Ken Giller on the Perils of Populism and Precarious Promise of Regenerative Agriculture

Can we have more honest conversations about the future of food and agriculture? That’s the plea from Ken Giller, recently retired professor at Wageningen University, after four decades of witnessing both progress and setbacks in supporting farmers worldwide. We discuss the dangers of populist narratives that oversimplify agricultural challenges, how to reshape research incentives to embrace complexity and nuance, why he opposes carbon credit schemes for farmers, and more.

For more info, transcript and resources, visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/
episode83

Guests

• Ken Giller, Wageningen University

Host

• Matthew Kessler, TABLE

Episode edited and produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew  

Can you introduce yourself?  

Ken 

My name's Ken Giller. I'm Professor of plant production systems from Wageningen University. Just retired after nearly 40 years focus on smallholder farming in Sub Saharan Africa,

Matthew  

And you've been spending retirement entirely on the couch. 

Ken  

Unfortunately, I keep wanting to do less, but I've got so many exciting projects going on at the moment, I end up working more than I should.

Matthew 

Welcome to Feed, a food system podcast presented by TABLE. I’m matthew Kessler

Nearly a year ago, I caught up with Ken Giller at the 5th Global Food Security Conference in Leuven, where scientists from around the world gather to discuss how to make food and farming systems more resilience. At the conference, Ken gave a talk on principles and populism and said a handful of things that perked my ears right up, and I wanted to chat with him about them. Here’s our conversation.

Matthew 

Yeah, so we're here with Ken Giller, who may be a familiar voice to some of the people who've listened to the podcast. We're going to focus this conversation, not as much on agronomy, on the amazing things that all these nitrogen fixing plants can do, but we're going to take a kind of larger systems approach, because Ken has spent four decades having a lot of conversations being parts of farming systems across the world. And I think it would be interesting just kind of capture some of your observations about how the nature of discussions have changed over the years. And so we could start there. What were conversations around the global food system like in the early 1800s when you've just started back in the day, versus where, where, where we are today, in 2024.

Ken  

Let's start with the positive stuff. We're much better now in our discussions about connecting things up. Yeah, we used to work very much in our silos, working on production, working on human nutrition, working on supermarkets, working on supply chains, you name it. I think one thing we are much better at these days is trying to link things up and look at the bigger picture.

Matthew 

So that's the positive side. 

Ken  

That's the positive side. And obviously, I'm, you know, I retired in September last year. And of course, what you tend to do is start thinking, Hmm, looking back, you know, where are we now? Where were we then? 

But when I look around the world at the moment, I am deeply concerned about politics and populism, particularly the way that politics seems to be all about sound bites, not really a caring politics. In terms of people and particularly the poor. Of course, maybe the United States is the epitome of this. But if I look at my home country, the UK, I can absolutely not be proud of the way things have gone over the past five years, I think it's been a desperate situation. I live in the Netherlands, where we're trying to form a government at the moment, with the populist parties being way out in front. Lots of things, of farmer protests and a very, very sort of complex political background, where the far right, it seems to have huge influence. That's the political side. But what really concerns me is, I feel that this whole move towards sort of a populist approach is infecting science, and for me, that is something I really can't tolerate.

Matthew  

Yeah, maybe you could speak a little bit more about how this - It's a global trend. We see this trend towards populism, and I think people can relate to that, and see that in their everyday life and in the tenor of conversations that people are having with each other. People aren't talking to each other because of political identities. So I think that's something that that's familiar to many people, but perhaps you can make that connection more to how that's, as you said, infecting, how that's influencing food system debates, food system conversations. 

Ken 

Absolutely. What we tend to do is we want to be clear in our messaging. But what that tends to do is that it hides all of the nuance in the debates, and we come out with sort of black and white answers. And of course, science isn't about yes or no. Science is about engaging with complexity, and I think particularly in the area of food systems. I mean, it's very big, big term. But if take it down to the agricultural end, the production end, where I do most of my work, then we tend to be talking about value judgments about farming. 

We wrote this paper about conventional agriculture. What's conventional agriculture? It's become a weaponized term where people use it to show the alternative. They're promoting their alternative. It's regenerative, it's organic, it's agroecological. We're putting up sometimes rather bully concepts in order to be able to knock down the current conventional system, because that's failing us. “The food system is broken.” And when I feel hear scientists talking in those terms, I feel deeply concerned. When I feel here scientists speaking with such conviction that they have the answer, then I think these guys aren't scientists. Science is about struggling with uncertainty. It's about struggling with complexity. It's about, yeah, nuance. It's about engagement.

