Our current agricultural systems produce food with little nutritional value. And even the products labeled organic are not necessarily more nutrient dense. We assume that every carrot is as healthy as the next, but in truth, there is enormous variation and our existing standards assess process—not quality. So, is there a reliable way to determine the nutritional value of a particular food? To compare one carrot with another and make an informed decision on what to buy?
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, it’s Ross from Reversing Climate Change. I wanted to let you know that we have a new podcast called Carbon Removal Newsroom. It’s short form, it’s timely, and it’s all about carbon removal. Whenever we see a good news story about carbon removal, or that should be about carbon removal, we’re going to record a short episode about it with a rotating cast of guests. So please subscribe to Carbon Removal Newsroom, check it out in your podcast app of choice, and thank you so much for your support. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast.
I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jaspé. Again, no Paul. Paul, we need you. Get out here. I’ve been taking over your duties, but it’s going okay. We are in Kansas. We are in Wichita. I’ve had a great time the last couple of days. Been a bit of a marathon though.
Christophe Jospe: It has. We’re here just wrapping up at the No Till on the Plains conference. I’ve had White Stripes Seven Nation Army stuck in my head. I’m kind of sick of that, actually. Seven Nation Army can’t hold me back. Here we are in Wichita. But this is a lucky one. Yeah. He is also a farmer, which gives him, I guess, a couple more levels of credibility to talk about the things he’s going to talk about. Dan, welcome to the show. It’s really great to have you on here. We like to start with people’s story, really, how they got to where they are today, how they got to caring about Reversing Climate Change.
So where did it all begin for you?
Dan Kittredge: Thank you for having me on. It was great to meet you guys, too. I’ve been hearing about Nori for years now, and almost entirely good things. So I’m really glad to have the opportunity here. Flattery works. Well, no, sorry, just a simple fact. Yeah. Some people you hear good things about and some people you don’t hear good things about. I’ve been hearing good things about you guys. My background is as an organic farmer. I grew up on an organic farm in Massachusetts. My parents bought a 30-acre piece of property, a couple acres of open field and a bunch of rocks and woods and swamp and built a passive solar house in 1981 with a root cellar and a wood stove and We’re basically, you know, not off the grid, but very much back to the land kind of homesteader like.
So I like to say I grew up more Amish than English, as the Amish would say in my personal experience. My parents, like many farmers. We’re unable to make a living farming, and so their day job was and still is running an organization called NOFA, Northeast Organic Farming Association. They helped write some of the first organic standards in the 80s. They’ve been running the conferences and editing the newspapers and running the organization for more than 30 years now. My background is really as an organic farmer, not just as a farmer, but also in the movement.
They ran the organization out of our house and still do. So I came at it from that lens of growing up on a farm. We had a milk cow, we had our own pigs and Chickens and turkeys and orchard and vegetables and started a farmer’s market and started a CSA and sold to health food stores and all that kind of stuff. And that was basically the profession that I had through college into my 20s. When I got married, I had not found any other lifestyle that I found more attractive and more, I thought, appropriate for raising children.
I thought children should be able to be out in land and nature and Exposed to all that kind of stuff. And I don’t really like answering to anybody. And I like working with living things. And so I said, okay, I’m going to try to be a farmer. I had done various things. I worked for political campaigns. I was a 9-11 truth activist. I was part of the global anti-GMO campaign. I spent a couple of winters up in the Himalayas. I did a bunch of various things in the winter times, but I was a farmer for paying the bills.
When it came down to actually trying to pay the bills, I realized that I couldn’t, like a lot of farmers, make enough money to provide for a family. And what I came to for why I couldn’t was because my plants were sick. I tell us a little anecdote when I’m teaching courses. I was checking on our old farm dog, Stuball, who had his rear end run over by a CSA member. Ground into the driveway and he had a sort of an open wound and I was just checking on it. It would have been a couple of days and there were some maggots in the wound eating the dead flesh, which is nature’s way of cleaning a wound.
I didn’t know that. I almost lost my breakfast. But it really struck me that larvae eating my dog was almost more than I could handle. But larvae eating my plants, I was so inured to, I just considered it to be no big deal. One could argue that being eaten alive by the larvae of insects is a sign of poor health, but that never really crossed my mind in all the 20 years of farming I’d been doing at that point. You could argue that a flesh-eating fungus, a systemic staph infection, would be considered to be a sign of poor health if you were raising chickens and they were being eaten alive by staph.
It would not be honorable or appropriate to slaughter those chickens and sell them to your customers. And yet powdery mildew was regularly eating our cucumbers and squash alive, etc. So you can basically see this as going. I had to come to terms with the fact that As far as I was concerned, nature was telling me that my plants weren’t healthy. And that really connected to poor economic viability. And so there’s a real visceral incentive is where I came at it from. How can I make my plants more healthy so I can make a living?
