Hot Farm—episode 1 transcript
This is a transcript of episode 1, “Change is Hard.” Listen to Hot Farm wherever you get your podcasts. Narration by Eve Abrams.
Farmers love to check each other out.
JEFF: There isn’t a farmer one that doesn’t drive down the road looking out the side window to see what the other farmer’s doing. They all do it.
Jeff Bonnacker is one of dozens of farmers I spoke to last summer.
JEFF: And their question to themselves is: will that benefit me? What he’s doing: will that work for me? Will it make me any money? Will it save me any money? Will my bottom line increase by copying what this guy’s doing? And it doesn’t have to be your neighbor. Doesn’t have to be in your same state. When I get in an airplane, I look out the window and I look down at what they’re doing down there, and I try to figure out what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. We’re all trying to, you know, carve out a living and pass on what we built to the next generation.
If farmers are always checking each other out, it can be hard for them to take risks– because when you take risks you might fail.
JOHN: So I started breeding my own seed corn. I just got this old like open pollinated heritage variety, and I grew it across the street from his house, right on route 10, which is a major road. It was an absolute failure.
John White is a young farmer, trying to go organic – which is very different from how his dad Jim farms. John is taking risks. And he’s had many failures. Over plates of fried chicken at the Country Aire Restaurant in Central Illinois, father and son tell me about this one cornfield.
JOHN: And there were a bunch of weeds in it. And it was about yellow as you could get; there wasn’t too much green in there, and it just looked like crap, and everybody was – he was so mad.
JIM: See as the dad, I get the brunt. I get the ribbing of: what is that? What is that? Or what are you doing over there? Cause I mean it was not attractive.
JOHN: Yeah, so now we learned a lesson on that. So now my organic fields are behind their house, half mile off the road.
Change is hard. Sometimes it’s unsightly. But farmers can’t avoid it, because the planet is changing.
TOM: We were the fifth driest June on record, and we went to the fifth wettest June on record in one week!
DAN: We’re seeing this river rise very frequently.
PAUL: My creek comes out and starts pushing trees out of the banks, washing people’s basements and houses away, taking out fences, drowning cows.
KATIE: We lost 50 percent of our wheat, and then on the vegetable side of things, we lost our broccoli, 75 percent of our onions…
NIKKI: Clearly, this is not what we’re all used to.
Scientists tell us all this crazy weather: this is life in the age of climate change. Most farmers are too busy to think about the big global picture; some don’t even believe humans are causing climate change. But everyone sees our weather is bonkers.
This past summer, I spent a lot of time on farms in the Midwest, where the majority of land is used for agriculture. In the United States, we use around half our land to grow plants and animals. But in the Midwest, it’s much higher. In Illinois, where John, Jim, and I were having lunch, 75 percent of the state is farmland. That’s a lot of land. And also a lot of emissions. Agriculture generates 10 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. If we’re serious about fighting climate change, we HAVE to involve farmers.
From the Food and Environment Reporting Network, I’m Eve Abrams. welcome to Hot Farm, a podcast about farmers and food – your food.
Over four episodes, we’re going to travel the Midwest to understand what the people who grow our food are doing – or could be doing – to take on the climate emergency.
In this first episode, we’re going to stick close to a farmer named Dave Bishop. There aren’t a lot of farmers like Dave out there, but his willingness to change: it’s what far more farmers are going to have to do, if we have any chance of avoiding a climate catastrophe.
DAVE: That’s crop damage right there. That’s not coming back there. That’s gone.
I’m driving with Dave to his farm – just outside of Atlanta. Atlanta, Illinois. I visited him there last summer. Coming from town, we pass huge expanses of corn and soybeans. Two weeks before I arrived some of these fields flooded. And then flooded again, the next week. The creeks overflowed, covered the low crops around them in soil, and killed them.
EVE: Wow. Everything is so brown – up to the street
DAVE: Up to the – yeah, look how high up the brown is, that’s how high that water was
EVE: Yeah.
DAVE: Here’s another one on the other side of the road. This corn was still pretty big but the water was running so fast here, it just took it just took it down. Look at that.
Dave has a gray goatee and mustache. He wears black wire glasses and a baseball cap with the name of his farm – PrairiErth – embroidered on it. He always has a pen in his breast pocket. The creek running through Dave’s farm is called the Kickapoo, named for the people whose land this was before settlers took it.
