4. Farm machinery, precision agriculture, big data

Fossil fuels are woven into nearly every aspect of modern agriculture - from powering farm machinery to creating plastics and supporting data-driven tech like precision agriculture. But what would it take to reduce or even eliminate their use on farms? We dive into both replacement technologies and transformative food production methods like agroecology, exploring the obstacles and limitations of scaling different solutions.

Visit the episode webpage for more resources.

This series is powered by TABLE, IPES-Food and Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

Guests

• Darrin Qualman, National Farmers Union Canada
• Pat Mooney, IPES Food
• Jennifer Clapp, IPES Food
• Swati Renduchintala, CIFOR-ICRAF

Produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Cover art by Cover art by The Ethical Agency. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew

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At the beginning of 2024, farmers across France, Germany, Greece and Romania turned out in the thousands to protest. 

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They blocked streets and highways with their tractors, some set fires, and together they put overwhelming pressure on their governments.

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 A key demand in each of these countries? Make sure diesel fuel stays cheap or gets cheap.

“This is Fuel to Fork,  a podcast that exposes the fossil fuels in our food and imagines a future without them. I’m Matthew Kessler. 

Episode 4. Farm Machinery, Precision Agriculture and Big Data.

Roughly 20% of fossil fuels used in the food system are consumed in agriculture. While last week explored farm inputs like Nitrogen fertilizer, this week takes a  look at the ways fossil fuels show up on farms - from powering tractors and machinery to producing plastics used on farms, and even in supporting data and AI technologies.

Part 1. The energy farms run on today

Matthew

In 2007 Food writer Michael Pollan suggested that for every calorie that ends up on your plate, around 10 calories of fossil fuels are used.

Darrin

I think a more refined version of that number is 13.3, at least in North America. That's the number I get when I work it out.

Matthew

Darrin Qualman, Director of Climate Crisis Policy and Action with the National Farmers Union in Canada. 

Darrin

And that's not just on-farm energy. That's processing and then in home cooking and refrigeration, et cetera. But a huge number of calories go in per unit that comes out.

The trendlines are very interesting and disturbing. In Canada for instance, and I think this is true in a lot of places. We've doubled the use of liquid fuels in our machinery. Overall just doubled the fossil fuel inputs into the system over the last 30 years, and it's a pretty durable exponential upward trend.

Matthew

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has listened to the first few episodes. We’re using more and more fossil fuels across the world to produce the food we eat. And fossil fuels are all over the farm, not just in the obvious places.

Darrin

I think what people would first think of is diesel fuel and gasoline, the liquid fuels that farmers pour into tractors and trucks and combine harvesters, et cetera. And in addition to those liquid fuels, there's also gasses, natural gas and propane and similar fuels for grain drying and building heating, and water heating. Of course, electricity for cooling, lighting.

Matthew

These fuels, after Nitrogen fertilizers, are the biggest fossil fuel inputs into farms. Then comes plastics on farms, which is smaller, but still significant. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization - 12.5 million tonnes are used in agriculture production each year. And we’re talking about them here because plastics are petrochemical products. Nearly all of the raw materials that make plastic come from fossil fuels, like crude oil and gas.

Darrin

On a lot of farms plastics are new. They weren't part of farming a couple of generations ago.

We're seeing increasingly plastic grain bags. Grain is coming off the field and put in these very long, they look like great big white sausage casings and that's all plastic. The twine that wraps the bales for our livestock is plastic. None of that existed when I was young. When I first started farming, the twine for the bales was largely made of organic sources. I think they called it sisal.

Matthew

Many uses of plastic are highly functional, and some are used with the purpose of making farming more sustainable. For example, greenhouses and hoop houses help extend the growing season in cold climates. So you can keep harvesting crops throughout the winter. Today, many of these structures are covered in plastic films.

Darrin

The old term for those was glass houses and I know glass has its own environmental footprint, some energy to make there, but the plastics that we're seeing almost ubiquitous across agriculture are really kind of a late development.

Matthew

There’s also seedling trays, irrigation tubes, nets that cover crops from pests, films to store animal feed. 

The UN Secretary General Antonio Guiterres has said, "the phase-out of fossil fuels is essential and inevitable".

But, let's not forget there are good reasons for farmers to exploit fossil fuels. With fertilizers, they can boost crop production; with tractor fuel, it can improve the efficiency of your operation and cut down on labor. And you can think of plastics like the duct tape for farming. You can really use it everywhere.