I had been brought up in the organic world. I was pretty well versed with what was known about best practices. I was implementing them and still not getting... What I would consider to be good results. So I set about doing study and reading books and going to conferences and attending seminars and practicing winter study, summer practice. And it took very little time to get to a point where the diseases disappeared. The insects disappeared. The yields went up. The cost of production went down. Shelf life improved. Flavor and aroma improved. Soil structure improved.
So I had this visceral experience of saying, oh my God, when you do a better job working with nature, all these synergistic feedback loops begin to occur. It’s not a double bottom line or triple bottom line. It’s like an octuple bottom line of synergies. And so I figured if I grew up on an organic farm and my parents were in an organic farming organization and I didn’t know any of this stuff, then maybe... This wasn’t necessarily well known out there. And I almost had an obligation to start talking about it, even though I knew enough to know I didn’t really know that much.
And so I started giving workshops at conferences and those started turning into half day presentations and then to full day courses and then multiple day courses. And it ended up basically turning into an educational organization. And so... In 2010, we established the Bionutrient Food Association, which is an educational nonprofit whose mission is to increase quality in the food supply. We understand that there’s a pretty profound decrease in nutritional value And food as documented by the USDA, any number of other national agencies in Europe and Asia, et cetera, which happens to correlate with increases in what we now call conventional lag, correlate with increases in degenerative disease, chronic illness, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, whatever.
All those diseases which are managed but not cured by the quote unquote medical system. Also correlates with increased carbon in the atmosphere, all kinds of dead zones in the oceans and pollution of the aquifers. There’s a really beautiful opportunity as I see it to do agriculture more well and systemically address a bunch of what appear to be sort of intransigent systemic issues that we’re struggling with culturally. So there’s a long story. I can keep going if you want, but that’s where it started.
Christophe Jospe: No, that’s amazing. I think there’s a lot to pick up there. As I was hearing you talk, it brought to mind the dinner that we were at last night with No-Till where, you know, here we are in the Midwest and you’d think this is really the basket of America where all the food is produced. But it’s actually oftentimes quite the food desert and because you see people grow corn and they grow soybeans and maybe they grow wheat. But that’s basically it. And it was really great to hear a story from a husband and wife and the wife was in And the nurse decided that she wanted to plant a one acre garden and a vegetable garden and was producing all this amazing food.
And it was kind of interesting. She’s like, yeah, this isn’t organic, but I know how my food was grown and it was great. And it kind of, I’m deciding whether we want to get into the spicy organic question now or later. And I think I want to get there now.
Ross Kenyon: It was also on my mind.
Christophe Jospe: Great. So maybe we start with that. But before that, you also, well, just so you know, Dan, we hate acronyms and you use CSA. So that’s community supported agriculture for all of you. Out there who don’t know what a CSA is, go join one. It’s a great way to support your local farmer and really know where your food comes from, which kind of that’s the kicker here. Know where your food comes from. You are what you eat. And it’s important to think about that. But organics. Okay. You know, been to enough farmer conferences now where there’s this slide getting passed around and it’s like a soccer mom going through the grocery store with her kid.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve seen that stock image many times.
Christophe Jospe: Stock image, label fatigue. Like organic is good. Just buy organic. Is organic always good? What is the dark side of organic?
Dan Kittredge: Different people have different colored skin, different genders. You know, they’re allowed to say certain things. I’m a white male, so I can’t say a lot of things. But I did grow up on an organic farm and my parents do run an organic farming organization. So I feel like I’ve got a certain... You’re allowed to dish on this. I can speak about organic with some perspective. I think the impetus behind the organic movement was very much honorable and coming from an appropriate place, a pushback against... What was at that point relatively new, this chemical system.
And it was tied up with Back to the Land. And after the 60s sort of pushback against the militarist system, a different model of life and community and culture emerged. Moving more towards what we think is perhaps more harmonious and multiple levels. But in many cases, it was professionally trained, relatively privileged people who didn’t necessarily have a lot of experience farming who were taking it on. That’s the back to the land side of it, right? Right. Yeah, well, but the whole organic movement, I think, initially started out with people who were not necessarily connected to their indigenous forebears.
They had been removed from the land by a couple generations through education and universities and professional careers and things like that. The wisdom that had been passed on through the generations... Had been broken and they didn’t necessarily know what they were doing. A lot of that sort of just muscle memory, knowledge wasn’t there. And, you know, there was a, it was an obvious pushback against the chemicals. I mean, my father literally wrote one of the first organic, was on the committee for NOFA that helped write one of the first organic standards in the country.