Dave idles his favorite four wheeler, a John Deere “gator,” on the edge of a ruined field. He points across it, to the creek. Dave says, in this last flood, the Kickapoo rose 20 feet in hours.
DAVE: It rained one night 10 and a quarter inches just upstream. There’s nothing for the creek to do but come out if you have these kind of flood events.
Flood events now tied to climate change. But this isn’t the first time Dave has lost crops because of extreme weather. Over 30 years ago, one big loss changed Dave– in a big way.
And Dave became a totally different kind of farmer.
Dave grew up on a small farm near Peoria, Illinois. Back then, most American farms were small, but while Dave was in college, in 1973, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, told farmers:
DAVE: get big or get out. Tear up the fences, get them out of there and plant right to the road.
Plant commodity crops, like corn and soybeans. And plant a lot of them.
Growing up, Dave was never sure what he wanted to do. But after graduating college, he did know he wanted to experience more of the world. So he became a pilot for a few years. And then, in the late 70’s, the farm economy started to crash.
DAVE: And it was really bad. I mean, a lot of people I knew were going broke. Farm sales were a daily occurrence and they were heart-wrenching. And there was a year when there was a farm sale in driving distance every day of the year. You know the slow motion destruction of rural America was a long, slow process.
Small farms that couldn’t get big, were getting out. Which meant, ironically, in 1978, it was a GREAT time for Dave to start his own farm.
DAVE: I mean, machinery is dirt cheap. We can buy good equipment for next to nothing. There’s land to rent.
So, about 40 miles from the family farm he grew up on, Dave started his own farm.
DAVE: I started doing the conventional corn soybean thing. Cause that’s what everybody was doing.
This is what Earl Butz was talking about. Industrialize. Use technology — chemicals like herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers — things you buy from multinational corporations to grow a crop, or two, in a big way — which you then sell to another huge company. The idea was that American innovation could feed the world.
DAVE: We thought we were heading into this 20th century Nirvana. There’d be nothing but cheap food everywhere.
DAVE: It was easy to do.
Despite the bad farming economy, Dave did ok. At first.
DAVE: And so we went along pretty well until 1988 and that’s when it all, that’s when it all came an end.
1988, ten years into Dave farming.
DAVE: it was an okay summer until about the 1st of April, it stopped raining.
EVE: you had no rain?
DAVE: No rain from April 1st, till November 1st, and it was a hot summer. You know, first you started thinking it’s pretty dry out here and then, wow, we really need a rain. And then you start watching, literally watching, this crop die a little at a time. You stand out there and you look at this stuff, and there’s nothing you can do.
Every day, you died a little bit. When the fall did finally come around, there was no, no corn in that field. We all knew that from August, right? And one day, one day after supper, six o’clock, I guess, in October, I walked out in the machine shed, I got on the combine and I drove down that field and I started picking, back and forth till nine o’clock. At nine o’clock, I turned around, I looked back in the grain tank, little tiny handful of seeds, not very good looking, pretty, pretty brown, nasty looking seed. And I went home on, went to bed. And I have spent a lot of years wondering why Why I got into a combine spend three hours going through a field where there was nothing in it to harvest? But I guess the psychological answer is I was not able to accept this yet.
The drought was the only thing farmers were talking about. Dave says the conversations went
DAVE: from depressing to more depressing. And uh, you know, everybody was, of course: what are you going to do? Now next year, you know next year will be different year and we do what we do and we’ll hope for different results. It won’t be like this a second year in a row.
But for me, doing what I’m doing and not taking any steps to change the way I’m operating did not make any sense.
That summer was the hottest summer on record up to that point. And while Dave, in Illinois, was focused on the problems on his farm, a 12 hour drive east of him, a NASA scientist named James Hansen was delivering alarming news to Congress.
HANSEN: The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now
Hansen said the Earth’s rising temperatures were caused by HUMANS burning fossil fuels. He said, if we don’t do anything, it will get worse. Temperatures will continue to climb and will impact life on Earth for centuries.
It was one of the first and most high-profile times scientists publicly declared that our increasingly hotter Earth wasn’t a natural weather fluctuation; it was a result of increased carbon dioxide and other pollutants in our atmosphere. Senators demanded action. George Bush Senior, then running for president, vowed to fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.
Meanwhile, back in the Midwest, Dave wasn’t aware of this new urgency around climate change. He was fighting for the survival of his farm.
So he began changing it. Dave remembered the farm he grew up on, his family’s farm since the 1800’s.
