What biodiversity do you care about?

Are food systems allies or enemies in the fight to save biodiversity? With our planet facing a biodiversity crisis, the answer depends on who you ask and what forms of life we prioritize. We speak with farmers, biophysical modelers, and biologists to explore whether producing food and conserving biodiversity can be achieved at the same time. We also discuss how our diets impact biodiversity, whether farming without soil can be better for biodiversity at large, and what it would take to effectively "shrink" the food system.

For more info, transcript and resources, visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/
episode71

Guests

• Anna Lappé, Global Alliance for the Future of Food
• Els Hegger, Aardigh
• Silvia Quarta, La Junquera Farm
• Bernd Blossey, Assoc Prof at Cornell University
• Adrian Müller, Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) 

Episode edited by Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg and Matthew Kessler. Produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew

You might think about biodiversity as this big web that all forms of life on Earth are part of.

Els Hegger

And we are not above or under – we are just part of it.

Matthew

But - what biodiversity do you care about?

From the allure of charismatic large-eyed mammals to the fascination with microorganisms in the soil – what lifeforms we care about are shaped by our different values and experiences. Do we prefer the biodiversity we encounter in our everyday lives or marvel at distant ecosystems found on nature documentaries?

No matter the biodiversity we care most about, we all face the reality that our food systems are the primary driver of global biodiversity loss…

Bernd Blossey

We messed it up – we need to fix it.

Matthew

Our food systems are affecting land use and habitat destruction.

Anna Lappe

If the word “catastrophic” can’t be used here, then where can we possibly use the word?

Matthew

What we eat and how we produce our food largely determines which species will decline, survive or thrive.

So – what biodiversity do you care about?

Anna Lappe

I’m really glad you’re even asking this question…

Matthew

Welcome to Feed a Food systems podcast presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler.

This is the final episode in our nature season. Here we ask farmers, biophysical modelers, biologists and ecologists about the biodiversity they care most about and how food systems can support them – trying to look not only through a human centered point of view.

Matthew
 Starting with the big picture, we turn to Anna Lappe, Executive Director of Global Alliance for the Future of Food from the US. You’ve met her in the first episode of the nature season.

This episode explores what role food systems play in either harming or nurturing conditions for biodiversity to thrive. Anna Lappe’s first point is that we urgently need to get conversations about our food systems on the one hand - and biodiversity on the other -  out of their silos.

Anna

I think it's really important to bring them together, because what we know from the evidence is that our global food systems are one of the key drivers of biodiversity collapse. And at the same time, we know that reinvesting in models of food and farming, that promote biodiversity are one of the key strategies for protecting biodiversity.

Matthew
Conversations about biodiversity loss depend on your historical vantage point. But if you look at the last 100 yeras. The loss of biodiversity in our agriculture fields, our forests, what shows up on our plates, and in turn, what shows up in our gut microbiome, you can scientifically track this significant loss of diverse plant and animal species. And of course you can zoom in and look at individual species. Or a family. Anna turns her attention to what some have called the “insect apocalypse”.

Anna

There was a meta analysis a couple of years ago, that looked at insect collapse worldwide and found a number of drivers. And really, if you look at the biggest ones, they all came back to food. So there were things like the expansion of monoculture agriculture that essentially create food deserts, for insects, or the heightened use of pesticides around the world, really decimating insect populations. So we know food systems today are playing this huge role in impacting biodiversity. And it's one of the reasons I'm so passionate about trying to promote food systems that do the opposite. That again, promote biodiversity as opposed to destroy it.

Matthew
 Biodiversity comes in almost endless varieties. As individuals, it can feel overwhelming to know what we can do play a part in reversing biodiversity loss. Els Hegger is a small-scale farmer in the small town of Svick  in the Netherlands, playing her own part.

Els

We have a windmill next to my house. So very Dutch. I have self harvesting, small market garden community supported.

Matthew
hen we talk, it’s winter; and Els can’t offer aubergines or courgettes (eggplants or zucchini) to her customers - but that doesn’t matter.

Els

People forget about seasonality on my farm, because I'm small. I can connect to people, and I can take them on a journey in the garden and through the seasons.

Matthew
It all started in 2017, with the first seeds. And then pigs followed, and then chickens.

Now, Els runs what is mostly a vegetable farm, with a few chickens for eggs. Her customers pay for the season; and then they come and harvest themselves.

Right now, she’s also got 11 volunteers helping her out on the farm; 60 families harvesting from it.

Els
 And there's this whole sense of community that's arising.

