310: You Are What You Eat: Soil, Seeds and Social Justice

Full Transcript

Tom: [00:00:02] Hello and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Tom Rivett-Carnac.

Christiana: [00:00:04] I'm Christiana Figueres.

Paul: [00:00:06] And I'm Paul Dickinson.

Tom: [00:00:07] This week we asked what lessons agriculture needs to learn for the future, and Paul and Christiana traveled to Umbria in Italy to meet twin brothers Nicola and Alessandro, who left behind city careers to reinvent the way we grow food. Thanks for being here. So, friends, we're going to hear about a very exciting trip that you took recently to Italy and learned a great deal about the future of food production and what it might look like, but I wonder if we should just take a minute or two at the front end to talk about what's wrong with how we produce our food. Now, this will not be an alien topic to many listeners, and indeed we've covered it before on the podcast. But to just kick off, this is something I discussed a lot with my good friend George Monbiot down here in Devon, who I see who's made it his life's career to focus on this. He essentially says that modern farming creates the majority of our challenges in the world. If you look at the emissions associated with it, the terrible use of land and all of the pollutions that come from that. So many of our challenges have come from the way we produce our food. So, of course, industrial agriculture contributes to around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, and it may be more than that, depending on how we calculate it. Monocultures and chemical inputs degrade soil and pollute waterways, and of course, as we know, have a devastating impact on biodiversity.

Tom: [00:01:20] And what's more, our reliance on fossil fuel in the form of fertilizers and global supply chains increases our climate vulnerability. Now, that's only the environmental issues. If you expand that out and look at it socially. Farm work tends to be underpaid, seasonal, and sometimes it can even be exploitative in certain instances. And in many places, farming is no longer seen as viable or attractive career, especially for younger generations. And in many cases, it is just the government subsidies that keep this moving forward. Not only that, but an overreliance on a few varieties of crops makes food systems vulnerable to disease and climate shocks and global food supply chains now tend to break down under pressure. Perhaps, though, the biggest impact that our food systems face is the soil. 33% of the world's soils are seriously degraded, and some scientists warn that the number of harvests we have left may be something between 50 and 60. Healthy soil is critical, not just for food. For carbon storage, water retention and biodiversity. And yet, conventional farming treats our soils as inert. So to just start off with that litany of challenges, you too recently had a visit in which you saw some other ways in which we can do this, but what what would it be like if we listen to our soils? Do you feel like you've got a sense of that when you were in Italy?

Christiana: [00:02:36] Well, how could we not? Because sadly, you were not able to join us, Tom. But Paul and I went to Umbria, Italy, for the wedding of a colleague. And listeners have to, like, imagine that the whole wedding took place between rows of eggplants, Onions, cucumbers, tomatoes or tomatoes, and we're sitting on bales of straw in the middle of a vegetable and fruit garden. It was an amazing experience because we were there certainly to celebrate this beautiful wedding, but also to remember, as you point out, Tom, that soil is anything but inert. Soil is the very source of life. That's where the roots grow. That's where every single plant takes its nourishment from and grows into the plants and the fruits and vegetables. And I almost felt like I wanted to take off my shoes and walk barefoot, because there is such a reverence for soil on this Quinta Essenza farm. It was founded by twin brothers Nicola and Alessandro. Five years ago, in the middle of the pandemic, they bought a piece of land that was basically barren right in front of their parents house and they bought over 80 acres. They today grow 1600 varieties of fruit and vegetables, and it is just a completely different experience of farming and in particular of our human relationship with fruits and vegetables than I have ever had.

Paul: [00:04:34] And our dear friends went there and visited and then just thought, we want to get married here. Now that's an unusual response to a farm, but it's pretty.

Paul: [00:04:42] Normal when you meet these two and the wonderful people they work with. I mean, I've got to say, the first thing that just blew my head off was to hear two founders who've had kind of city jobs in kind of media and such, like talk about a farm the way people normally talk about a startup. They had all of that joy, passion, sense of creativity and excitement completely about a farm. The second thing they said, and let's just, you know, ground ourselves in pretty far flung reality. They are saying farmers have got to get ready for a ten degrees hotter world.