And over the past 100 years, our use of fossil fuels in food production has increased, it’s worth noting that productivity—how much food we can grow on a given area of land—has also increased. 

Since 2001, the rate of increase in fossil fuel inputs on farms has slowed, while productivity gains have accelerated. This is a global trend, with some significant differences though when you zoom in across specific regions. 

So of course there are tradeoffs with using fossil fuels, but Darrin Qualman points to a different root cause that’s driving increasing fossil fuel use. The constant push for farms to grow larger and produce more.

Darrin

Overall, the system just wants to keep getting bigger and bigger. The grain companies want to move more grain. The processors want to process more. The retailers want to retail more. And farmers are really on a treadmill.

In order to stay in farming, there's a tremendous spur to every year produce a little more than the year before. And you need to keep your yields going up. That's one thing that farmers around the world talk about. They talk about their yields.. 

Matthew

I get why they talk about it . Higher yields directly translates to more revenue for the farmers. But that’s complicated. The market price for crops changes constantly. Here’s a sad fact. In 2024 in the US, Wheat sold for the same price as it did in 1972. $4.86 a bushel. Contrast that with the cost of a loaf of bread, which 52 years ago cost $.25.

Darrin

In order to run ever faster on that treadmill of increasing output, you need increasing inputs. That's the way you drive the output. Some of it's from plant breeding. Sure. Some of it's from just getting better at farming, but most of the increase in output is really just a direct function of the increase in input. So farmers are really on an output treadmill and that causes them to be on an input treadmill. And unfortunately that also leads them to produce in many cases, higher emissions over time.

Matthew

This is central to the challenge of moving away from fossil fuels in our food, and in society more generally. The relentless push for more growth has real consequences. This affects communities where extraction occurs and it fuels the larger climate crisis driven by so-called "cheap" fossil energy.

Governments and businesses are mobilizing to decarbonize the energy sector, finally listening to the warnings of climate scientists. The International Energy Agency calls for net zero energy by 2050 globally. Governments like the European Union have signed up to carbon neutral energy by 2050. Actions are louder than commitments. Though we’re still heading in the right direction.  But where are food systems commitments to phasing out fossil fuels? Here there is much less momentum and much more resistance to change. 

Coming up, we’ll highlight a few different visions and approaches to cutting back our reliance of fossil fuels in agriculture.

Part 2 - Phasing-down fossil fuels on the farm

Matthew

We’re going to talk about hydrogen fuel, biofuels, agri-voltaics, and no-till farming. Buckle up, this section is going to get a little bit technical. 

Darrin

So in terms of decarbonizing and moving away from fossil fuels and moving to something that aligns with a net zero 2050, the challenges are huge. And some people really have trouble imagining how this can be. 

And a good starting point is to remember though, that we've had agriculture. We've only really had this fossil fuel dependent high emission model for 1% of the time. So clearly the default mode for agriculture is something other than this high emission fossil fuel system. 

Matthew

It’s also the first time in history that we have 8 billion humans.

Darrin

So starting with tractors and farm machinery and the liquid fossil fuels going into farming, that will eventually be decarbonized probably in the 2040s and by 2050.

Matthew

Darrin doesn’t know exactly how farm machinery would be run and powered in the future, but says there are a few options.

Darrin

Some people are thinking it might be battery electric in the same way that cars and light trucks are. Others are looking at hydrogen and some even looking at ammonia, which is a hydrogen molecule, hydrogen carrier molecule. 

Matthew

We’re not going to get too deep in the weeds here, but just to lay out, there are a few alternative fuel sources besides petroleum. We’ve talked about hydrogen fuel and fertilizer briefly in the last episode. It’s a pretty new technology, and at the moment it’s not very green. In 2023, 99% of its production still relies on fossil fuels. Though this could change in the future.

So what else is available? There’s biofuels. These are fuels made from organic materials, such as crops, and plant and animal waste. This sounds like a good idea - switching to a biological solution and away from fossil fuels, but there are some serious costs. Growing crops like corn and soybeans for ethanol and biodiesel, means using farmland for fuel instead of food. 

Darrin

A huge amount of the North American corn, soy, and canola crop is being pushed into the biofuels market. 

Matthew

In the United States, nearly 180 million acres of prime farmland—an area larger than Texas—are dedicated to biofuel production. This vast amount of agricultural land could instead be used to grow food for people. Also, producing biofuel crops in large monocultures requires significant fossil fuel energy for harvesting and processing.

