Hot Farm—episode 4 transcript

This is a transcript of episode 4, “The New California.” Listen to Hot Farm wherever you get your podcasts. Narration by Eve Abrams and Travis Lux.

EVE: There’s one day farmer Shawn Peebles will never forget.

PEEBLES: …December 17th, 2009. That’s the day the auction happened at the farm. They hauled all my equipment down here to Forest City and I watched them sell every piece of it. And when I left there, I had nothing.

EVE: Before the farm sale, Shawn was a conventional farmer in Eastern Arkansas. Like many of his neighbors, he mostly grew soybeans for the commodities market – which means people didn’t eat those beans. Instead, they fed livestock or helped make cooking oil or car fuel. Shawn farmed around 7000 acres. He had two combines – and a LOT of debt. He tried to make the numbers work, but each year Shawn was barely scraping by. His farm sale was rock bottom. When it was over:

PEEBLES: I had a thirty five hundred dollar pickup truck, a house worth about $35000 that I still owed them on, and nothing else except for my clothes.

EVE: Shawn rode home from the auction in silence. His dad, his grandpa – they’d all been farmers. Shawn felt like he’d failed. But… he had one last trick up his sleeve. His own personal moonshot: Shawn left the kind of farming he’d been doing and… stepped into the future. What Shawn did, how he farms now – it might turn out to be a kind of blueprint.  Not just for other farmers, but for how we can all keep eating in the age of climate change.  

EVE: From the Food and Environment Reporting Network, I’m Eve Abrams.  Welcome to Hot Farm, a podcast about farmers and food – your food – and what the people who grow that food are doing – or could be doing – to take on the climate emergency.

In our first three episodes, we looked at farmers changing HOW and WHAT they farm. Now we’re going to talk about WHERE they farm. Because one of the main places we grow our food today – California – is running out of water. So the US is going to need a LOT more farmers like Shawn, farmers who will take a chance on something new – FAR away from California.

In this final episode of Hot Farm, we’re diving headlong into the future. We can’t fully TAKE you there – it being the future and all – but we can show you parts of what it could look like. We’ll get back to Shawn Peebles’ farm in Arkansas, but first, we need to learn about what’s happening more than a thousand miles away.

EVE: This is episode four: The New California. Producer Travis Lux takes it from here.

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.

LUX: Alright – walking into the grocery store now.

TRAVIS: Something you MIGHT already know is that a whole bunch of the food we eat comes from California.

LUX: Got some green artichoke: grown in California. Grapefruit: grown in California. Zucchini: Mexico. Romaine lettuce: California.

TRAVIS: Altogether, about a FOURTH of our food comes from California. It’s kind of like the food basket of America.

Most of the produce comes from a specific part of California – the Central Valley – right in the middle of the state. There’s a good reason why.

PHILPOTT: I mean, I think the first thing you have to say about California is that it’s got a Mediterranean climate, which is a rare thing on Earth.

TRAVIS: Tom Philpott is a journalist and author of the alarmingly titled Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It.

PHILPOTT: And so what that basically means, practically, is that it has long hot summers and mild winters.

TRAVIS: It’s warm, it’s dry, it’s sunny. That means you don’t have to worry so much about weeds growing out of control, or pests eating your vegetables, or fruits freezing at night. Simply put: it’s got a good growing climate.

TRAVIS: There are other reasons so much of our food comes from California. Like water. For decades water was plentiful in California. The snow would melt in the Sierra Nevada mountains, rivers would fill, and farmers could tap into those rivers to water their crops. But…..

PHILPOTT: The snowpack that goes into the Sierra Nevada mountains has declined over the past 30 or 40 years, demonstrably. And you know, basically when we talk about a drought in California, what we’re talking about is how much snow landed on the Sierra Nevada.

TRAVIS: In other words – California’s climate isn’t doing so hot. Or maybe another way of putting it is that it’s doing TOO hot.

MODERN NEWSREEL: Tonight, firefighters are finally gaining ground on massive wildfires burning in California…despite all the fires, many agricultural products still need to be harvested right now…one hundred percent of California is now in a drought, and if you could believe it, it could get even worse.

TRAVIS: California’s water has gotten SO SCARCE and SO VALUABLE, that some farmers have even started selling their water to other farmers, rather than using it to grow food.

So what happens when the place that grows so much of the food we eat…can’t anymore? Julia Kurnik, with the World Wildlife Fund, has been thinking about this. Julia says our current system is unsustainable.

KURNIK: We expect farmers to shift…out of California. It’s not that it’ll stop being an agricultural state altogether, but some farming will need to shift.

TRAVIS: Julia says our dependence on California is ALREADY shifting. Farmers are buying up land in places like the Dakotas and Montana. Sensitive ecosystems that haven’t historically been used for agriculture – and turning it into farmland. a process known as land conversion. This is NOT the shift Julia wants to see.

KURNIK: And that would bring a really large environmental footprint. So we do want to avoid that.

TRAVIS: Julia has a solution – a big idea. She published a report for the World Wildlife Fund called: The Next California. We’ll include a link in the show notes.

Here’s the gist:

We need to utilize EXISTING farmland – outside of California – for growing food. Convince farmers in other places to grow less of the corn and soybeans we don’t directly eat, and more of the fruits and veggies we actually eat for dinner. The region she’s eyeing? is the mid-Mississippi Delta – where Shawn Peebles lives – an area that includes parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and Mississippi. Why the mid-Delta?