Tom: [00:05:18] Ten degrees.

Paul: [00:05:19] They said the Mediterranean is already seven degrees hotter and it is in some places at some times. So this is like a real thing. They're not just starting kind of farming as entrepreneurs. They're also thinking about inevitably what we've got to do and a wonderful story about essentially the sort of pivotal moment for them when they discovered whilst they were suffering this terrible drought, which of course, we're going to experience more and more of the forest managed to retain moisture. And that's just an amazing story. So I think this is such an exciting insight into how we can completely reframe what we do and become enormously excited about food systems. And I think the the standout Tom, is for you and your friend George Monbiot to go over to meet them in Umbria and and to sort of become messengers for what I think listeners are about to find is a a fascinating roller coaster.

Tom: [00:06:09] Okay. So let's get into it. And I mean, I would love to ask you, is there anything we should know? We're going to hear these interviews that you, you made while you were on the ground there in Umbria. What should we know? Set it up for us.

Paul: [00:06:20] Wind, barking dogs, that sort of thing. It's a farm, right?

Tom: [00:06:25] Any terms that we're going to hear?

Paul: [00:06:26] There are a few terms that can be used. And one is Em technology. Effective micro-organisms that comes from a car in Japan celebrated way of adding kind of extremely effective and fast multiplying microorganisms to soil to give it greater effectiveness in terms of growing things, which is kind of what our farm is all about. But it's not been trialed at the kind of scale that people would want. You know, the science is still a bit on the fence, but I think you have to kind of really go for it. You know, it goes to something that they pointed out about how the crops have become more resistant sometimes. 80% of farming is killing, they said, leaving a void. So some other terms that you may come across are heirloom seeds. Traditional seed varieties passed down through generations, often region specific and genetically diverse. And they've very much embedded themselves in that world. Unlike commercial hybrids, they're open pollinated and can adapt to local conditions over time, and adaptation is a very critical part of their story. You know, remember what Darwin said? It wasn't survival of the fittest. It was the survival of the best able to adapt. And then the other term you're going to hear is biochar, a form of charcoal made from organic material like crop waste that's added to soil and it improves soil fertility, helps retain water, and locks away carbon. Critically, it's a centuries old practice, actually, but rediscovered in modern climate agriculture. So you're going to hear from the we don't say coal face anymore. You're going to hear from the spinning, the spinning blades of the windmill of modernity in terms of farming practice.

Christiana: [00:07:54] We have heard about organic farming, and there's so many cutting edge efforts at organic farming and organic produce. We have heard about regenerative agriculture. We've heard about rewilding. All of these efforts have in common that they are trying to kill the soil less than what we have been doing in the past. But what I just found was absolutely fascinating about Nicola and Alexandra's efforts here, is that they go above and beyond all of these efforts, and they actually say, what we really need to do is learn from nature herself. Biomimicry. Janine Benyus, who invented, discovered, developed the concept of biomimicry and who we have had on the podcast. But the applications of Some biomimicry have more been about design, of architecture, of packaging of transports, such as the bullet train. Velcro is another very famous example of biomimicry. But what these brothers have done is learn from nature, to treat nature like nature would treat itself. So it is. And it's not extracting from nature for human things, services, constructs, constructions. It's actually learning from nature to behave as nature, to produce as nature. I just was blown away by that concept.

Tom: [00:09:39] Brilliant.

Paul: [00:09:40] All right, so let's go to the interview.

Christiana: [00:09:46] Alessandro and Nicola, thank you very much, both of you, for joining us on outrage and optimism. Now you are twin brothers. You live here in Quintus Support Farm in Umbria, Italy. You have previous professional lives that had nothing to do with farming, but at some point you decided to come home to the land where you grew up. Your parents still live just very close here, and you decided to buy this farm and start a farming profession. Can you tell us why you decided to do that? And are you still happy with that decision?