Matthew  

I think working with Table and being exposed to a lot of these different debates. I think it's interesting that the one thing that people more agree on is problem definition. They're able to name things that aren't working, and then they're doing that with incredible conviction. And it's interesting how you say it's interesting thinking about how that that in itself, could be a version of cherry picking a narrative, because you're not talking about what replaces it on the back end. This kind of, these calls for food system transformations, are quite vague, and people aren't really sure how to finish that sentence. , food symptoms, transformation to To what end, to what impact, to where. And I think that's yeah, and I guess maybe I'll just push back or ask you, Do do you think there's an issue with calling out the present problems of the food system. And

Ken  

I think when it comes to the present problems, we tend to line up pretty well often. Although some things, I think, get overplayed. It's the dangerous ground now, of course. Dangerous ground in the sense that, I think, at the moment, we've got this massive focus on soil health. And soil health is undoubtedly something that we have to look after, but I don't think it's a particularly huge problem in the way that it's being promoted. 

But I do think that people are often making a problem sound much more difficult and problematic than it is as scientists as a way of actually promoting their science area, promoting themselves potentially, and also a way of pulling scarce resources towards themselves. I think this competition for funding at one level, it can be healthy, of course.

Competition is good because you have good evaluation procedures, and it strives for the best, but it can also be bad, because it can prove to be toxic at times. I've had examples recently, in the last year or so of working with younger scientists who really feel that they're being silenced. And they're being silenced because they're saying things which are critical of, for instance, paying farmers for soil carbon credits. It's a big thing. I was actually talking to the Rabobank recently about this. And there, there are all these schemes where people want to pay farmers for farmers for storing more carbon in their soil. And my take on it is that it's virtually impossible, and the wins are really rather small. 

But we've got many scientists lined up there who would take the same set of evidence as another set of scientists, and they say, this is a huge problem here. We can solve it by storing more carbon, and we've got the carbon underground. We've got these big movements with farmers heavily involved. And then we've got scientists on the other side saying, “Come on, same set of evidence. They look at the same set of evidence, saying, yeah, come on. Actually, the gains are going to be fairly minimal.” And even in the science literature, you've got people standing up and often sort of shouting at each other, almost from one side of the room to the other, in a way that you think, come on, guys. I mean, if we really sat down and we hammered this out as good scientists, I think we would come out maybe a different place, and maybe it would be a place which isn't attracting as much funding, but maybe that would be a more honest place if we're really reflecting to society what we can deliver and where we should be putting our focus.

Matthew  

So we have a lot of research and a lot of evidence, and there's not necessarily consensus, but there's broad agreement on on the issue of, say, the potential soil carbon sequestration. 

Ken  

I'm not sure if that's true. No, I don't know if there was going back in the Table history. At one point, I had a debate with

Matthew 

Yichao Rui of Rodale Institute.

Ken  

Rodale Institute. And of course, Rodale had come out then at one point with a white paper, which said that locking carbon up in the soil would be enough to solve all of our emission problems. And of course, that was a slightly overstatement, and people have pulled back from there, but that is still for some people, people are fairly far towards that corner. And of course, then we come into a quantitative thing, building soil carbon is generally good for soil health, for crop production. It's good because we maintain a fertile, healthy soil, but the actual gains that you're likely to get in locking up more carbon than you have already are going to be fairly limited, in my view, because in the past, what we were doing. We were measuring initial carbon sequestration rates, what you get if you change practice today. And we were extrapolating, in a linear way into the future. Whereas anything you change, you come towards a new equilibrium. There's an attenuation of those rates, and that was not being taken into account. Now, of course, how fast is that attenuation? That becomes the point of scientific debate. Some people say the potential is much more than the others, but I think you get the idea,

Matthew  

So, just to to reiterate, so it really depends on kind of what the baseline condition is of your soil as well. Because you're going to make these gains, you're going to be able to lock up and store some more carbon in your soils, especially if you're working with an incredibly degraded soil that’s poor management, poor treatment for extended period of time. But there's going to be some sort of new equilibrium, some sort of plateau, and the previous models weren't taking that into account, and therefore we had perhaps these more exaggerated numbers, but this recalculation isn't being accounted for necessarily.