Matthew
Els describes her farm surrounded by bushes and trees; bursting with life. Some water features, for frogs and toads. Flowers that attract pollinating insects and birds, integrated with the 60-70 different kinds of crops that are planted in rows.

Els
I have signs in the garden and I even have QR codes for people how to harvest so I made little movies of all the vegetables how to harvest. So it's a balance between what's the most beautiful and what's also tenable for us and for the customers. So I’m trying to create as much life as possible.

Matthew 

When you're planning your next farming season, when you're thinking ahead about the year, or the next few years or decade, what biodiversity or what species are you thinking about?

Els 

Well, I really like things to grow organically, sometimes things develop themselves that I didn't think of. And when I see how the soil is bursting with life now, I think that the combination of so many different crops and so many different flowers is really beneficial. And I'm also planting and planning more perennial crops, small bushes and some fruit trees. To allow for a different network of mycelium underground, but not too many, because it's always a little bit of a balance between what annual crops need and the perennial crops.

Matthew 

You're creating a real patchwork of a landscape. And I know that you're not just thinking of the species, the crops that the people who are coming to the farm will then harvest themselves as part of their boxes. But you're also thinking about the life that supports that.

Els 

Absolutely. For me, the one doesn't go without the other.

Matthew

How do you think of humans? Where does the human sit in this web of nature? I think people have different understandings of what humans roles are in different ecosystems, whether they're on equal footing, above other species, below other species.

Els 

Yeah, I definitely think that humans are custodial species. So we are part of a big web, and we're not above or under, we’re just part of it. And I think every species in the system or within the Earth system, has its own responsibility. Our responsibility as humans comes with taking care of our environment. By harvesting in that environment we create, because there's how species that flourish with the existence of humans. And we have this view of true nature being there without humans. And I think that's such a fallacy.

Matthew
Els wishes we could more broadly rethink how we produce our food.The way she sees it, we’ve created a ravine between us as humans and all the other life on our planet, and we see food only as a commodity, when in reality, it’s so much more.

Els
It's a cultural thing. And look at all the cultures around the world, what they feed themselves with. And it's a social thing. I cannot think of any social event without food. And food is something to share. It's not only our food, it's also food of so many other animals and plants. By looking at food as a commodity, I think we're undressing something that is so worthwhile and so complex and so rich, that we are forgetting about all the connections that are there between us, and all the other life forms.

Matthew

If I had to sum up what biodiversity does Els care about. I would say it’s the lesser noticed species, sometimes invisible to the human eye, that supports our farms and food production. From the microorganisms in the soil to the pollinating insects.

 
Back to Anna Lappe, director of Global Alliance for the Future of Food. The insect apocalypse that you focus on, is a term that really hasn’t caught on, but in the circles that are aware of it, that is one of the most frightening things we hear today.

Anna 

I couldn't agree more. I interviewed one of the lead authors for this meta analysis about insect collapse Francisco bio Sanchez. And I asked him if he got any pushback about his findings, which were again, you know, pretty alarming about pulling together all this data from really micro studies around the world.

And then you pull it together, and you see a pretty alarming trend. If business as usual continues, we're looking toward what he described as real insect apocalypse. Catastrophic decline is how he put it. And he said, the one pushback he got is that many of his scientific peers, talk about the importance in the scientific community to be very careful about the words you choose. And pushed back around this use of kind of catastrophic decline. He said to me, “Look, if the word catastrophic cannot be used here, then where can we possibly use the word?” That what we are seeing is nothing but catastrophic decline. And he stood by his use of the term. 

I think that study got a lot of attention in the media. Did it translate into policymakers really waking up and realizing that we really need to have major turnaround in terms of the kind of food and agriculture environments that we're incentivizing? We haven't seen that yet, sadly. But I think it's really important for us to keep raising the alarm, because we absolutely need to address this link between our global food systems and biodiversity.

Matthew 

Population is growing. More and more people are living in cities. Many call for us to continue to these trends of continuning to intensify agricultural production—using less land and fewer resources to produce more food—so we don’t need to expand agricultural land. Others believe that nature conservation and agriculture don’t have to be separate. 

Silvia 

I think it's very much an ideological battle.

Matthew
Silva Quarta works at Camp Altiplano, one of the ecosystem restoration communities in the south of Spain. She finds that this “ideological battle” over what food systems are best for biodiversity at large, leads to a research selection bias. What I mean is, everyone finds the arguments and evidence to support what they’re looking for. But to her, it’s clear that very separating nature from agriculture, with urban populations losing connections to where their food comes from. She finds it quite destructive.  