Allesandro: [00:10:33] Everything started a few years ago. We were kids. We were, as you said, spending most of our weekend here and summertime. And the best way to keep our two twins busy is to give a house to this very old man who used to do the vegetable vegetable garden for my parents. And this man was pretty unique even for that time because he was really passionate with seeds. He reproduced his own seeds in his grandfather. His name was Renato. So we it teaches the passion for green vegetable, but most of all for seeds. And basically, when we were kids, being our friends, they used to collect stamps and everything else.

Christiana: [00:11:15] And you collected seeds? Yes. Yeah.

Allesandro: [00:11:17] To strange kids. And in the years, uh, growing this passion, we also grow with an idea of one day. We said one day, when are we going to be retired? We're going to open a farm. You're interested? I said okay. Then, like I was, I started working in cinema production. Miguel opened a company in London and sustainability and our business plans finished in a drawer for a few years. Several years. Then I was 39 and I was back in Rome, and sadly this place was put in sale and we decided that probably we could buy the land as a family just because the excuse was nobody's going to be nothing in front of my parents house.

Christiana: [00:12:05] So the original motivation to buy this farm is to prevent anybody from building anything obnoxious in front of your parents house.

Allesandro: [00:12:12] Right. Then I came here, I was alone, I see the land. It was completely abandoned. Completely. And there were olive trees and an abandoned vineyard. And I see, you know, this potential. So I go, as I call Nick, say, maybe I can start. I'm going to spend three days here, four days in Rome, keep doing my job. And we signed the paper and I arrived here, and I never came back to Rome. And I started learning everything because I knew we knew how to grow vegetables. But we we didn't knew nothing about olive trees, vineyards. So with very old men of the area as teachers, I started learning how to ancestral wisdom. Exactly. Wise men. And then suddenly something very, very extraordinary somehow happened. Covid. Covid arrived. I was locked down here. Nic arrived, and we say, okay, it's time to maybe do this. Something for real. And we started. That's how. Quinta Essenza. Born with. Not really an idea, to be honest, of how to run a farm. That was the biggest problem. How to do this scale? Yeah, the challenge was, you know, it was nice to do a vegetable garden and grow, you know, a few plants of tomato. But how can we do this scale and how we can provide consistency in the product that we offer? How do we actually work a winter vegetable garden that no one ever did in Umbria? So at the beginning we were like literally a blank page in front of us And, and I would say that blank page that everybody thought it was a limitation became our biggest strength because we didn't have a playbook. We could just do however we liked.

Christiana: [00:13:58] But you had values and principles, and Paul talked to you about your values and principles.

Paul: [00:14:03] I mean, when we spoke about this, I was very struck because I said, what is the big learning that you've had? And, um, you know, the first kind of I think you made it was like empathy. And I thought you were going to say something about what we learned about these characters, and we learned about this process or something. And you said, learn empathy. And then later we spoke and you said respect. And so how is it that empathy and respect are critical features of successful farming? Because they seem like words from a different part of the planet.

Allesandro: [00:14:30] For let's start with empathy, because respect, I think, is the next step. Do you think I learned since I opened the farm? One is to be patient first thing. And second, how difficult it is to try to understand and somehow communicate with species that doesn't talk or they don't talk the same language. So to understand is really you have to open your heart, which is seems really pyrrhic. But it's true. That's how it works for us to understand what was happening in the farm around us. You have to open your heart and listen and trying to understand. That's why I think the most important thing is empathy, which we don't have much in the world at the moment.

Christiana: [00:15:22] Empathy with the other species that we share the planet with.

Allesandro: [00:15:26] And we can be doing sustainable farming. It means to produce something for other human beings that are good.

Paul: [00:15:32] So that's empathy.