DAVE: Well, I remember as a kid, okay fertilizer was produced by cows.
So Dave brought back livestock. First cows, and eventually pigs and chickens – whose manure fertilized the ground. Which meant he didn’t have to pay for chemical fertilizer.
DAVE: And then we thought, well, in ‘88, the wheat crop, which is harvested in July, wasn’t a complete loss — had I had any of course, which I didn’t, but for those who did have it, that spread out the timeframe and it wasn’t as vulnerable.
So Dave started raising wheat, sometimes oats. In other words, diversify. Don’t rely on one or two crops.
DAVE: And then we began to look for other ways. What else can I do? Well, what about, instead of selling everything into this commodities market, why don’t we try selling it through our neighbors?
In the late 80’s, like today, most farmers did not sell directly to people. Most of them didn’t even sell food you could eat right away. They sold crops on the commodities market, like: soybeans or corn to feed another farmer’s pigs. Or corn destined to become corn oil, corn syrup or corn starch. Or eventually, these days, ethanol, for our cars.
DAVE: What we were looking for was a way out of being totally dependent upon what some commodity firm wants to offer you from a crop. And as we all know, their motivation is to buy as cheap as they can, right? That’s what they do. And then there you have the people who sell you inputs, fertilizers, and pesticides. Well their motivation is to sell as high as they can.
Dave began diversifying his markets, in addition to his crops. Remember, this was thirty plus years ago. A lot of the farmers markets and food co-ops we’ve come to know today were just getting started. So Dave began selling directly to people.
DAVE: What can I raise as you would like to buy? And we did raise some hogs too, because there were people who said, well, I don’t really want a cow, but I’d take half a pig. Okay, and that corn that I had there, I could sell that or I could feed it. So I had two options now. And if feeding it wasn’t the most profitable option, I could sell it. If selling it wasn’t the most profitable option, I could feed it. All of a sudden I had some choices. I wasn’t just stuck.
Climate change STILL wasn’t on Dave’s radar. He wasn’t altering his entire farming strategy out of some environmentalist ideals. He was being pragmatic. He saw the farmers around him being swept up in a system squeezed on both ends. So he created his own system – a much more local food system. Dave believes strong local food systems make communities resilient. He says when supply chains break down, local food is close by. If you have local food, people can always eat.
But Dave was out of step with the locals around him.
EVE: I think you said to me on the phone, it’s the Midwest. My neighbors are all very polite.
DAVE: (laughs) Well, my neighbors are all very polite and they’ve always been extremely tolerant of me. Not that they would do what you’re doing – necessarily, cause you know, you’re a little different, and uh, but but never anything but kind and I uh, have endless respect for my neighbors.
But he wanted to do things differently. He wanted to regain his independence.
DAVE: Earl Butz said get big or get out. I thought there was a third option. Get big, get out, or get different. (laughs) So I chose the get different option.
Through the 1990’s, Dave’s farm went along, more or less, like this. He grew livestock and three or four crops (often: corn, soybeans, wheat, and alfalfa) on 450 acres. And he sold as much as he could locally. Meanwhile, Antarctic ice shelves were warming and breaking up. The fossil fuel industry was convincing politicians and voters that climate science wasn’t trustworthy. ?
Around the year 2000, Dave made another change — and it was inspired by a memory.
DAVE: I don’t know how old I was. I was — just a knee-high kid when my dad and my grandfather were talking. And they were talking about, uh, you know, the latest technology coming along — the pesticides and all these things that were brand new at the time. And my dad was the World War II generation and they were all gung ho for the latest, newest thing. And nobody could dream that it was anything unsafe about it, cause they wouldn’t sell it if it wasn’t safe. That’s just a given, right?
And then my grandfather’s question to him was: why do you think he could put poison on your food and you had poison yourself? All I remember after that was, it was silence. So that’s probably what got my attention. There’s a skull and crossbones on the bag for goodness sake.
The lesson stuck with Dave: be really careful about what you put on your food and your soil. And as a farmer, Dave was really careful. He was already farming pretty close to organically, so he decided to start the process of getting certified USDA organic — three years of growing without synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.
Dave and I walk out into one of his fields. Half an acre away, workers are picking kale destined for Chicago area Whole Foods markets. The sun’s out. It’s hot. Dave and I look down to our feet.
DAVE: This soil has – I can’t remember the last time there was any kind of insecticides or pesticides on this ground. It’s been – maybe 2000 maybe, or before? 20 some years.