Silva
Because you create huge spaces of land where there's zero biodiversity, which means that you have deserts in between some hotspots. Which means those hotspots are also not connected anymore. Which means there's no exchange anymore. And you're reducing the connections, you're reducing the diversity. So I'm quite sure that's not the way to go. And I'm quite sure we can do intensification on a different scale. So instead of thinking of making things bigger and more industrial, maybe we can make things smaller, and more diverse. More intense in the small scale. So you have more of everything in a smaller place. More of these sites are everywhere.

Matthew

Silva Junta’s work over the past ten years has been working with La Junquera, a farm that was covered in cereal production to a regenerative farm. Now it’s over 1000 hectares with lots of biodiversity. with aromatics, pistachios, an apple orchard and almond trees and multiple restoration projects. It’s a kind of a hub for research and experimentation around  ecosystem restoration and regenerative agriculture.

We go on a mini-tour of the farm.

Silva 

There's usually a lot of sun and a lot of wind. As we drive into the farm, actually, you can see different managements of the land. And when you reach Camp Altiplano, it's basically a quite stunning, lush area compared to all the rest.

You see a water source, there's a pond with water, which means there's green grasses all around it, which means there's usually quite a lot of birds. We’ve seen herons the other day. And then we would drive through a windy road that goes up into the more hilly area where we see a cereal field where swales have been dug. Those are water infiltration infrastructures basically to retain water and soil on the land.

Matthew
Winding trenches create a kind of cut in the monocultures. They are dug out on contour lines, to slow the flow of water. In these areas, they’ve planted aromatics – fragrant and functional plants and flowers, alongside almond trees. When you get the top of the hill, you can see a 360 degree panorama view of the landscape.

Silva
Very little life around you, which is human life. Although most of it is farmed, and then we drive down into the vineyard, which is planted only a couple of years ago. And eventually, I would definitely go to the mountain, which is also part of the farm, which is, I think, my favorite spot here. 

Because it's a almost pristine, definitely not pristine, but it looks like it, in Mediterranean forest. Oak trees and pines and junipers and rosemaries, and everything smells really nice. And there's no really a path to climb up the mountain. So you have to find your own way. And it just really feels like a special place with the shade. Yeah, a lot of different plants and animals living around and you really feel like it's kind of a safe haven.

Matthew

You mentioned that if you climb up to this vista, you would see very little human life. But there's plenty of biodiversity. There's a lot of other non-human life that exists in this landscape.

You occupy this unique position where you're working both with nature conservation and food production. What type of food systems support this type of biodiversity that you care about and want to see more of in the world?

Silvia 

So basically, the whole struggle of this farm, in general, is to find that food system that instead of destroying or maintaining as it is a system as it is – it's actually bringing it back to a very healthy state. I guess the system we’re trying to get is very diverse. You have a lot of different crops in the same plot, fruit trees. So you have different products on the same land. It's a system where soil is absolutely important and the care for the soil is absolutely important and reducing erosion and adding a soil covered and healthy and with the good structure, essential part three. So definitely. Mechanisation is still going to be a part of it, because we're, this farm is very big and large scale work. But instead of, for example, ploughing seven times a year, as it happens on most cereal fields around here, maybe a couple of times, Maybe the need of external inputs is reduced. So then, of course, when you're adding compost, or any kind of fertilizer, it comes as much as possible from what you have on the land. And hopefully you would have some animals too. Here we have cows, some horses and we're actually producing our own compost. And the same goes for the seeds, which I think is a super essential part of the whole process, working with local varieties producing as much as possible your own seeds.

Matthew
Silva’s vision of the farm La Junquera in the south of Spain is an extremely diverse and biodiverse one - breaking the separation between nature and agriculture as much as possible.

Silva
Making it more of a mosaic and making it more of a mix. And also, I think, as much as possible, a bit more small scale, because that also entails the ownership side. And I think a system, which is more resilient is also a system that involves more people in its production and its ownership. So that it can actually support more rather than few.

Matthew 

Next, we speak to someone else looking to break the separation. But here we focus on more on diets, and specifically meat. He talks about the types of meat we eat, and wonders how different landscapes could look, if we switched from farming cows and chickens and pigs to eating more wild game.

Bernd 

And so the vision would be getting rid of all the corn and soybean farms. Let the bison roam. Bring the native prairie back. And have mobile slaughterhouses to then go and take whatever Bisons are given us and put that into the human food chain.

Matthew
 You’ve also met Bernd Blossey, Conservation Biologist at Cornell University in a previous episode. So what’s his vision? How could landscapes in North America evolve, and how could biodiversity could thrive, if we changed our strategies around the supply and consumption of meat?