Nicola: [00:15:34] And then to respect it in respect, we can divide it into very big pillars here. And one of course is a bit. What I also said is respect for nature, respect for the environment that surrounds us. Learning from it rather than trying to teach to it. But what I think is very important in farming especially, and is often overlooked, is the respect for the people that work for you is the social aspect of farming, because farming across the planet is almost now a tool for modern slavery by pushing the price down. Farmers don't have other choice but to use what we call in Italy bread shanty. These are people, usually immigrants, that get paid by the hour to come and do one job without the security of having the same job tomorrow or in a month's time. And that resulted in farming jobs not being attractive, aspirational anymore, not leading young people to wanting to do this job because you can't be the life on this. And so since we started, we had this very strong idea that social sustainability had to be one of the main pillars of the farm. And how does that translate in practice? Is translated by giving people full time contracts long term with a living wage at least, that can allow them to support themselves and their family.

Nicola: [00:16:53] We need to retain talent, and I understand that the talent concept in farming is something that people don't even look at. But we train these people, these young people, for now, for years. We don't want to lose them. You know, they're good at what they do. They learn a lot about the technique that we use. And so we want to retain this talent. So good salaries, good welfare pension, medical insurance, you know working hours there are decent and flexibility. We always say we work hard and play hard because also we play a lot. You know, often the soundtrack of the farm is laughter. People joking, you know, and sometimes running and, you know, it's uh, you create a beautiful environment and it's inspiring a lot of young people that come here and visit to maybe one day choose the same job, which is probably one of the most important missions that we have. Apart from doing fantastic food, is actually influencing young people to choose this as a job.

Christiana: [00:17:51] How are you that you're doing more than that, not just encouraging young people to take farming as a job, but to have entrepreneurs choose farming as their profession.

Paul: [00:18:02] And just this. This is my last framing question, really. We had a lovely conversation where you talked about how language is important, which is, I think, something we believe very, very much on the podcast. And you talked about going from producing to growing and how does that different language work out?

Nicola: [00:18:19] Well, it's so we grow food, okay. Farmers grow food, don't produce food. Produce is a mechanical industrialised process. Growing is witnessing the magic of seeing a seed of life, a seed that becomes a little plant. You put it in the soil. In the farm it grows. You produce fruits, they're ripe, you taste, you extract the new seeds. It's the most beautiful, I think, romantic, a fascinating part of this job. But if you go to production, you take away all the Romans. And actually, I have to say, unfortunately, today food is mainly produced, which means that we also mix it with substances that shouldn't be there, that are harmful for the planet and for human beings. And for what reason, just to make the food cheaper. But then we need more food because it's less nutritious, so it doesn't work. I mean, the system is kind of, you know, broken on all sorts of aspects, but terminology is important. It's a bit like I start all my lectures saying that. To me, the biggest greenwashing has always been done is that humans have to save the planet. It's not for us to save the planet. We need to save ourselves.

Christiana: [00:19:36] So I agree with you.

Nicola: [00:19:37] The planet to survive as a ball of fire or ice. Well, you know perfectly well when we are not here anymore.

Christiana: [00:19:43] Exactly.

Paul: [00:19:44] Maybe, maybe, maybe you're trying to get the planet to save us. And just the last thing I wanted to sort of frame this is the soil here is not especially good. Right. This is not the easiest place to start a farm.

Allesandro: [00:19:53] The sun was awful when we started the farm. I mean, awful lazy. Is it? Is this soil? So it cannot be awful. But it is. It's pretty intense and tough. Everything is a good soil, I think. But there was not the right soil to grow vegetable. It was chemical free. It was chemical. That was good because it was abandoned.

Christiana: [00:20:14] How did you restore the soil?

Nicola: [00:20:16] So, um, when we started a farm, we literally took the, the, the most easy choice, which was we want to be sustainable. Let's take the organic certification. And we started following the organic methodology to grow vegetables. But that didn't really change the soil. Organic is a lot about what products you use, what spray you use for your products, And it's about rotation of crop is a it's a conventional farming a bit cleaner a bit cleaner. Exactly. Nothing different. Um, so we started with a bit of a random, not dogmatic approach of taking inspiration from all the techniques that we were aware of, from regenerative farming to biodynamic farming, synthetic farming, and trying to get the ideas that could work on a scale because permaculture, it's lovely. And I would do my vegetable garden through a permaculture technique. But when you work a scale, it becomes rather financially and efficient and it's very challenging. So we took some principle of it, like the raised beds, we took some principle of regenerative farming, which was a lot of focus on the soil. We had the priority that we changed the soil. We took biodynamic and entropic in terms of understanding the natural cycle of plant succession and biodiversity. But then something happened, which was.

