader, author, and speaker on global agribusiness, AgTech, and food system trends. She is the former Director of Harvard Business School’s Agribusiness Program and has worked closely with startups, Fortune 500 companies, governments, and the FAO. She is the author of 70+ case studies on the world’s top agri-food businesses.
After interviewing many guests, I was still left with the following questions: what are we doing to systematically mitigate our agriculture emissions, is it actually working, and how far do we have left to go? In this episode we dive in with the group that has been tackling these questions in California for the past 10 years.
Renata Brillinger is the executive director at CalCAN, a California based nonprofit driving forward critical policies and programs at the intersection of climate change and sustainable agriculture. We discuss decarbonizing livestock, what regenerative agriculture looks like at industrial scale, and the financial breakdown of how we get to net negative emissions (I’ll give you a hint, its surprisingly low).
Resources mentioned in the episode:
- CalCAN website
- California Agriculture Climate Solutions Summary
- What’s happening in other states? National Healthy Soils Policy Network
- Renata’s email: renata@calclimateag.org
Building a startup from scratch is an art. In this episode, we sit down with Swaroop Kittu Kolluri, one of the best early stage venture capital investors, to dive into what it takes to go from an idea to a billion dollar business, with a focus on the ag-tech and climate-tech.
Kittu is the founder & managing director at Neotribe Ventures. He is a serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist and has both run and invested in several successful startups including well known names like Climate Corporation, box, robinhood, webMD, and Bloom Energy.
Kittu gives an inside view into the journey of The Climate Corporation, one of the most successful ag-tech and climate-tech startups of the 21st century. He also shares some of the key the tips, tricks, and strategies that he uses to coach his founders.
Background Reading
Walking Around in Your VC’s Shoes - Written by Kittu
Neotribe Ventures
Ed brings one of the most diverse agriculture perspectives to the podcast to date. He is the former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, 2 time governor of North Dakota, and he has led a multi-national consumer products business as well as many entrepreneurial start-ups. Ed played a pivotal role in many of the biggest agriculture events and movements of the 21st century.
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
- Tackling the 2008 world food crisis; learnings for a safe & resilient global food system
- What it was like to build the USDA organic label and why it may be more "wishy washy" than you'd expect
- G.M.O.s are a spectrum, we can't bunch them all together and rule them out-- there is too much potential for good
- How silicon valley jumped the gun with ag-tech
References mentioned in the episode
- 2007-08 world food price crisis
- Golden Rice - G.M.O.s and Vitamin A deficiency in developing countries
Tatiana Schlossberg is the author of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have and a former New York Times Science and climate reporter whose award-winning work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg and other publications. We chat with Tatiana about a variety of topics relating to climate change, pollution control, social inequality, agriculture, and aquaculture.
“Its not about feeling individually guilty, its about feeling collectively responsible”
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
- How Climate change relates to everyday life and why feeling bad is not the answer
- Oceans, aquaculture, and sustainable fishing
- Why climate change and pollution are inextricably linked to social inequality
- Coal ash ponds: pollution disasters destroying the surrounding farmlands and natural environments
References mentioned in the episode
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The Omnivore’s Dilemma
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The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
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Tatiana’s book: Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have
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Tatiana’s website
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Global Fishing Watch
Michael J. Coren is a reporter at Quartz where he works on climate change, and the people, technology, and policies addressing it. Recently, Michael has been focusing his attention on uncovering the relationship between COVID-19 and climate change/pollution. This week we finally dive in to what the pandemic means for our planet. We also tap into Michael's experience with carbon markets and forrest carbon sequestration.
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
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Paying people to not cut down forests might be a great way to sequester carbon
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The implications of green house gas and air pollution decline from quarantine
-What do low gas prices mean for the oil and gas industry?
- Quarantine may cause banks to become owners of a lot of oil and gas
Michael's page at Quartz: https://qz.com/author/mcorenqz/
Michael's email: mjc@qz.com
Michael's twitter handle: mj_coren
Dr. Ray Goldberg has served a critical role over the past half century in improving the global food system. He is considered by many to be the father of agribusiness and is actually credited with coining the term “agri-business” in 1957.