And I remember asking him a few years ago, I said, you know, why did you guys... Have it be a process standard instead of a quality standard. Why was it a series of actions as opposed to a result? And, you know, there’s a deeper conversation here, which we don’t necessarily need to get into. But the idea was that if you grow plants more well, then they’re better. They’re more nutritious. And the reason that they didn’t establish a quality standard that, you know, to check to see how good the crops actually were was because A, we didn’t have one and B, there was no way to test There’s no easy way to assess quality.
And so they just reverted to thou shalt not use synthetic materials, etc, etc, etc. It’s like a practice basis. It’s a practice basis, right, as a lot of the regenerative standards are now, which the same critique applies as far as I’m concerned to the regenerative community. Which is a bunch of people who really mean well, who don’t know what they’re talking about, who have an impulse which is well founded, but without deeper knowledge and proper assessment capacities, it’s a big fad that might just be co-opted and everything else. Yeah, so organic, it’s based on something and it started building, it was grassroots, it was great and it was a threat to the system, as it were.
And so the government, as a lackey of the system, came in and took it over and At this point, the vast majority of crops that are being sold under the organic label are being produced in a very unorganic quote unquote way, depending on how you define the term. Mass production, monoculture, heavy tillage, lots of fertilizer, organic fertilizer, organic insecticides, organic fungicides, nutritional values that are relatively similar to conventional crops. We can say with some confidence that the toxin levels in organic crops are lower. We can say GMOs are not present.
We can say Things like that. The bad stuff is less. But the point from our perspective is it’s about the quality. It’s about the good stuff being more that’s what people really want. So we should be humble about what’s going on. We should be honest about what’s going on. We should be transparent about what’s going on. And say that most organic food nutritionally is similar to most conventional food. There are some organic farmers who are doing a great job. Oftentimes they’re smaller scale, not always. There are some conventional farmers who are doing a great job nutritionally, and some of them are decent sized.
So our position at the Bionutrient Food Association is that the nutritional value of the food is a great point to assess from. And we think it correlates to Carbon sequestration. We think it correlates to food being medicine, healing you, healing your children, etc. But it doesn’t necessarily correlate with an organic label or with a local label or with a permaculture or biodynamic or slow food or Weston Price or whatever other kind of a That label you want to associate with your product, your crop, your food doesn’t necessarily correlate with nutritional value.
And so that’s what we’re trying to do with the organization is bring forth this transparent empirical assessment capacity and give consumers the ability to go right past the label to the actual quality the food.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m someone that would definitely look for the label. Mass society has a lot of information that you’re required to process very quickly, make snap judgments, living in society above Dunbar’s number. You don’t always necessarily know your neighbor. You don’t necessarily always know the farmer. What’s Dunbar’s number, Ross?
Dan Kittredge: Yeah, I don’t know that one either.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, it’s an anthropological concept about the number of people that you can actually know in some important way and hold accountable by informal norms.
Dan Kittredge: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That whole thing. So we’re way, way, way above that. And if you’re trying to keep track of where your food comes from, especially given how disposable... Yeah.
Dan Kittredge: Is that correct? Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s what we have been championing, you know, for at least a decade now. I certainly, when I first started learning about these things, I said, well, what’s the word for this quality thing? And there wasn’t even a concept. I mean, there wasn’t even a word for it. It wasn’t really even in the consciousness of the conversation. There was just people weren’t talking about it overtly. So, I mean, there’s a few of us that started using the term nutrient density and it seems to have caught on at this point.
Like organic, you know, organic used to mean contains carbon. It still does in some circles. Nutrient density already means something in food science, which is not what we’re talking about it here to mean, but it’s the word people are throwing around. So the concept is that, you know, this carrot has more carotenoids, more carotenoids. Nutritional components, more milligrams of vitamin C per 100 grams of carrot, more whatever. That’s what we’re talking about here with nutrient density. And the variations are quite significant. Even within the same crop, same field. Precisely. Well, not necessarily within the same field, but within the same crop type.
What we understand now, we don’t know for sure, but we’re pretty darn sure, is that how you grow the food has a massive effect on how nutritious it is. And so just as an example, I was talking to Joel Salatin about this stuff a couple years ago now. Good name drop. That’s a good one. I can drop all kinds of names. We got all the elders, all the leaders in the movement backing us. You want to say it or should I?
Ross Kenyon: We’re coming for you, Joel Salatin. We want you on the podcast too. We’re fans of your work. He’s a great guy.