Right now, fewer than one percent of US farmers are certified USDA organic. There are others who don’t have the certification but who follow organic, sustainable, and regenerative practices. Still — it is a very small number of farmers. And while farming organically doesn’t — in itself — address climate change, some of its methods directly reduce carbon emissions. And some practices are simply better for the soil and the environment.
The first year Dave was certified organic, he sold his corn for almost twice as much as conventional corn. It made economic sense, but growing organic also went along with Dave’s beliefs.
DAVE: This is where it’s all at, right there in the soil. And what you see is this incredibly complex ecosystem of bacteria and fungus and all kinds of –what’s it – arthropods? archeopods? — all of the different organisms that inhabit that, and each of those play a role in getting that fertility into that carrot or that beat as the case might be right there.
It took tens of thousands of years for Dave’s soil to become so rich and productive. It’s nutrients, from glaciers and silt and prairie grasses that covered the Midwest, decomposing rich organic matter, are what make the Midwest so fertile — that whole America’s breadbasket thing.
I reach down to touch Dave’s soil. It’s dark brown, slightly gritty.
DAVE: You are touching the flesh of god. That’s kind of how I think about it.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, Dave is passionate about soil. It’s his livelihood – his farm – but it’s also the foundation for everything, for all life.
DAVE: it’s just a fascinating thing to think of how this all came to be and how many thousands of years it took to create that and how quickly you can screw up. Wow. You know, nature, uh, it takes time to build something. People can tear it down and then wonder why they can’t just fix it overnight.
Dave is the first to admit he’s had plenty of screw-ups. But what defines his life as a farmer is that he changes.
For many years, Dave says, taking a smaller, more local, more sustainable route was pretty lonely. But gradually, over decades, farmers like Dave: their numbers are growing.
I’m going to briefly walk you through three more things that farmers are doing — to build more resilient farms, with lower emissions. None of these practices is a magic bullet. Averting a climate catastrophe will require way more than one solution, but farmers ARE trying things.
Top on the list…
Sustainable Farming Practice number one: cover crops. Dave gets us started.
DAVE: You know, you drive t hrough the Midwest and you see something out there on the land about half the time, right?
Likely, corn or soybeans.
DAVE: From spring to October, you see something green and growing. The other six months of the year, the factory’s doors are shut.
Meaning, nothing’s growing. No plants sucking up carbon.
DAVE: We operate the land for six months and then we just let it sit there, bare naked, and wash away. Now tell me how that makes any sense. What other business operates like that? (Laughs)
Dave’s answer to this naked, underutilized land — is cover crops. Plants like oats, rye, alfalfa, peas — that farmers grow on the same fields they grow their cash crops (again, usually corn and soybeans). Some farmers graze animals on cover crops; some harvest cover crops to make hay. Some farmers do nothing with their cover crops. But even doing nothing does something for the environment.
DAVE: They keep the ground covered. You have not only green matter on top, which is a blanket. Rain hits it, it doesn’t hit bare dirt. And you have roots underneath that’s holding the structure of the soil together.
PAUL: if I have something green and growing, there’s something there on Tuesday that wasn’t there on Monday.
NICKI: the cover crop itself – all that green matter, all the plant material – was breaking down in the soil, and that feeds the living things in the soil.
PAUL: In the case of my legumes, they captured nitrogen, right? Every time any regular plant takes a breath, it’s interested only in the CO2, but legumes are able to take in the nitrogen.
SERENA: we keep our fields covered with grass so that our cows can come back on and graze as long as possible.
DAN: Growing plants, whether it’s cover crops or whatever it is, it’s it takes carbon to build that plant. You know, carbon sequestering and global warming is the hot topic right now, and so there’s just a lot of farmers out there trying things. And I want to try it too.
That last voice was Dan Bonacker. You heard his dad Jeff at the very beginning of this story. He’s the farmer who looks out of airplanes to check out other farmers’ fields.
JEFF: I am a sixth generation farmer,
DAN: you’re fifth.
JEFF: I’m the fifth. Sorry.
DAN: better start that over.
Jeff and Dan farm corn, soybeans, and livestock together, on a large scale — in Cedar Hill, Missouri. Which brings us to Sustainable Farming Practice Number 2: no till.
Before Dan was born, when Jeff was taking over the farm from his dad, they would till the ground – meaning plow the soil, make it fluffier, easier for planting corn and soybeans. But one year, in the early 80’s
JEFF BONNAKER: We had multiple floods in the spring one right after the other. And the, and the river would scalp the ground down to, to where we plowed. And the layer of topsoil just washed away.