Ken  

Very good summary. Well done. Matthew, you passed, yeah. And I think the other point to build on that then is that in highly productive agricultural soils, such as we have, particularly say in North America, in Europe, then the soils are actually in a pretty good state. I mean, unless you're in a place where you've got bad soil erosion and there are really visible signs, then generally the soil organic matter, content of those soils is good. Where I'm working in Africa, we're often dealing with extremely low carbon soils because they've not had a lot of manure or things returned to them, and you could argue that the gains there would be larger, but again, you have to temper that with the idea, okay, we could pay farmers then for carbon in their soils, but when you're dealing with millions of tiny, small farms, the whole registration and organization of the schemes to do it are going to cost you more than the gains you're going to get at the end of the day. So is it really a solution? My point would be, and if we, you know, we get back into soil very quickly. But my point would be that we all want to be working towards a better world, that let's do it in a way which actually respects, if you like, the people who are going to have this stuff pushed on them from outside. First of all, let's identify what their needs and wishes are, and then we'll all start, if you like, to use better practices in the soil where we can encourage a lot of education, everything that we needed to do that rather than having these rather sterile scientific debates at one level, which are not then engaging in this local adaptation, this nuance of recognizing the local condition and pushing back there.

Matthew  

I think that takes us nicely back to where we were before we got into the soil, which, of course, which was inevitable. It's impossible not to. I think that takes us nicely back to the point of working in this environment where populism is reigning supreme in communication. So I guess a question is, how do we restructure our incentives towards better communication, towards better scientific communication, where we're, as you said, engage with the realities on the ground and not just kind of working in this abstract paper or just talking to each other. How do we find ways to reward that behavior, if you will?

Ken  

it's very good, good question. How do we teach people to listen? Well, it's very much about the ability to be able to listen actively and try and understand the other person's points, but also trying, in my mind to understand where are they coming from, or what's what's pushing them into that position that they're arguing those things. So I mean being able to to debate well is obviously not a matter of just standing and shouting. It's being able to understand arguments articulate. And you know, maybe we don't do a good enough job of that in our in our education systems. I think that there is a fundamental problem in the reward structure in science. 

I think there are positive moves in that direction, in terms of the way that we're now trying to move towards this San Francisco declaration of research assessment, which is much more about showing the relevance and the impact of your work. And that can be in terms of societal goals, but it can also be in terms of learning goals, or it doesn't necessarily all have to be translated into sort of better dollars for the economy. There are different values there, so moving away, if you like, from the citation rankings and those sorts of things, which, of course, in my era, were very much the evaluation targets. I think that's very positive. 

I think what's more difficult is the area of funding. Because funding bodies across the world, whether that's coming from funding from the private sector, where they've got very clear goals, which have to link then to their goals, or from the public sector, where we're asked, increasingly, to work on things of societal relevance. And then there is a political agenda behind that, which can often be pushing us in particular directions. So and the easiest thing to do is to jump onto that bandwagon as a scientist. What I’ve been trying to argue in Wageningen is, when we get a request from the ministry, we should say, Yeah, that's a really important topic. But can we first think about how we're framing the question? Because how you frame the question leads to the outcome of the research very often. And what's happening now is we're coming with a very specific question from ministry, and you work on it, and it's the wrong question. First of all, we should get into a discussion of, how are we framing this issue, this problem? Can we come up with a better articulation of what the research question should be, and then we can move forward with it.

Matthew 

You're hitting all the points that I that I typically try to communicate as well in the presentations that I do, which is largely challenging the notion of, how are we framing the problems that we're trying to solve? Can we acknowledge people's starting points in these conversations and where they're entering these discussions - regional context, stakeholder context, and being really specific about context, because context is supreme here.

I guess I heard earlier at the conference, someone talking about, yeah, we could, or maybe it was you talking about principles and practices. Maybe you could just share what your reflection was on the differences between these kind of general principles versus practices.

Ken 

So I mean, we I can share a paper I just wrote with my colleague, Jim Sumberg, and it's really his input, his initiation of this, this work, but we started looking at the idea of principles and practices in agronomy. And principles are definitely a higher order. There's a principle, and below that, you have practices which could address that principle. But we realized that there was no real classification of principles. And where we came out is in agronomy, we've got explanatory principles. So they things like, if you put more nutrients into soil, you know, that stimulates crop growth, that's sort of really directly related to the way crops grow. But then you've got what we call Directive Principles. And a good example there would be Organic agriculture. You're not allowed to use this. So then you know, if you use artificial fertilizer, you're not organic. That's a very directive one, and they come in two forms. One is a must do. So conservation agriculture or regenerative agriculture, keep the soil covered. We must do that. And encouragement “don't do”, which is like the organic one. They're the Directive Principles, and then we've got the normative principles, and then we look at agroecology and fairness. Is a is, is a norm. We've got other examples in this paper you wrote from the companies the Sustainable Agriculture intensification program, which is, you know, which is a more complex definition. I can't think of it on the top of my head, but they're very normative principles.