But there is another biofuel out there, it’s called Gen2 biofuels, that promises to use byproducts and crop residues instead of the crops itself. However, there’s two downsides of this technology. First, the by-products - or the quote “waste” -  is in the eye of the beholder. This crop biomass that the Gen2 biofuels exploits is organic matter that could otherwise be returned to the soil. Harvesting this biomass for energy is robbing fertility for the next generation of crops. Which needs to be compensated by, you guessed it, probably more fossil fuel fertilizers. The second downside, is that gen2 biofuels aren’t currently cost effective or scaleable. 

Then there’s the idea of switching to Electric tractors.

Darrin

The problem is tractors and combines just require so much more energy per hour than a car. So, Battery electric may or may not work, especially in the larger machinery. But the good news is this is probably going to be worked out in the long haul trucking sector. So agriculture doesn't have to figure this out. We're quite confident that long haul trucking will be decarbonized and solutions will be found there. And then we'll probably transplant those solutions into agriculture. So it will happen, but it's going to happen slowly.

Matthew

Currently, long-haul trucking is considered one of the sectors furthest away from achieving Net Zero goals. And there are some broader challenges and hidden costs around electrifying all of the machines that currently run on fossil fuels, like the impacts of mining for different transition minerals. We’ll talk about these later in the series. But one thing is for sure, the decisions we make today have long consequences.  

Darrin

Farm machinery lasts a long time. So we've got to start soon not producing fossil fueled farm equipment. Because if the lifetime of that equipment is 30 years, you know, once you produce that machine and sell it and put it on the farm, it's got a very long embedded implied emissions curve.

Matthew

One more point on food and fuel on farms. Photovoltaics (PV), which are solar panels that convert sunlight energy into electricity, can  also be part of the toolkit to move us away from fossil fuels. 

One suggestion is to put them on farmland. But then again you have this competition for energy or food production. Some studies and pilot experiments are exploring multifunctional land use. So elevating these panels above the agricultural land, so you can grow crops or graze sheep underneath. This system is called Agrivoltaics. These would require a lot of upfront investment, but policy support could help overcome this challenge.

A few considerations.

1. These would require a lot of upfront investment.
2. Scaling solar panels, as with electrification, means considering the socio-ecological impacts of mining for these minerals, and 
3. Forward-looking policy and regulation could help overcome these challenges.

Another way to phase down fossil fuels in farm machinery is simply to use less tractor fuel. One way you can do this is by what’s called no-till farming, avoiding using tractors for the heavy work of plowing and turning the soil.

Darrin

So where I am here is kind of the epicenter of no-till farming. It is completely adopted here and it has tremendous benefits in terms of keeping cover on the land, preventing erosion, maximizing soil carbon building. It has tremendous soil health benefits.

Matthew

But there’s a reason farmers till the soil in the first place. It helps to aerate the soil, promote healthy root development, and it helps control weeds.

Darrin

But the data shows that no-till has not been a good way to reduce inputs or energy use. When you move to no till, you stop using tillage to control weeds and you start using chemicals. Chemicals, herbicides, have their own ecological problems. They've been implicated in everything from the reduction of birds to overall reduction of biodiversity.

Matthew

Darrin says that over the last 3 decades where farmers in the prairies of Canada have been adopting no -till–

Darrin

Fertilizer, chemical and fuel use have all doubled. And that I'm not stating causation there. I'm not saying that they've doubled because of no -till. I'm just saying that a whole lot of factors have been in play and no -till hasn't led to decreased fuel use.

Matthew

The United States Department of Agriculture has documented that no-till farming has led to reduced fuel use, lower emissions and cost savings for farmer. Though no-till in conventional systems often leads to increased herbicide application to control for weed. However, as Darrin noted, these potential benefits are not uniform and there’s also evidence that no-till hasn’t led to reduced fossil energy inputs.

Plastics on the farm are another one that comes with tradeoffs. Consider plastic mulches, these are large sheets that cover the soil. Because they cover the soil, they hold moisture in there, which reduces how much water is needed. They also help keep down weeds. These are proven through plenty of studies that show the benefits of mulching. But at the end of the season, you’re left with a big pile of plastic that isn’t easily discarded or recycled. We’re going to talk more about the plastic lifecycle in a future episode.

Like almost every decision on the farm, there isn’t an easy solution. But this is where the promise of precision and digital technologies come into play. Here’s a glimpse of a possible Precision Farm Future.