Bernd

When I'm thinking about more of the prairie landscapes, at some point when Europeans colonized that, there were prairies that were building soil, sequestering carbon, and millions of bison roam the prairies from New York to I don't know the Rocky Mountains and beyond. And then Europeans thought, “Oh, we can do better. And we need to farm and slaughter all the bison to reduce Native American populations that were feeding on them. And then we grow corn and soybean. And that seems like a real stupid idea for many, many different reasons.

Matthew

Bernd wonders if we can switch over to eating more wild game. Both managed bison on the prairies and the overpopulated deer that have grown to abundance in the North Americans forests. 

Bernd

Can that be done at the quantity that we would need for those that want to eat meat? That's a calculation that somebody needs to do, right. But the efforts are underway, driven a lot by Native Americans that established bison collaboratives, where this is exactly what they're trying to do. And it's a wonderful vision, why should you just farm corn and soybeans and put fertilizer out there that ends up in the Gulf of Mexico, and does dead zones there so you can't do shellfish fishing anymore. And instead have bisons and prairies sequester carbon, help with climate change, provide food and habitat for lots of different species. 

Reframing our relationship to nature and the attitudes that we have about it and the way that we go about taking resources for our use of a landscape that can be much healthier than it is now providing opportunities for lots of different species and us as well to thrive.

Matthew 

I like what Bernd Blossey said here, where he gets us to think about what role our diet have in relation to biodiversity. His way to show appreciation for the broad biodiversity he cares about is to eat less farmed meat and more wild meat - but only as much as the ecosystem can support!

 
But not everyone agrees we should use nature as a guide to determine what’s good for a sustainable food system.

Adrien 

I'm Adrien Muller. And I'm working as a senior researcher at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, FIBL in Switzerland, at the Department of Food System sciences, and my main work is on food systems modeling, and also on climate change and agriculture.

Matthew 

So as we've talked about, in this season, we're exploring this idea of naturalness and how natural our food and farming systems should be. And this is something that I've seen in your research for perhaps the last decade or so. The fact that maybe people have an attachment to naturalness, but you're quite interested in looking at a range of say sustainable agricultural practices. 

Adrien 

For me this argument of naturalness is not really important. That’s why I can look at soilless systems.

Matthew 

Growing food without soil. Vertical farming. Aquaculture or fish farming. These quote ‘unnatural’ ways of growing food are all on the table for Adrien.

Adrien

So basically, anything that converts inputs in some biomass outputs, which we can transform into food can play a role in sustainable food systems, And then the sustainability is less given by how this transformation takes place, then, which inputs does it need? And which impact does it have? So for me, also, a vertical farm without soils can play a role in sustainable food systems.

Matthew 

So we've invited quite a wide range of people onto the podcast, and we certainly have the people who have put forward the more organic, agroecology as this way forward for food systems. But we haven't heard quite as much on the say, vertical farming, farming without soil. Farming indoors more generally. Can you make the argument why that might play an important role in future food systems?

Adrien 

I think we just need the biggest diversity possible within some sustainability restrictions. And that's why I think looking at something more is rather better than something less. Then to decide whether it fits or not. That's why I can look at soilless systems and all this.

And it was triggered via some work we did here in Switzerland, on how to utilize strained organic soils, versatile enters quite a lot of intensive vegetable production. And in this context, I learned that one option, quite a radical option, could be to revert some of these areas and to try to do some of the vegetables which you can in vertical farms. Why not put some vertical farms there, which is not really a realistic option. But just to think about it, it would make sense, from certain aspects of sustainability, I think, in Switzerland. 

Matthew 

You said it's not a realistic option. What's making you say that, is it the politics, economics, maybe a broader lack of imagination?

Adrien 

Well, maybe it's not less realistic than aiming for a world where 50% of organic? Or for a world where we have only 10% of the pig production we have today? That's true. Yeah, it's a visionary. Maybe it's not unrealistic, but just to be put in a visionary context.

Matthew

I'm curious to get your perspective here as a biophysical modeler. What sort of patchwork would you be interested in seeing in the future of food? What areas might be better suited for different types of production?

Adrien 

The first thing I imagine is a smaller food system measured in, not necessarily in workforce but or number of farms or areas, but in throughput of nutrients and biomass, to open up room for less intensive production systems.

Matthew 

What would that look like to think about or measure food systems differently?