Dan Kittredge: A really great guy. Definitely doesn’t mind, you know, saying what he thinks, which I totally appreciate. Time’s up. Like, say what you think, people. If we don’t start standing where we believe, no more mealy-mouthedness. Anyway, he was talking about something that Mother Earth News did, I think it was like 10 years ago or so, where they took eggs from 10 different farms who were doing pastured poultry and they ran those eggs. Yeah. It’s considered to be a deficient compound. It’s health-giving, et cetera, et cetera. Good for your eyes. Joel’s eggs were something over 1,000, 1,052 parts per million.
So you can do your statistics in your head. That’s thousands of percent variation. It’s not 5%, not 10%. I like to say, if you’ve eaten a tomato off the shelf in January from the grocery store, you know the experience of a tomato with no flavor.
Ross Kenyon: That’s one of my most beloved culinary experiences.
Dan Kittredge: If you’ve eaten a tomato off the vine in August, you know the experience with tomato with flavor. According to the USDA, all tomatoes have X nutrients in them on average. And there’s this massive hole in the cultural consciousness right now, which assumes that all food is the same. Like all number two plastic is the same or all iron is the same or whatever. It’s just not true. Food is not a commodity. It’s not fungible with itself. Well, I mean, it’s being treated like a commodity, but we have to break this mechanistic paradigm that’s in our heads that we’re sort of like locked into.
As far as I’m concerned, there is a paradigm shift that needs to be undergone from this mechanistic paradigm to a biological paradigm, understanding that I think it was Descartes who said, you can basically take everything apart into its component parts, study the component parts, and then understand the thing that you started with.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like It’s either him or Francis Bacon, or they’re part of the same group.
Dan Kittredge: This whole, you know, it was called the Enlightenment in Europe in the 17, 1800s. And, you know, this idea that everything can be pulled apart and this component’s studied and therefore understood is where PhDs come from. This concept of like, just study one thing really well, and then you understand it. And, you know, I say, take an amoeba apart, study all the organelles, study the cilia, study the, you know, whatever, and then put it all back together again. What do you’ve got? You don’t have what you started with. You can’t take life apart and then put it back together.
Life operates on different principles. It’s a feedback loop, multi-factor system. It’s operating on multiple levels. And we’ve been treating agriculture like a factory system, like a mechanism. And it’s killing us. We’re falling apart. The environment’s falling apart culturally, spiritually, physiologically, biochemically, hormonally. We’re falling apart because we’re treating ourselves like a piece of plastic and we’re not. And so it all ties And food that has flavor comes from a living ecosystem. You can’t build high levels of nutritional compounds and crops without a well-functioning microbial ecosystem. You know, plants have gut flora like we do.
They’ve evolved not to eat fertilizer. On none of the first six days did God invent fertilizer. They’ve evolved a symbiotic relationship with microbes. In the same way, we can’t digest our food without the microbes in our gut. Plants can’t digest their food without the microbes in their gut. You can be kept alive on an IV drip, soluble nutrients injected directly into your bloodstream. But when you are not eating food, then your gut flora dies off. The way that agriculture is working right now, adding fertilizer to the soil, fertilizer by definition is a soluble nutrient.
We’re basically putting our plants on an IV drip, which is really good for the people making the IV drips. It’s good business for them. But then you’re susceptible to infestation and disease, so it’s really good for the people making the insecticides and fungicides. But plants and nature are neither getting food in the form of fertilizer or insecticides or fungicides, and they’re doing just fine. They’re not attacked by insects because they’re healthy. And so when we can apply the model of nature to agriculture, actually it becomes more economically viable for the farmer, becomes better for the ecosystem, and the output, the food, becomes more nutritious for us.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds like the whole nature as measure, Wes Jackson philosophy. We should look to nature. Nature doesn’t leave fields bare for certain seasons. It’s diverse. It’s not a monoculture. It’s like if you only ate one thing, I think your immune system would be pretty unhappy and we should imitate things that are diverse like that.
Christophe Jospe: Diversity makes us stronger. As I was hearing you talk, I was like, oh, Dan, come on, you’re depressing me, man. You’re telling me that all these things are bad. Let’s get to the hopeful stuff and the theories of change and how do we see exponential change. And I was thinking, as you were talking about tomatoes, I was remembering. And I remember eating the tomatoes and I had this like very visceral feeling like, oh, those are the best tomatoes ever. And that started giving me hope because once you’ve tasted something incredibly flavorful, You’re not going to forget what food is actually supposed to taste like.
So even if you eat crappy tomatoes most of the time, you know what the good tomatoes taste like, and then you know that you want those good tomatoes. So it doesn’t actually take all that much to start then seeing, okay, well, I’m a consumer of food. And I’m going to want those flavorful tomatoes. And I want to know how to get those flavorful tomatoes. So maybe actually the challenge is how does the food producer who is generating more nutritious and flavorful tomatoes communicate that in an effective way? And how does that create this waterfall for, what did you call it, octagonal bottom line?