Jennifer

The idea behind this sort of digital and precision agriculture is really to collect data on farms like soil data, weather data, pest data, all kinds of data, pool that data with data from other farms, analyze it, and then use AI to generate prescriptions to give back to farmers to help them be more precise and more productive in their fields.

Matthew

Perhaps you already recognize the voice of Jennifer Clapp, professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada Research Chair and panel expert at IPES-Food. Jennifer describes how data and AI support this technology.

Jennifer

So it has this precision and ability through the use of AI to basically tell farmers, these seeds will work best in your soil and your climate and given the pests in your area. So we use these seeds instead of those seeds. Or this part of your field needs a bit more fertilizer than other parts of your field because it's lower in certain nutrients. Maybe it's on a slope..

And then also, you're only going to need to use herbicides when absolutely necessary. So for example, these sophisticated machines that have cameras and sensors can actually spot weeds and spray them only where the actual weed is, rather than a blanket spraying across the field. So it's quite sophisticated combination of hardware and software that comes together, the use of AI, to basically generate a more precise way to farm. 

Matthew

When you first hear about it - it sounds like a really amazing way to remove the stress out of one of the world’s most difficult jobs.  And it promises a farm future with fewer fossil fuels.

I’ve spent years laboring on farms and this vision of a farmer sitting in a control room rather than having their hands in the dirt or on a tractor. It sounds a little science-fiction dystopian sounding. But maybe it’s worth it?

So is this a good future? Does it actually get us closer to fossil free farming?

Part 3. The who and the what behind big data in food

Matthew

Data, the zeros and ones, surprisingly plays a big and rapidly growing role in shaping how we produce our food, what we eat, and how food travels from the farm to your plate. 

Pat Mooney

Well, there's a huge amount of information being collected about our food system all along the food chain from beginning to end.

Matthew

Pat Mooney, co-founder of Etc Group, and member of IPES-Food.

Pat

That collection is being done by a handful of enterprises that really dominate big data, regardless of what industry we're discussing, whether we're talking about pharmaceuticals or we're talking about car manufacturing or anything else. 

Matthew

The big tech companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta.  These four companies potentially account for over half of the data stored globally.

Pat

So the biggest company in the world in terms of storing the world's data is Amazon. Its most profitable branch is actually its data storage branch, not the one that we log on to download movies or buy shoes.

Matthew 

So you're saying Amazon makes more money from their data storage centers than their commerce?

Pat 

Yep, more profitable. It's more profitable for them. 

Matthew

Now replace Microsoft, Amazon Google, and Meta with John Deere, Syngenta, Baer, Corteva, and other large agribusinesses. These are the companies trying to shape what farms look like. 

And there is a fossil fuel cost here.

Pat

We're talking about dozens and dozens of football field size, air conditioned, carefully controlled, heavily energy dependent data centers that store this information, which is increasing by leaps and bounds every year. 

Matthew

Data centers, which power servers and cooling systems, consume about 1-2% of global electricity. Data stored from precision agriculture technologies is only a fraction of that, but it is growing.

Some see a bigger cost as it’s locking farmers into a particular way of farming. A way of farming that relies heavily on fossil fuel inputs.

One possible reason for this: the same companies that are selling farmers precision agriculture technologies, are also the ones that are selling them the fertilizer.

Pat 

Well, the fertilizer industry says that, of course, they say that there's an overuse of their fertilizers and they're trying to work with farmers to make it better. And I really feel their pain. I mean, they're really suffering that they just can't somehow stop themselves from selling twice as much fertilizer to the farmers as the farmers require and creating that damage to our environment and to the health of people as well.

Jennifer

What's really interesting to me about the rise of precision technologies in digital agriculture is that all the firms across machinery, pesticides and fertilizers, though these are separate industries today, they're all investing and developing products for precision in digital agriculture. So it opens up a potential pathway for these firms to merge with each other.

Matthew

Jennifer Clapp has tracked how every big seed, fertilizer and farm machinery company is investing in digital agriculture. They each see this as an opportunity to shape the future of how food is grown. 

Jennifer

If we consider data as like a new input. So that's interesting. They're all vying for this. And the reason they're all vying for the market in digital agriculture is because of something that big tech scholars call “platform power”. Once you have the dominant platform like Amazon or Facebook, Google, once you have that dominant platform, everyone else has to kind of like work with you and you become a gatekeeper.