DAN: six inches that the plow had disturbed just gone.
Gone into Big River, which flows into the Meramec River, which flows into the Mississippi River. Gone.
JEFF: And we did that three times and it was, it was a big, pretty, it pretty much was a mess. We, we, we worked the ground, we replanted and the river scalped it again.
And it was myself, my dad and my grandpa, and we were standing on the bottom and then we were looking at the damage and, and grandpa just turned to dad and it, you know, grandpa was well retired and he was given his, he was given his advice and he just turned dances says, you better figure out how to stop this.
So he did. He stopped tilling the ground, an idea he’d been hearing about. Not tilling meant the soil was no longer disturbed.
NICKI: Your natural soil will have kind of crevices and holes where life is moving in and out.
Nicki Morgan farms with her wife and parents in Eolia, Missouri.
NICKI: The tunnel in which an earthworm moves through is the same tunnel that a root can grow through.
Nicki and her family grow lots of beautiful vegetables, so many different kinds. When they started farming eight years ago, they tilled their soil. But it didn’t make the soil better.
NICKI: We know through immense amount of scientific literature and from our own experience, that tilling is detrimental to the soil. It breaks down the soil structure. So you end up killing a lot of the essential life that helps provide that living soil.
Tilling also releases carbon — trapped in the plants’ roots and the soil — back into the atmosphere.
About half of US farmers say they have stopped tilling — at least on some of their land. One reason that number isn’t higher is because not tilling requires a completely different approach to farming. You have to buy different equipment, change when you do what you do, change your entire outlook on soil management. It’s a lot of work.
Dave Bishop said this thing to me when we were driving one time:
DAVE: You know, once you have an entrenched system, the resistance to change is, unbelievable. It doesn’t have to be rooted in fact, or anything else. It’s just that that’s not the way we do it. End of subject.
When you’re born into farming, like Dave, changing means turning away from what you know. When you’re new to farming, you get to decide what kind of farmer you want to be. I met one farmer like that this summer. Actually, he prefers to call himself an agrarian, not a farmer, because he’s actively experimenting.
Which brings us to Sustainable Farming Practice Number 3: trees.
BEN: One poorly timed flood or drought can sink somebody who’s raising a field of corn or a field of beans. Trees, once they’re established, can weather that a lot better.
Ben Brownlow grows in Rutledge, Missouri. He’s trying to figure out how to sink the most carbon into the ground while raising food.
BEN: If I fall down and get eaten by the pigs tomorrow, the trees are still going to continue the work that, that I started. They are more dedicated, uh, to sequestering carbon than I am. And like there’s something poetic about planting trees, right?
Usually, when we think about animals on a farm, we picture them grazing on an open field, or confined in a cramped building. But Ben is creating an entire ecosystem — with pigs, turkeys, ducks, chickens, goats, cows, and trees. We’re standing in the shade under a bunch of trees. A group of pigs are lounging nearby.
BEN: Pig, pigs! So this is a pig orchard. We have hazelnuts, Asian pears, apples and chestnuts. If you’re trying to sequester as much carbon with a piece of land as possible in our climate – this sort of temperate, North American climate, a 20 percent canopy to 80 percent grass has the most photosynthetic surface.
For those of you who don’t speak plant, that’s 20 percent tree canopy and 80 percent grasses or what-have-you underneath in order to capture and sink the maximum amount of carbon.
BEN: The dappled shade from the honey locust allows more light to come through and so you get better grasses immediately underneath them. They don’t shade out grass.
Ben is constantly trying things and observing, figuring out the most resilient way forward.
BEN: How we can save ourselves from the climate catastrophe that is inevitable. But there’s also like what are the positive things we can do to sink carbon into the soil, and that stuff is exciting for me. It’s overwhelming to think how many people would have to do that at what scale to make a dent, but that keeps from being too depressed to think about those possibilities.
Possibilities, options. Nearly every farmer I spoke with talked about the need for them. It’s not that any one of these ideas is THE answer; it’s that we can’t rely on any one answer, or any one system. To be resilient, we have to cultivate options. And as a farmer, Dave has done this. He’s tried things. He’s changed. His kind of farming epitomizes putting your eggs in multiple baskets.
DAVE: Here are ways that we are trying to assure our food supply remains resilient and that whatever gets thrown at us, whether it’s climate change or other shocks, as in COVID, that we’ll be able to weather these, these storms and we’ll be able to supply food to people.