Christiana: [00:21:35] Biomimicry, where mimicry come in.

Nicola: [00:21:38] It comes from a trauma. It comes from the second year of the farm. Yes, Umbria was hit by the worst drought in history. It didn't rain from February till November. November?

Christiana: [00:21:52] Yes. It did not rain.

Nicola: [00:21:53] Not a drop, not a drop. And we were hit by four heatwaves during the summer, where the temperature almost rise to 40°C, which means that we basically started losing all the crops and whatever it was not lost. It was cooking on the plants directly. Literally, literally. You know, we were harvesting tomatoes where we already roasted pretty much one day with me and Alessandro and Mr. Despair that we with us, because we were literally desperate, we were walking back to our parents house and we had to go through a woodland to do that. And literally we get into this woodland and the light bulb starts, you know, we we start noticing, you know, the temperatures. What's different was fresher. The soil was probably not wet, but moist. And then we started looking at specific issues that we had in the farm, like infest and weeds. They are here in every shape and form, but they don't take over pathogens, pathogens, parasites. You've got them all. How come they don't kill the woodlands and no one washes the woodland? No one rotates the woodland, no one fertilizes the woodland. And no matter what is lush, productive and stable. So we said, all done because there is something to learn from this. And having worked in sustainability for many years and approaching a lot of tech solutions, I knew about biomimicry as a principle in tech biology, chemistry. The most simple approach would be applying biomimicry to farming. Exactly why is no one done anything like this?

Christiana: [00:23:19] So that's the most adjacent application, right?

Nicola: [00:23:22] Exactly. So we luckily enough, we get the concept of the head of the Biomimicry Institute in San Francisco that we now partner with. And I explained what we wanted to do, and I was like, we want to imitate the woodland. And she told me. You're right. How weird that we are actually develop enzymes that it's plastic and have got like sugars at dropping. Amazing. But we haven't worked around farming. And actually what you're trying to do can be really classified as bio mimic. Farming and biomimicry is an approach where you imitate nature. I say non dogmatic again, because it's not about the specific solution, it's about understanding a system. For example, we solve the problem of trees through the planting of this species called Paulownia tomentosa arrived in Europe in the 17th century and used as an ornamental tree so far, and never in agroforestry now is widely used in wood production. Why? Because it's the fastest growing tree on the planet, and we don't have 20 years now to weigh the shade. I need a shade in 3 or 4 years. So we put these trees that are growing 4 or 5m a year. The roots go deep and in search for water independently. We don't need to water them. The leaves have the highest content of NPK, which are the substance that you have in chemical fertilizers. So when they lose the leaf, they fertilize the soil. We started using biochar to reproduce that organic matter in the woodland that acts as a sponge. We started using microorganisms inside the soil to fast track soil regeneration, and we discover that when they work with biochar, they augment each other and they double the speed of reproduction. The paulownia works with the microorganism as well.

Paul: [00:25:05] Where did you find the microorganisms?

Allesandro: [00:25:07] I was me because I was given a conference in Perugia University about this way of farming. And then when we I finished the conference, this man came to me and said, I'm Vanni, his name is Vanni. So I'm really interested in your farm. Have you ever tried the Aim technology? So I heard about it, but not yet. But technology has been invented by Doctor Higa in Japan a few years ago is a mix of 86 bacteria. Yeast is lacto bacteria that you usually find in every people kitchen. Okay, put it together. They found out that they work as a super charge for vegetable, and they help the soil to regenerate much more fast. So we train them and it comes. It's a liquid solution. It tastes like a handful. It's pretty good. And it's good for us as well.