That whole digital farming platform has been designed by these farm companies to continue to sell their existing products. So it's not moving us away from chemical use entirely. It's not moving us away from reliance on farm mechanization. It's not moving us away from reliance on fertilizer. Instead, it’s making the existing system more efficient.

Matthew

If we’re talking about the fossil fuel industry, worth approximately 8 trillion US dollars, we need to talk about power. Last episode we mentioned how Agribusinesses have increased their lobbying budget over the last 15 years in the US to promote an input-intensive food production system.

To take a similar analogy,  Exxon was aware of fossil fuels impacts on warming the planet back in the 1970s and have only continued to push their products evermore since then. Then consider what happened at the COP 28 climate summit in Dubai, where big oil companies were the ones leading discussions on whether they should phase down oil use in the future. So you can see why farmers and others may distrust a process where the ones pushing the products are the same ones saying they have the answers.

Part 4. Is a fossil free farming future possible?

Matthew

There’s a one word difference between phase-down and phase-out. And this language is at the heart of these global climate negotiations. But it’s actually a huge distinction. Phase down asks to reduce, to cut back. Phase outs calls for an elimination. It sets the target for use to zero. Here, we’re going to explore ‘phase out’.  In the 21st century, is it possible to abolish fossil fuels from farms? 

We’ll hear two different visions from different parts of the world. Darrin Qualman imagines what this future could look like in Canada. 

Darrin

We developed the idea of food sheds. And what a food shed is, is it's the proposal that our major cities and our medium sized cities just start buying up the land around them, say in a 50 mile, 50 kilometer radius and just start buying up that land from willing sellers as it becomes available and slowly accumulating the land in a donut around the city. 

And then giving that land over to, you know, new farmers, young farmers, new people in the country who want to farm it in ways that are more sustainable, maybe even zero emission. 

Give them long-term leases perhaps at below market rate and get them to produce food for the city. Now, if they were using organic methods and not using nitrogen fertilizer and say they had access to small electric tractors, they could actually produce the food with zero emissions. And then perhaps electric trucks could go through the countryside at regular intervals and pick that food up. So there's no emissions there.

And then they bring them to various points in the city where people can walk and bike to get that food and take it home. You could actually have zero emission food from that food shed. And you could give young people and others access to the land and they could farm. 

And you know, it seems like a very elaborate and hard to attain model perhaps. But what I like to remind people is that this is the way cities fed themselves for thousands of years.

Because they didn't have access to fossil fuels to move food thousands of kilometers or halfway around the world, the land around the city fed the city. And that's one of the things we can think of. It's a real holistic solution to this. It doesn't produce all the foods you need, but it produces a very large amount of the high value vegetables and pulses and other foods for the city. And it can be zero emission and that can then demonstrate how this can be done at a larger scale. That food shed donut can be expanded over time and more and more of the food can be produced with zero emissions by younger farmers, smaller farmers, organic farmers, et cetera.

Matthew

On the other side of the world in the state of Andra Pradhesh in India, or among the landless movement in Brazil or with agroecologists throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, you already have some examples of near fossil free farming systems. 

Swati

So country like India, we have 1.5 billion mouths to feed. The government is committing, the different states are committing that we do not want to feed our population poisonous food. 

Matthew

Swati Renduchintala, who you heard from in the last episode, is working with the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. Their community managed natural farming program now involves 1 million farmers.

Swati

Our strategy is we want to focus on local supply chains. The majority of the population is dependent on farming. So let the farmer eat first, let the family eat. If there is surplus, let the neighbors eat, the local village eat.

There is proof that natural farming requires, and these are all scientific evidences, which says that it requires less water. It requires locally produced input materials.

It’s crucial for transformation. So the state of Andhra Pradesh has vouched that by 2029, it wants to saturate the entire state to natural farming. So saturate means all farmers are enrolled in the program.

Matthew

Currently the program reaches one out of every 6 farmers in the state. 

We heard about how these farming systems transition their practices away from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, but it’s not only the farmers that need to change their behavior to phase out fossil fuels across the food system.

Swati

We want to develop market linkages. That we need aggregators and entrepreneurial ventures because companies and organizations, corporates are not interested in dealing with farmer. So we have to talk about aggregations. So that is also problematic because not every farmer is doing natural farming. These long distance value chains still needs to be figured out.