Dr. Goldberg has been a professor of agriculture and business at Harvard since 1955. He recently published a book called Food Citizenship: Food System Advocates in an Era of Distrust. This book sums up some of the most insightful interviews he held with folks that put their ideological differences aside to work together on solving some of the most pressing issues in food and agriculture.
This week in Agriculture Adapts
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Climate change’s impact on agriculture: a first person perspective from the dust bowl to now
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The pros and cons of GMOs without the stigmatization
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Food as medicine-- it’s about time we gave food the credit it deserves
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Consumer brands are innovating to improve the profitability and financial resilience of their farmers in developing countries
Be sure to grab a copy of Ray's book! All proceeds go to Harvard
Food Citizenship: Food System Advocates in an Era of Distrust
Craig is the owner/president of Sierra Orchards and the former president of California State Board of Food and Agriculture, advising multiple generations of state governors on farm related policies for the state that holds the title for 5th largest agriculture producer in the world. Craig is also the founder of the Center for Land Based Learning.
This week on Agriculture Adapts:
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Getting food to the people who need it: food waste, food scarcity, and "food apartheid" in the U.S.
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A creative approach to pest/weed management for organic hazelnuts
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Over-pumping groundwater has lead to irreversible subsidence in California
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Ways to deal with extremely difficult water access issues in California
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Taking steps to avoid a loss of multi-generational farming knowledge
Resources mentioned in the episode:
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Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in CA
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California's Healthy Soils Initiative
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CalCAN: California Climate and Agriculture Network
Katharine Hayhoe is one of the world's most renowned climate scientists-- she has a ted talk with over 2.5 million views, and in 2017 was named one of Fortune’s world’s greatest leaders. Katharine is a professor at Texas Tech University and has been published in over 125 peer reviewed papers, abstracts, and key reports including the National Climate Assessment. We speak with Katharine about the science, the impacts, and the psychology of climate change.
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
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Why the U.S. Military calls climate change a "threat multiplier"
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The impact of climate change on agriculture: risk, resilience, and profitability
-
Faith based communication on climate change: the secret to a fruitful discussion is common ground
Links to topics mentioned in the episode:
Global Weirding
Katharine's Ted Talk
Iowa Interfaith power and light
Katharine's Facebook
Katharine's Twitter
Angela Santiago is the co-founder and CEO of the Little Potato Company, an innovative and fast growing company focused on colorful, tasty, mini-potatoes that taste delicious. We talk with Angela about the mechanics of the potato world, the obstacles climate change is creating for the industry, and what it takes to build an agriculture business from the ground up,
This week in Agriculture Adapts
- Breeding for diversity and flavor
- Your french fries, chips, and table potatoes all come from different types of potatoes, specifically bred for their end use
- Increasing weather uncertainty, more frequent extreme events, and a potato production moving north to escape the heat
- How small changes in weather can bear significant impact on the way the crop turns out
website: The Little Potato Company
facebook: The Little Potato Company
Will is a food entrepreneurship and sustainability guru. He is the Faculty Director of the Sustainable Food Initiative at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley, a recently retired managing partner at Physic Ventures, the founding CEO of Republic of Tea, recipient of the Oslo peace award, and has been involved in leading and growing more than 30 entrepreneurial ventures over the past 30 years. This is part 2 of a 2 part series with Will.
This week in Agriculture Adapts
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Driving change in the food economy
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What does disruption look like for a food startup: brief case study of General Mills acquisition of Annie's Homegrown
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Business model innovations for extracting more value out of your crop
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The institutionalization of venture capitalism
Will is a food entrepreneurship and sustainability guru. He is the Faculty Director of the Sustainable Food Initiative at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley, a recently retired managing partner at Physic Ventures, the founding CEO of Republic of Tea, recipient of the Oslo peace award, and has been involved in leading and growing more than 30 entrepreneurial ventures over the past 30 years. This is part 1 of a 2 part series with Will.
"Food has been optimized around convenience, cost, and efficiency but it is not serving our health or climate"
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
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Building a revolutionary food company in the 90's: health, environmental sustainability, and fair trade
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dissecting the szizophrenia of capitalism
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Triple bottom line: a structure for more sustainable business
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Why gardening may be the solution to many of our systemic societal problems
References mentioned:
Republic of tea
Triple bottom line
Jason Samenow is the Washington Post's weather editor, founder of capital weather gang, and a wealth of knowledge for all things weather and climate. We chat with Jason about the inner-workings of weather forecasts, the latest in climate science, and how to accurately communicate on climate change-- what we can and can't say with certainty about the changing world around us.