Paul: [00:26:09] Especially before you put it on the plant. You drink some yourself, which shows that we're eating the same things. Good.

Allesandro: [00:26:13] Exactly, exactly. I actually eat every morning. A bit of this technology. Yeah, it's pretty good for your organism. And when we started, I remember we did with Nick. Three raised beds, one with our soil, another one with our soil and biochar and our compost. And the other one with our soil, biochar, compost and GM technology.

Paul: [00:26:35] Because we're looking at a laboratory right where you perform constant experiments.

Allesandro: [00:26:38] But what happened? I mean, something was okay, normal. So of course, the one that grew with compost and the biochar, they were growing bigger and faster. But suddenly something really strange happened because the first two were eaten by pests. All of them. The third one I'm talking about one meter of distance. The last one, they were pest, but they weren't eaten them. So what is happening here? It's really strange. I mean, we we we call the the M house in, in Japan because we are working a lot with them. And they say why this is happening. And apparently. Yeah, well, Doctor Riga was, uh, it's a bit like humans, you know, when you've got a very good and balanced gut, the microbiome, you develop natural barriers so you don't get viruses that easily. And we're like. Of course that's easy. The same happens to plants, you know, roots. And the microbiome is exactly the same dynamic that happens in our guts. But although the answer was somehow satisfactory, you know, our push was to understand the scientific mechanism behind this. And it couldn't only be that the plants were stronger. So we started testing the plants with universities and the genera, which is the center for National Research in Italy. And after one year, we made a discovery that changed our farm forever, I think, and it was that the plants feeding on a healthy soil were vibrating at a different frequency than the other plants.

Christiana: [00:28:15] Vibrating.

Nicola: [00:28:16] Vibrating. So they were literally emitting a frequency. And we learned that actually is one of the means of communication in nature. Of course, we some of us know that plants connect through the mycelial network. So mushrooms are actually the internet of plants. But a lot of us didn't know that actually plants communicate through specific frequency. We haven't invented anything in the way we do farming. We actually now we are discovering that biochar was used 4000 years ago by the Amazon tribes to make the soil more fertile, that pushing biodiversity and not tilling and just leaving everything green is a technique that we've been using always, and it's ingrained in our DNA until the 1930s. So a lot of the things that we're actually doing is just the process of being curious and rediscovering what we've always been doing.

Christiana: [00:29:16] What our ancestors knew all the time.

Nicola: [00:29:19] What we're doing, probably that is different is the way we are mixing these things, you know? Is that probably a bit more modern, systematic approach is that the ability that we've got today. Of course, that we didn't have before to test the effects of these techniques. But I can tell you that the water retention of the farm has improved by between 50 and 60%. I can tell you that our vegetables, because we have tested them into a microbiology lab, have between 300 and 1000% more nutrients than the one that you buy from the supermarkets. So we've got the modern technology to, in a way supports the results of the farm. And we are looking now after, you know, five years of a bit, you know, a material discovery. We now are working and we are planning to actually develop a paper, a scientific paper that can be shared with other people, with the collaboration of university to put some science backing and data by hand behind what we observe every day. Because then again, you know, if your tomato plant is good and it tastes good. You know, you can do any test lab that you want. You know there is more nutritious. It's got more sugar, more minerals, more salts, more, you know, antioxidants and and vitamins. So we but we want to have a data support to what we're doing. I think it's important also in light of the fact that for us, one of the mission is sharing what we're doing.

Christiana: [00:30:49] I want you to talk to us a little bit about the concept of heirloom seeds.

Allesandro: [00:30:54] When we opened the farm, we soon realized that all these very ancient variety that arrived to us and then nobody grows anymore. Some of them, because the consumer doesn't recognize the color. Who's gonna buy a white tomato or a green tomato that, for people doesn't taste nothing? I can assure you, it's the most sweet tomato in the world. Some of them, because they don't last much after you harvest them. So if you think that now a courgette travel more than I do because most of them are produced in Brazil, packed in Thailand and sold it everywhere in the world. It seems crazy, but it is crazy. Load More