I think, having actually done this and divided up into explanatory, directive, normative, what we find is that none of these alternative agricultures actually undermine the basic explanatory principles. We're always working on the same principles of how you grow crops. That's uniform. What they differ in is the directive or the normative. And then you realize that what they are essentially is a bit of a power play of, how do we claim our place in this really heavily contested space? How can we claim our space within that? And that's what companies and brands are doing. That's what agroecologists are doing to try and push their line. That's what you know. You could argue people more into the conventional agriculture world, not quite keen on that term. All of us are using these directive and normative principles in different ways, which are essentially about a power discussion. And if you realize that, then I think you can potentially start to come together, and what are the differences, and how can we move forward.

Matthew 

Sustainable intensification, improving yields and reducing the environmental impact, as a kind of shorthand, I guess,

Ken  

yeah, I always call that. It's a do no harm. We produce more, but we do no harm. Yeah. And I think the big difference, if you like of the regen movement, is we increase yield and we do good. So, I mean, you have to like it.

Matthew  

It’s a really positive story. 

Ken  

It's a positive story.

Matthew  

I think that's part of the power of it, is that it it says we're not only just going to be sustainable, we're not only going to maintain the current level. I've heard the analogy, you don't want your marriage to be sustainable. You want it to be thriving and flourishing, and then regenerative is that kind of that version in the agricultural world. 

Ken  

Who could disagree? So in a sense, the goal is good, but how do we harness if you like this positivity without it becoming a hollow term without it becoming greenwashing. All the big brands are on board. Guinness was one of the latest, you know, regeneration taking root. Nice picture of Guinness planted firmly in the soil with the barley growing out of it. I was interviewed by the Financial Times in January, and as quoted in an article where they were looking at, is regenerative agriculture a good investment for venture capital? You know, it's really taken off. It's a positive story. But how do we avoid it being used simply as another hollow term and and how can we then support farmers to be able to do, you know, if you like good things,

Matthew  23:08

Yeah, it's one of our great challenges.

Ken  

There's a very interesting blog, actually, from an Australian farmer, Moffitt's farm, where the farmer actually himself asks the question, what's the difference between myself and these people doing this regenerative? And he runs through all the different practices, and he comes out at the conclusion very little apart the fact that they call themselves regenerative and that he reckons that his profit margins are slightly better because he's doing things better. It's a bit of a simplistic analysis, but it's a very insightful blog. Another one I should share with you.

Matthew  

Yeah, I'll add all these links in the show notes. So we talked about the perils of populism, principles and practices and the promises of regenerative agriculture. Where do we go from here? How do we wrap this up?

Ken  

Part of the reason I come into this thinking about this, this issue of populism, is I was asked to talk at the opening of the academic year in Wageningen, which was a great opportunity. It's the week before I formally retired. I was given the floor at the opening of the academic year, and of course, you want to say something positive. And I was asked to talk about one of what Wageningen has identified as the six big dilemmas, and that was about the land sharing or land sparing for biodiversity. And I said immediately, but it's not land sharing or land sparing, it's land sharing and land sparing. And precisely this point, depending on your starting point, what the goals are, we can give good examples of where a land sharing approach would be more useful, or a land sparing or the mixture of the two, and that we shouldn't be thinking of black and white. Yes or no. It's very much different shades of gray or. Different shades of green, of course, in this side. And I think it makes a really nice argument that actually pushed me to really think much more deeply about this populism and then you start to see many, many different examples of where it where it boils over, if you like, in debate. 

Big question is, where do we end on all this? And it really is a matter of, how do we encourage scientists to think a bit more deeply, not just about what they're doing and how they can get money for the next project, but where does their work fit in this bigger picture? What are the values and norms that they put behind it themselves, and can we garner, if you like, people to move together more actively, listening to each other, engaging more in dialogue and debate, instead of claiming the high ground and, you know, throwing stones, if you like. So yeah, I think that's going to be a challenge always, but I think that's in a sense where we need to be moving.

Matthew  

That's essentially what we're trying to do at table. Ken Giller “retired professor” at Wageningen University. Thanks for joining us.