The demand is there. I'm sure you and me and even the CEOs who are pushing fertilizers would like to have chemical free food. We want to have safe food. So demand is there. The supply side has to be strengthened.

Matthew

I find the scale aspect of this really interesting. Both the scale of production needed to sell food to markets, not just for hyper local consumption. And also the scale of farms, how small or how big they are. Many of these agroecological farms we talked about in the last episode too, are smaller in scale. 

It’s worth noting that many small scale farmers across the world are poor and not doing this by choice. Some would like to use inputs if they could afford it. But these examples show a way of farming that the whole world can learn some lessons from. They’ve been documenting economic, health, and environmental benefits.

Though even in these systems, fully eliminating the fossil fuels that come in the form of plastics, or are embedded in farm machinery. That presents another challenge. Whatever you feel about the promise of these systems, small or large-scale, transitioning away from them is going to be hard.

Darrin 

The challenge to agroecology in a lot of places, and specifically I'm thinking here of the Canadian prairies or some of the drier parts of the world and where the farms are very large, it's a scale -up problem. If you imagine very diverse crop mixes and a lot of cattle and other livestock, the first question is are there markets for those? So the markets here are signaling very clearly that they want a lot of pulse crops like lentils, a lot of canola and a lot of wheat. In other parts of North America, they seem to want a lot of soy and corn. You can move to a very diverse crop mix in agroecology and that certainly works while it's not large scale. But if you imagine scaling that up to tens of millions of acres, the question is, are the markets there for those products? 

Matthew

Darrin Qualmin says everyone needs to be a part of this transformation.

Darrin

You really need a simultaneous bottom up and top down approach to this. You know, the bottom up, you need to get farmers on the landscape using these practices and incorporating these agroecological models and elaborating them and making sure they work. And then you need a top-down system to figure out, so where is this going when we scale it up? What are the markets? How does this work together synergistically with the rest of the food system with all the other things we want to accomplish. Because right now in the current corporate control system that only demands a few products and it's difficult to scale up some of these more diverse complex systems.

Matthew

The global food systems goal has been to maximize output. You’ve heard me say this in almost every episode - but this core to the challenge of phasing out fossil fuels. Our food system produces enough calories for more than 10 billion people, but many around the world aren’t able to afford a healthy diet, and we’re destroying the soil fertility, the water systems and the biodiversity on which food systems and living creatures depend. 

Darrin Qualman says we should have a serious rethink about what are the fundamental goals of our food system.

Darrin

The key is to diversify the goals of the system, the policy goals. And we need to stop pushing farmers to produce ever more year after year after year. We need policies that diversify the outcomes we want from agriculture and help farmers get off of that output treadmill, that input use treadmill. 

So in Canada, for instance, we have a very clear policy focus on export maximization. The government sets a target for exports. A few years later, farmers meet it and no sooner have they met it that the agri-food export target is increased again such that agr-food exports just keep doubling and re-doubling and re-doubling.

So we need to diversify those policy goals and create a system where farmers can feel financially secure and successful even if they're not setting new records for yields year after year after year and new records for fertilizer use.

Matthew

These episodes covering the farm leave me with some big questions:

How do we smartly reorient, rather than expand, the food system? 

Should we continue to try to tweak and make more efficient global industrial food production through technologies like precision agriculture? 

Are efficiency gains just being offset by producing and consuming more and more? 

Or should we be more open to transformative solutions? 

And we know the risk of our current trajectory, what are the unknown risks of systems change?

In our next episodes, we'll explore the fossil fuel impact from the moment food leaves the farm to when it reaches your plate. Next week: Processing, packaging and transport. 

Emma Priestland

Plastics are really enabling sort of fast food, ultra-processed food, but they're also enabling this globalised system that allows me sitting in the UK to eat asparagus in the middle of winter that's been shipped from Peru.

Matthew

A huge thanks to you for listening. The best way to help this show is to take one minute out of your day and rate and review us on whatever platform you’re listening on.

We will link in all the resources and references in our show notes and on our episode webpage, found at  fueltofork.com

This podcast was made possible by IPES Food – the international panel of experts on sustainable food systems, Global Alliance for the Future of Food, and TABLE. The series was produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Episode was edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Special thanks to Robbie Blake, Chantal Clement, Jack Thompson, Jackie Turner, Tara Garnett, Amanda Jekums, Douglass Gollins and Jim Thomas. We’ve received funding from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Cover art and design was done by the Ethical Agency.  Music by Blue dot Sessions.