Adrien 

It would mean starting with the nutrients much less inputs of new reactive nitrogen, for example, or also new phosphorus. Not yet, in the food system. So trying to better close to nutrient cycles. And it would mean to have lower volumes of crops produced, so if we reduce the feed production then we could have the same amount of calories, protein and so on just more plant based than today with less biomass needed to be cropped. And for sure, we need to look at the quality of the proteins, the digestibility, we need to look at fat we need to look at all the micronutrients. 

So I wouldn't say that totally abandoning animal production would make sense. But we could start from such a circular view, How much biomass do we have that we cannot eat ourselves, and so on.

But it would still be quite too much less than we have today. And related to all this also waste reduction, like producing 30% just for the bin doesn't make sense. So there is big room along the whole value chain to produce less, and still have enough food to feed the people.

Matthew 

This call for a smaller food system. Do you think that's a controversial statement, given that we have an increasing urbanizing and growing population across the world?

Adrien 

Definitely, it's controversial. And that's why it's so important to know what it means. It means smaller, not regarding the calories provided per capita to meet the needs of the people. It means regarding losses and inefficiencies in the wider sense.

So this 30% of waste, a large part of it could be reused, this directly makes the food system smaller. 

And the controversial part. Maybe it's also what would this mean for the farmers, for example, if you have just waste reduction, this means less production. So does this mean less farmers? And I think this has to go hand in hand with a change in what a farm is, how these areas are cropped, what they do. 

And I think if it's more diverse also in the landscape, it will tend to become not easier to do so maybe. We need a different type of mechanization for example. 

I always think maybe the digitalization can also help to make really diverse production systems. And for all these, you would still need people doing it. It's important when talking about making the food system smaller. To know what this really means, then it's maybe not controversial.

Matthew 

This is where I like talking to you. And I know you're your modeler, and you're a systems thinker. So you can take this statement, let's make the food system smaller and say, okay, that doesn't mean we don't increase organic production, which might use some more land, because we're taking out inefficiencies in other parts of the system. And also perhaps we're looking at a wider range of solutions that include growing food indoors.

Matthew 

Adrian Mueller thank you so much for speaking with us.

Adrien 

Thank you for having me.

Matthew

Look, I personally find something compelling about what everyone here is saying. I've worked on smaller scale farms and saved those seeds and traded it with people in the community, and there's something that resonates with me on an emotional level about that, to feel the role of being a steward of the earth and leaving your little place on the planet better than when you left it. And there's also something quite resilient about that model.

But, are there enough people that want to be farmers that could support a vision of that food system scaled out? Would we end up using a lot more land than we otherwise would have to use if we instead had a more intensive production? Then there's also the conversation about pesticides and other inputs that negatively impact the surrounding ecosystems.

I have to say that living central Sweden is not the most exciting place that I've ever lived from a biodiversity point of view. At least not compared to Nepal or Hawaii or southern Appalachia, but this past weekend, my daughter ate at least 12 different kinds of berries tromping around in the forest within a few minute walk of our home. So I’m slowly learning to appreciate the offerings here.

We’re going to wrap up, with some words for Anna Lappe, Executive Director for the Global Aliance for the Future of Food. She makes that poin that regardless of what biodiversity you care about, our choices about what to eat, and what foods to grow, are pretty constrained by a history of policy choices that have incentivized the production of just a handful of commodities.

Anna 

So here in the US, it would surprise probably no one, to hear that it's something like two thirds of all of our fruits and vegetables grown in this country, it's just lettuce, tomatoes, and potatoes. 

It probably also would surprise nobody, that globally, little bit more than half of all global calories come from just a handful of crops, including rice, wheat, corn, soy. 

So I think that kind of narrowing of what it is we grow, especially in certain places, like in the United States, we have just a few crops, responsible for the vast acreage of American farmland. That's led to huge profitability for a handful of multinational corporations. And it has led to a huge narrowing of the biodiversity of our diets, which is not good for our health. But it's really also not good for biodiversity at large. And I think it's important again, to be sure, when we talk about biodiversity, we knit that conversation together with human health, we knit that conversation together with climate, that these things are not disconnected, and that it's really important to have that kind of a unified systemic conversation.

Matthew

This wraps our nature season. Thank you all so much for listening. We’d love to hear from you. Please rate us, write a review, send us an email to podcast@tabledebates.org What guests did you like the most? Who did you disagree with? It’s always wonderful to hear from the listeners. 

This episode was edited by Ylva Carlqvist Warnborg and myself, Matthew Kessler. Special thanks to Rachel Headings, Tara Garnett and the rest of the TABLE team. Table is a collaboration of the University of Oxford, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Wageningen University in the Netherlands, University of the Andes in Colombia, National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Cornell University.