Octuple, I said. Octuple, octuple. So, I mean, we’re talking about, I mean, we’ve got the triple bottom line, which is people, planet, profit, maybe, I don’t know, just guessing like water retention, carbon, like less pollution, like maybe a couple more bottom lines you have in mind.
Dan Kittredge: There’s a number of them we can go into if you have time for it.
Christophe Jospe: Right. Another just throwing multi-layered blatherings at you to maybe pull out a question on theory of change, producer preference. I mean, I think when we met you in person yesterday, you were talking to a brand of a food company that probably everyone would recognize. We won’t name it here. But that food company really wants to put its money where its mouth is. And you were like, look, guys, this is going to happen with or without you. You can be part of leading it. So I just lay that out there to say, to really make it all happen, actually, we need to come together and say the ways in which we estimate or communicate how good something is for you must be open.
Take us out of the pessimism and into the optimism.
Dan Kittredge: Yeah, if that wasn’t three softballs at me, I don’t know what would be.
Ross Kenyon: It gives you your dealer’s choice.
Dan Kittredge: Yeah. So what are we doing as an organization and why are you talking to me? I started off talking about my experience as a farmer and... Some background about other things I’d done in my life. I think many of us have this deep-seated desire to have a positive impact in the world and are struggling with ways to use our limited human capacities to have a meaningful impact. I know I’ve certainly gone through that process of, you know, how can I engage in a meaningful way? How can I really be part of something systemic and beneficial?
And as far as theory of change is concerned, you know, I’m of the opinion now in my much more cynical 40s than I was in my 20s, That money is a piece of the puzzle. That money really drives a lot of things. And I think money is your vote. I think money is energy. And we the people have a lot of power if we want to use it together. And where we choose to use our money actually is a great way for us to use power, to affect change. So our organizational thought is it sure seems like Working well with nature as a farmer improves the soil health, improves the nutritional value of the food, improves the bottom line of the farmer, can have a positive impact on the human health.
How can we facilitate that? That seems like a really deep solution to a number of different things. We can sequester carbon at ridiculously high levels, right? We can reverse degenerative disease categorically. There’s all kinds of really positive things we can do. How do we drive it? And so our thought is that if we can If we can help them understand that this bag of carrots is bland or bitter tasting, and this bag of carrots is flavorful. This bag of carrots is flavorful and aromatic. Your child will want to eat. This one, your child will not want to eat.
If we can help consumers choose, say both of them have an organic label on them, how do you know the difference? Which one’s more nutritious? You know, we’ve come up with this idea that giving people the ability to test that in real time with a flash of light, functionally like take your smartphone out, flash the light at the bag of carrots and tells you 14 out of 100 to the next company’s bag, 40 out of 100 and The third company’s bag, 80 out of 100. If you knew this company’s bag was much more nutritious than that company’s bag, which one would you buy?
Our thought is people would buy the ones that are more nutritious. And if that company’s bag starts to leave the shelf and the other company’s bags are left on the shelf, then we’ve got an economic incentive to the supply chain telling them, The stuff that’s more nutritious is what people are looking for. They don’t care about the aesthetic, you know, the shape anymore. They care about the flavor and the nutritional value. And so what we’re doing is building that capacity. And so the technology is called spectroscopy. We can see Alpha Centauri, I like to say, is a star that’s eight light years old.
And we’ve never sent a probe, a Voyager or anything else past the edge of the solar system, which is 12 light hours away. Alpha Centauri is eight light years away. You ask any astrophysicist, they’ll tell you with great confidence. Alpha Centauri is 51% hydrogen. It’s 48% helium. It’s 1% other gases in these levels and ratios. We have great confidence. We know exactly what Alpha Centauri is made up of, even though we’ve never been there. Because every element in chemistry is a vibration in physics. And the way we can read that is with this thing called spectroscopy.
It’s that you look at the frequency of light and everything has a certain frequency it vibrates at. And so if you can figure out what something is made up of eight light years away, should you be able to figure out what something is made up of eight millimeters away? Our thought is, sure, we should be able to. And so that’s what we’ve done is we’ve built basically a portable handheld consumer priced spectrometer that you can take to the grocery store. You can take to the farmer’s market. You can flash a light at the bag of carrots and it’ll tell you, this is junk.
This is also junk. This one’s pretty good. So we’ve done this in a totally open source fashion. We’re a nonprofit educational organization. And we’ve got the tools out there right now. You can purchase one. Right now we’re in the developer kit stage, which basically means you can get the tool, you can get the frequency of light bounce. We can tell you what that frequency of light means. We can tell you it means you’ve got so much carotenoids, so much protein, so much, et cetera. But what we don’t know is, is that good or bad?