Because eating is something we really want to keep doing.
Which also means: we need farmers who are willing to take risks, and the average age of a farmer…
Care to guess?
NICKI: 57 or 60. No it’s sixty-
KATIE: 63 or something.
TOM: probably 58 some 59
BETH: Well I’m fifty what? 7. So I would guess the average is getting upper to 60.
Actually, Beth Morgan of HeartBeet Farm: you are the average age of a farmer. 57. Well, 57 and a half. (An average age that keeps getting older.)
Dave turned 71 last year. He’s now quote, retired. I mean, the man is teaching a course on regenerative agriculture at a local college. And he gives all the farm tours to PrairiErth. But he is mostly retired.
See, in 2008, Dave’s oldest son, Hans, decided to leave his corporate job at State Farm and come back to work on the family farm. Dave says it wasn’t until then, 20 years into charting his own divergent farming path that Dave stopped feeling lonely.
EVE: Did it make you happy when your son got into farming?
DAVE: Are you kidding me? I was absolutely thrilled to death to think that, you know, you think I’ve actually done something that he thought was worth a career.
I mean, how can you not be flattered by that? Oh my God yes.
Dave’s farm has continued to evolve. His son Hans and daughter-in-law Katie took over the vegetable operation Dave had been tinkering with and transformed it. Eleven years later, Hans and Katie grow dozens of vegetables, all different varieties, which they sell to 400 CSA members (those are people who pay into the farm upfront and get a box of veggies every week in return). Also, they sell to restaurants, grocery stores, and food coops in Illinois and Missouri.
KATIE: it’s been very quick growth. Faster than I want sometimes for sure.
That’s Katie, Dave’s daughter in law. She says Dave gave her and Hans a huge leg up. Not only did he give them land (which is probably the biggest impediment for young farmers), but that land was already certified organic, and the farm came with a decades-old reputation and connections. Farming is hard and having someone experienced to encourage you–
KATIE: That’s the difference between giving up and persevering is that one person that’s saying: you’re doing a good job. Weeds aren’t important. You know, like that’s the other thing Dave would always say, like, who cares? What your neighbors think? It’s not, it’s not that big of a deal.
Don’t worry about farmers checking you out. Dave gave that advice to his kids, Hans and Katie, but he gives it to others too. Remember John, the organic farmer with the wretched looking fields that embarrassed his dad? The one I ate lunch with — at the Country Aire? Well, Dave was at that lunch too. In fact, Dave is John’s mentor.
John: New Holland has a restaurant now.
Dave: We definitely have to try that some time. Next time we meet…
Dave has mentored and employed so many farmers over the years. And in part because of them, the thing Dave’s wished for, it’s actually happening.
DAVE: And now young people, like I once was at that point are seeing value in it and they’re taking off and doing it. And all of a sudden it seems like maybe there’s hope for us yet.
Around 44 percent of US land is used for agriculture, but only 1.3 percent of Americans are farmers. That’s a small number of people, but they have the potential to make a very BIG impact.
What if MORE of them checked Dave out?
All the sustainable practices you’ve heard about in this episode… they’re pretty rare. And there are reasons farmers aren’t using them.
So what would it take for those farmers to change?
That’s next time on Hot Farm.
This episode was reported and produced by me, Eve Abrams, and edited by Alison MacAdam. Hot Farm was conceived by me with the Food and Environment Reporting Network. A huge thanks to FERN Editor-in-Chief Sam Fromartz, Executive Editor Brent Cunningham, Contributing Editor Elizabeth Royte, and Staff Writer Teresa (Cot-sa-ril-us) Cotsirilos.
Thanks to all the farmers who spent hours upon hours showing me their fields, talking rhapsodically about soil and vegetables – and feeding me. In addition to those you met by name, you also heard Serena Cochrane, Paul Krautman, Tom Martin, David Boehlen, and Katie (Ho-sted-ler) HochStedler. Special thanks to Jenn DeRose, Chris Wimmer, and Adam Davis.
Greg Scahtz composed Hot Farm’s music and performed it, along with Paul Kemnitz and Tony Nozero. Recorded at the House of 1000Hz. Engineering by Andrew Gilchrest.
Funding for this podcast was provided in part by the Walton Family Foundation.
If you’re enjoyed listening to Hot Farm, give us a rating, write a review. It helps others find the show. And thanks so much for listening.