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
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Scientists have officially discovered the footprint of climate change on our everyday weather
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Most weather-related natural disasters get blamed on climate change. To what extent is that a fair connection to make?
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What makes weather forecasting so hard and how to best communicate forecast uncertainty
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Deconstructing the 2019 floods in the Midwest U.S.: a perfect storm
References mentioned in the show
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Capital Weather Gang twitter
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Capital Weather Gang general website
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Capital Weather Gang Facebook
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Jason Samenow's personal Twitter
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Daily weather now bears the fingerprint of climate change
Julia Jackson is from a family of vintners, well known for their Jackson Family Wines. In 2017, Julia turned her full attention towards climate change and founded Grounded, a nonprofit committed to accelerating scalable solutions to climate change.
Grounded hosts its annual summit each year, catalyzing climate conversations lead by cutting edge innovators, world leaders, climate-progressive corporations and more. The event will be on March 19th & 20th this year-- you can access the details here.
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
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How Grounded is desiloeing climate solutions and helping drive financing towards high impact projects
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The role of agriculture in helping to draw down carbon: 7.6% emission reductions needed per year to meet the 1.5°C Paris target
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What it was like to speak at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) weeks after climate change showed up at her doorstep
References mentioned in the episode:
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Grounded Summit
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Project Drawdown
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Uninhabitable Earth
Tim Hammerich is a former ag commodity trader turned entrepreneur. He is now the host of one of Agriculture's most popular podcasts, The Future of Agriculture, as well as the founder of AgGrad, an agriculture centric recruiting company. We chat with Tim about the trends, innovations, and challenges facing the agriculture sector.
"You can't have sustainability without profitability"
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
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The process for change in a field with razer thin margins
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Tim's take on agriculture and climate change
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How to attract top talent to solve some of the biggest problems of our time (food safety, security, nutrition, etc.)?
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Should farmers get paid for their "ecological services"?
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Build solutions with farmers, not for them
Lewis Ziska, PhD is a plant physiologist and an associate professor at Columbia University. Dr. Ziska studies the nexus of climate change, carbon dioxide, plant biology and public health and has published over 100 peer-reviewed research articles.
He was formerly with the USDA until summer 2019 when he resigned after having critical work with implications for millions around the world, blocked by the Trump administration in an unprecedented effort to silence academia and the search for truth.
This week in Agriculture Adapts by ClimateAi:
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If CO2 is plant food, shouldn't more of it be good for plants? Not by a long shot
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Higher atmospheric CO2 is causing a food/public health emergency in developing countries
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What is the role of food businesses in protecting consumer health & taking the mantle on sustainability?
Ali Amin is the founder and CEO of Primex, a fourth generation grower, processor and international trader/exporter of nuts and dried fruits. Ali has served as chairman of the California Pistachio Commission and through Primex, he owns over 5,000 acres of Pistachio orchards. Ali explains why Pistachios are a climate change crop of choice
"You plant Almonds for yourself. You plant Pistachios for your grandkids."
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
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Why Pistachios are a near-mystical crop with unparalleled resilience
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What is "Chill" and why is it threatening tree nut and stone fruit production in California (and in some cases the entire U.S.)
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How California is thinking about its ground-water crisis
Cannon Michael is a 6th Generation farmer, touting a farming lineage of over 160 years in California. He is the current president of Bowles Farming Company and has become something of a voice for farmers in our consumer driven world, explaining to end-customers what their preferences truly mean at the farm level: sustainability, regenerative agriculture, and organic.
"Sustainability is ingrained in the DNA of every successful farmer. If it wasn't, they'd go out of business"
In this episode of Agriculture Adapts:
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Regenerative and organic agriculture: realities, myths, challenges, and opportunities
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What a 160 year legacy has to say about climate change's impact on agriculture
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Regenerative agriculture is not one size fits all
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Health impacts of organic vs conventional agriculture from the perspective of someone who grows your food
Links:
Bowles Farming Company
Pima Cotton - 100% traceable cotton sourced from Bowles
Jeff Creque is the co-founder of the Marin Carbon Project and the director of agro-ecosystem management at the Carbon Cycle Institute. He is an expert in biodynamic farming and a pioneer of the carbon farming movement.