So in carrots, for example, what’s the nutritional spectrum of a high quality carrot versus a low quality carrot? No one seems to have defined that. And then also we’re trying to figure out What are the management practices that correlate with high quality carrots? Because we don’t just want to be able to go to the farmer and say, look, this is no good. We’re not going to buy it. We want to go to the farmer and say, if you just do this and this, then the crop will be much higher quality.
So our hope is that with economic incentives, we can support farmers and knowledge and transparent open data. And, you know, a nice little shiny object, a spectrometer, we can inspire a shift in management practices that will correlate with dramatic increases in carbon sequestration because that’s part of how plants feed themselves is through carbon sequestration functionally and increases in nutrient levels and human health and all kinds of other corollaries.
Christophe Jospe: So you got optimistic, which allows me to be cynical. I was trying to put you there. I mean, okay, sounds great. But here we are three white privileged males sitting around a table in a Hyatt hotel, and we’re able to purchase food potentially for more, but... But not everyone can. And so there’s that. Once you start having those who can pay for more nutritious food, maybe it’s only available to those who can afford it and not those who might most need it or be in the lower half of the sort of income bracket.
So that concerns me. Maybe you’ve got an answer there. I do. Okay, good. All right. Let’s start on that.
Dan Kittredge: Yeah. Well, as a farmer, what I found was that when I started producing crops that were healthier, my cost of production went down. When you’re managing in harmony with life, it’s the microbes in the soil that are doing most of the work for you. You don’t need fertilizer anymore. You don’t need any insecticides or fungicides anymore. You don’t need to till the soil. In fact, tilling the soil is bad for the process. Your plants, because they’re healthier, are able to realize more of their inherent genetic potential. So my experience as a farmer is that the healthier your plants are, the lower your cost of production is.
So I would suggest that we should be able to out-compete conventional ag and This heavy input system, which is basically designed to facilitate profits for industry, we should be able to out-compete that system economically. I think we can. The question is, do the farmers have the incentives to? Most of the education that’s coming to the farmers right now is coming from people who are trying to sell them stuff. It’s not that they wouldn’t make a better living if they were doing something differently. It’s they don’t know how, and they don’t have a necessary interest.
So if we can give them an economic interest, as in, we’ll buy your crops if you produce high quality, and we won’t if you don’t. Maybe it needs to start out with an extra 15% on top, but once these practices get well understood and established, I suggest we’re going to be able to produce more food of a higher quality at less cost. That’s, as I understand it, how it works. I’m satisfied with that answer. My next word. If you look at the amount of beef being produced in Iowa in 1491, it’s more, if you count buffalo as cows, than we have beef being produced in Iowa now.
You take all the corn and soy that’s being produced in Iowa and how many cows are being fed that corn and soy and how many pounds of beef are being produced, pounds per acre, et cetera, of beef. They were producing more beef per acre then than we are now. They were actively managing the land, consciously managing the land. They were sequestering carbon like crazy, right? We had 40 feet of topsoil in Illinois and Iowa when the pioneers first came out and plowed the soil. That topsoil came out of the atmosphere.
That rich, dark earth didn’t just magically get there. It wasn’t from the rocks. It came from the atmosphere through carbon sequestration, through biological pathways. And so they were not only producing more food, they were having a much more positive effect on the ecosystem. We’ve got historical models of how this can be done very low tech. They had no wheel, they had no plow, they had no beasts of burden. We can totally do this. This is not a question of if we can. It’s just a question of will we.
Christophe Jospe: Which gets to my next hardball question. It’s the mindset shift. I mean, oftentimes here we are sitting next to farmers, some of whom only do a very small portion. And people don’t like being told that. What you’re doing is producing less nutritious food and killing the soils. So how do we enable that mindset shift?
Dan Kittredge: I think life has this thing called evolution. I’ve heard of that one. Which is basically if you’re in violation of life’s principles, you die off. And life teaches us. And what’s going on right now is we’re dying off. We’re physiologically degenerating. We’ve got serious issues with people, children with life-threatening illnesses, right? I mean, children, if you go to Iowa, you go to Minnesota, You go to some of these states and there’s fourth graders, funerals for fourth graders that died from cancer. These farmers in their communities are seeing the effect of their actions on the land.
They’re seeing that effect on their children, right? That what they’re doing in their gut, in their heart, in their insight, intuition, they know is not right. And so, you know, it does require a level of humility, but we have these visceral drivers like we care about our children more than anything else. And a lot of people have children and a lot of children are struggling. It’s not just adults that get cancer these days. It’s all these diseases that are really – I mean, we are going to die off if we don’t change our practices.
This is called epigenetics. They’ve done this work with rats and with pigs and with cows, and they’ve seen what happens when you feed an animal poor quality nutrition through a couple of generations. The grandmother, the mother, and the child – That child has a limited capacity to function and that’s where we’re at. And so that’s the real driver here as far as I’m concerned is visceral, visceral self-interest. It doesn’t matter if you care a whit about the environment, you probably care about your child. And so if we can help you do one small thing, which is to choose this bag of carrots versus that bag of carrots, you know that’s going to make your child more healthy.
By the way, it’ll also sequester carbon. Awesome. You know, by the way, it’ll suck the life force out of agribusiness because you’re not going to be using their products anymore. You know, I mean, we can talk about the systemic effects on agribusiness, the systemic effects on pharmaceutical medical device industry. I personally think that we are incoherent. Incoherent in our ability to think, in our ability to tune into our higher natures because we’re vibrating out of tune. And we can go down this rabbit hole, we probably don’t have time for it.
But I would suggest systemically as a culture, because we are so incoherent, because we’ve been eating such poor Hot Cross Buns is where we are. No, no. Hot Cross Buns is fine. That’s one person on the piano. It’s the fourth trumpet that’s flat and the second flute that’s sharp and that fingernails on the blackboard dissonance. We each have a vibe based on what we eat, you are what you eat. You are either vibrating coherently or vibrating out of tune. As a community, as a culture, we’re vibrating out of tune. That’s why we have these issues politically of an inability to make coherent decisions because we’re each so incoherent.
And my understanding is that as opposed to a car, which when the brake pads wear out, you take the brake pads out and you put new brake pads in. Or the muffler wears out. When the muffler wears out, you take the old muffler out. That’s a mechanical system. We are biological systems. We are being rebuilt on a daily basis. Four billion of your oldest, junkiest cells get disassembled. New ones get built out of the food that you eat. You do the numbers, you get a new body every six months, right?
Your blood takes two weeks to replace itself. Your bones take seven years to replace themselves. But on average, you get a new body every six months. If we each started eating food that was more nutritious, in six months, we would each be much more coherent. Each of us eats food. Most people eat food. Most people use money to buy food. If we started using money to buy food that was more nutritious, to build more coherence in ourselves, to sequester more carbon in the environment, we would be in a place as a collective to make intelligent decisions.
Our thought is that through enlightened self-interest, through transparent collaboration, through a nice little shiny object of a spectrometer, we come together around this question of quality in the food supply, which has all these beautiful corollary systemic benefits.
Ross Kenyon: Well, very interesting to consider there. A lot of bait, but I’m trying to keep us focused on wrapping up the show here because we want to talk about the open source ethos and how that might fit. Also, I’ve been hearing at Nori about handheld spectrometry from the beginning. And I want to hear about how that might fit into the system as well.
Christophe Jospe: It’s no coincidence because just to give some shout outs to some very bright colleagues of Dan’s, Greg Osteck and Dan Kane. Basically, at the beginning, we had a conversation with them and it was one of those like, yeah, cool. You guys are working on this thing. We totally see how it fits with this thing we’re working on. And yeah, of course, like none of the ways in which we’ll estimate and quantify carbon dioxide removal will be proprietary. Like all of this has to happen out in the open space. So it’s no coincidence that you’ve been hearing about that, Ross.
Dan Kittredge: And the quick carbon tool that you guys probably have been hearing about is the tool that we built that we hired Greg to build. And that tool, a little portable handheld open source spectrometer with an open source database, open source app, everything in chemistry is a vibration in physics. Soil carbon is a thing in chemistry. It’s a vibration in physics. Carotenoids and carrots are a thing in chemistry, a vibration in physics. The same tool that you guys are using for The quick carbon real-time infield assessment of soil carbon is the same tool we’re using to test nutrient levels in carrots, right?
And it’s open source. All the specs are on GitHub. The whole thing is in the commons. Our thought is this is something that needs to be held in the commons. It can’t be black boxed. It can’t be proprietary. It can’t be controlled by a company that if we come together, we companies, organizations, Universities, researchers, consumers, farmers. If we all jointly build this database, answer these questions together about which practices correlate with which results, we can give feedback loops. We can empirically assess results of the nutrient levels of the soil carbon sequestration.