We chat with Jeff about the science, economics, feasability, and scalability of carbon farming as a climate change solution and a engine for healthier soils.
This week on Agriculture Adapts:
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The wide range of benefits of carbon farming: climate, soils, resilience, and productivity
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How compost revitalizes dead soil and accelerates carbon storage
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How do we ramp up carbon farming to a scale large enough to go toe-to-toe with global greenhouse gas emissions
Randi is a 24 year USDA veteran with experience ranging from research genetics to managing director in the domains of forestry and climate change. Randi chats with us about the most pressing challenges at the intersection of climate and agriculture.
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
- The practical barriers that complicate climate solutions in agriculture
- What are the big climate-ag questions the USDA has set out to tackle
- Why climate change is more widely accepted in the agriculture community than people think
A.J. Ferrari is a wine expert with decades of experience across the wine industry ranging from working for wine spectator magazine and working on a vineyard in New Zealand, to becoming a wine sommelier and teaching a wine class at Stanford University. This episode builds off of a previous conversation about wines and climate change with Peter Mondavi (episode 2).
This week in agriculture adapts:
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Shifting climate zones are leaving many age-old wineries in the dust and opening up the door for newly suitable lands
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Why wineries that weren't burned in the Napa wildfires were still effected
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Can vineyards developed without irrigation actually be better suited to combat drought?
Better Cotton Initiative (bettercotton.org) is the largest cotton sustainability program in the world: 2 million farmers across 21 countries accounting for 20% of the world's cotton. Scott sits down with us to explain how BCI is revolutionizing the global cotton supply chain.
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
- The importance of profitability; $1 could determine a child's future
- How BCI makes cotton farming safer, more sustainable, and more profitable
- Data is the key to climate resilience
Ashby Monk is an institutional investment Guru, helping the likes of multi-billion/trillion dollar pension funds and sovereign wealth funds rethink the way they view risk. In this episode we dive deep into the wonky side of finance and climate risk.
This week in Agriculture Adapts:
- Climate change is a non-diversifiable risk
- The engines of capitalism must evolve if they are to thrive in a changing world
- How and why we need to translate long term risk into a current concern
Gary is a 3rd generation CEO of one of the largest strawberry operations in the south east U.S. He walks us through how the strawberry world in the south east has changed over the past century and how Wish Farms continues to evolve to keep up with a changing world.
This week on Agriculture Adapts:
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International strawberry market dynamics
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How climate has changed strawberry management strategies
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Are hurricanes a major concern for the Florida strawberry world?
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Solving the labor shortage
Peter Mondavi is a 3rd generation wine maker and the co-proprietor of the Charles Krug Winery, the oldest commercial winery in Napa Valley. Napa Valley has seen decades of amazing wine production but a changing climate has created new hurdles for the industry. We sit down with Peter to understand what issues sit top of mind for the industry and how vintners (wine makers) are managing these new risks.
This week on Agriculture Adapts:
- Will Napa be able to grow its favorite wine, Cabernet Sauvignon, as the climate heats up in the region?
- In 2017 wildfires tore through Northern California wine country -- how was the industry affected and how are they adapting?
- Can drought actually be good for wine grapes?
Teddy Bekele is the CTO of Land O'Lakes, one of the largest agriculture co-operatives in the U.S. Teddy has lead the co-op's shift to a tech-oriented company, first joining as a senior IT director and quickly climbing the ranks to CTO where he now leads the company-wide data and sustainability initiatives.
In this episode, we learn about Land O'lakes view on ag-tech and innovation, the role data will play in the future of sustainability, and how climate resilient farmers deserve better financing and insurance rates.
climate resilience: the ability to thrive through various extreme and unpredictable long term weather events
This week on Agriculture Adapts:
- Land O'Lakes views on technology's role in the agriculture sector: augmenting the farmers' expertise and harnessing their experience rather than trying to replace it.
- How investment and innovation happens at the farm level despite razer thin margins
- The process of derisking technology before rolling it out to farmers-- no room for error when you're betting the farm every year
- Land O'lakes new data and sustainability platform, Truterra. Successes, hurdles, and new opportunities.
- How sustainability and climate resilience tie together