We have this core, this nut in the middle, which is the commons. Let as many companies as want to make as much money as possible by engaging in this process. Right. There’s no, it doesn’t have to be, you know, we’re going to be poor and we’re going to be serving the greater good and we’re better people. No, we just need to make sure that this core functionality, this collaboration node is something that doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s held in trust for the greater good.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we heard you speaking about that and Kristoff and I kept looking at each other being like, yep, this is pure Nori here. Yeah, we like thinking about these problems that we’re all working on together. We’re all on the same team. If you want to get Kropotkin on it, this is mutualism. We are working together. I think the competitive mindset and stealth mode and things like that tend to blind people to how many others they need to collaborate for any business to be successful, for any idea to be successful. And We think that’s just a good attitude to have, and we wish it was more common.
I think it is increasingly common, especially with the way that things are going with data. Alternatively, there are also not so good things happening with data, but there are more silos, there are more proprietary systems. But I’m happy to hear you’re putting the flag in the ground and saying that this has to be open source.
Dan Kittredge: Well, for our perspective, if we don’t follow the model of life, we’re dead. And the way life works is symbiotic, right? There’s millions of species of microbes in the soil, none of whom flourishes by dominating the others. They flourish by supporting each other. Each species has its own functional skill set and capacity and they share what their resources are and they get resources back. I say the most selfish thing you can do is be selfless. You’re happiest when everyone around you is happy. You don’t get fulfillment by being separate from everybody else and having everybody else struggling.
You get fulfillment by having lots of wonderful, flourishing people around you. It is the most selfish thing you can do to support everybody around you as much as possible. It facilitates the greatest quality of life. This is how life works. And if we can understand that, we can use our selfishness for the greater good. It’s a paradigm shift from this reductionist, top-down, patriarchal, whatever you want to call it, system to this biological system. Humans are really good at the fight or flight, the crisis management situation. And what’s so exciting about this time is we’re finally in a crisis.
We’re finally in a true existential crisis. And this is the only answer on the table as we start working together. So awesome. Let’s do it. Great. Let’s take the opportunity and just bust it out. We totally got this thing.
Ross Kenyon: Good note to start wrapping up on. I was reminded of, I’m going to butcher this quote too. I think it’s Martin Luther King Jr. that I will work with any man to do good and with no man to do ill. And it might not even be MLK. So I’m going to get fact checked on this one.
Christophe Jospe: Should I butcher that Margaret Mead quote? Don’t underestimate the power of a small number of people to change the world. There you go. It’s the only thing that ever has...
Ross Kenyon: We don’t necessarily always agree with everyone that we collaborate on with everything. I think that’s impossible anyways, given how intellectually diverse all these spaces are. But we try to come around a common core of things that we can do together and move the needle on. I think that’s really important. So thanks for Christoph steering us into a more optimistic conclusion there, given that we started with the exposition. We got into the solution there.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, well, I want to pass it back to Dan, throw some call outs to our listeners. Maybe if you’re a tinkerer and want to play around with this spectrometer, it’s open source. Go break it, improve it, ship some open code and get on board because this is only going to get better and we’re all in this together. But Dan, how can people listening get involved or be part of this movement?
Dan Kittredge: So our organization is called the Bionutrient Food Association and our URL is bionutrient, one word, . org. The broader collaboration framework we’re calling the Real Food Campaign. Our thought is that there has to be a structure For this collaboration to occur, which includes all these different partners and is not controlled by one entity. And so Real Food Campaign is what we’re launching. That’s sort of the home for this broader collaboration as far as we’re concerned. And that will be a live URL in short order. We’ve got an annual conference called the Soil and Nutrition Conference and we cored all of the presenters and we put all that out there for free.
It’s not exactly a podcast but it’s definitely a lot of good content. So yeah, Bionutrient. org is a great place to start. What we’re doing, this work, the running a lab, the building the tool costs money and we are violently open source. We’re not committed to much, but we’re committed to that, which means that we’re not taking any investment money, right? The work of doing this, of building the calibrations, of And so we are hoping that people will find that inspiring and make a commitment of something like $5 a month.
If that’s something you have to do, We’ve talked to the companies that make the chips for the smartphones. So this is coming down the pike. Um, we’re going to have the first consumer calibrated tool available for use at the end of this year, 2019, but that’s a standalone tool. It’s, you know, it’s a bit clunky and not that big, but it’s a pain to operate. Not really, but it’s a lot harder than just taking your phone out, you know, and taking a picture. And so we think we’re going to be at that stage in a couple of years where it’s just going to be, take your phone out and take a picture.
If you want to hold a house party, get one of our little gizmos, bring five friends over each of you go shopping in a different grocery store or farm So, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. Well, thanks so much for being here with us, Dan. If you like the show, please give us a good review, share it, give us a good rating. That would help us a lot. Subscribe to our newsletter at nori. com. Anything else?
Christophe Jospe: Subscribe to the podcast if this is your first time listening and welcome on board. Thanks for sharing this journey.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you very much. Thank you.