KURNIK: I think it has a lot of assets across the region…the most immediate ones that jump out are that it is a farming region. So it has very fertile soils. It has plenty of water…so it won’t be a strain to water plants and to let them grow and to irrigate them.

TRAVIS: Now – it’s important to note that you can’t grow EVERYTHING in the mid-Delta. It’s got a different climate. It’s more humid than California. And – it’s got colder winters. Crops needing California’s dry, Mediterranean climate won’t grow well in the Delta – so almonds and avocados are a no-go. But Julia Kurnik says plenty of California’s crops will do great in the mid-Delta.

KURNIK [00:38:39] Most types of berries: strawberries…blackberries all grow well in the region. what are called tree fruits: so things like peaches would do very well.

TRAVIS: Also: Tomatoes. Peppers. All kinds of things. Point is — there’s a lot of potential in this idea.

Here’s another important point: the mid-Delta is NOT IMMUNE to climate change. In California, climate change is drying things out. In the Mid-Delta climate change is making things HOTTER and WETTER. And these changes demand a response. 

MATLOCK: ..As the weather patterns change that means we have to adapt to those changes and that means moving certain things from certain areas to other areas. It’s not complicated at conceptual level.

TRAVIS: Marty Matlock is a senior advisor at the US Department of Agriculture – the USDA. He pretty much agrees with Julia: where we grow our food… needs to shift. And: expand.

MATLOCK: …Here’s the thing. We don’t need the same amount of food next year. Fruits and vegetables, we need more. So I wouldn’t call it the next California…I would say…where is our next garden? California, South Texas, Florida. They’re our current garden. Where are we going to expand our garden?

TRAVIS: Maybe… the mid-Delta..

TRAVIS: For one thing, land there is cheaper than many other areas of the country.

Also: it’s centrally located in the country. So for a lot of people, our fruits and veggies won’t have to travel as far; maybe they’ll even taste a little better when you bite into them. A little fresher.

Plus, when food comes from multiple places the supply chain is stronger.

KURNIK: It’s the same as any other business principle. If you can source from two areas, that’s more secure than if you’re putting all your eggs in one basket and sourcing from one area.

MATLOCK: …if we have a disruption in one place, we do not lose all of our capacity in others. This is an issue of national well-being.

TRAVIS: National Well being. When people can’t eat – that can lead to bigtime political problems. Think about the French Revolution, the Arab Spring. Food insecurity has played a huge role in historical events. Even VIOLENT ones. Climate change, Marty says, will continue to disrupt our food system.

MATLOCK: …That’s our future. That’s those are the challenges that are and that that will increase in intensity and frequency. So what we have to do now is prepare for that future.

TRAVIS: For Marty and the USDA – preparation means strengthening the supply chain. Think about it this way. Right now we have a system that is super efficient – when it works. It’s really good at finding the fastest, cheapest way to put food on our tables.

MATLOCK: …And that’s great. That’s stringing that piano string really tight, and it’s great until that piano string breaks…

TRAVIS: Which happened with meat and poultry at the beginning of the pandemic. Remember those shortages?

MATLOCK: So what we need are lots of strings on that piano, and that’s what we’re doing, and we’re stringing the piano so that…you won’t go hungry. You won’t know what hunger is.

TRAVIS: Marty’s part of a new Federal initiative to make the food system more resilient. It’s an effort motivated, in part, by climate change. Marty couldn’t give many specifics, because the USDA is still putting the programs together. But he says the first strings of the piano will strengthen the meat and poultry supply chain. After that, the USDA will turn to fruits and veggies.

But making a change of this magnitude is gonna take a LOT of work. You can’t just cut and paste a whole food system overnight. You need infrastructure, labor, refrigerated storage, and most importantly, farmers.

In order to make the mid-Delta anything like today’s California, we need a LOT OF farmers to grow vegetables. This is a STRUCTURAL problem that demands STRUCTURAL solutions.

The WWF report reaches the same conclusions. There are big hurdles Delta farmers are facing, and they need help.

But in order to even see what those hurdles are and what their solutions could be – we need to zoom in on one farmer who is already navigating them. Shawn Peebles, who we met earlier. Because it’s in Shawn’s problem-solving that you can almost see him drawing up a blueprint for an agricultural revolution in the mid-Delta.

TRAVIS: We left Shawn after the farm sale where he’d sold off every piece of his farm equipment. He was broke. Depressed. But he had one more idea, his moonshot. In order to keep farming, Shawn moved toward A NEW IDEA – something completely different from the farmers all around him. He shifted away from commodity crops – the corn and soybeans people don’t eat, and started growing SPECIALTY crops – fruits and vegetables – food people actually eat.

It didn’t happen all at once. But it all started the day he ran into a family friend at the local farm supply store. A 75 year old farmer named Jody Taylor.

PEEBLES: He had an organic farm, and he convinced me that that was the future…

PEEBLES: And he had a little piece of paper in his pocket … and he told me that he showed me what organic soybean prices were, what organic corn prices were, things like that. And they were double what I was getting conventionally.

TRAVIS: Shawn’s like — wow. OKAY. Maybe this is my way out of debt. So he rented some land from Jody and started growing 200 acres of organic soybeans.

PEEBLES: .. So I went from 7000 conventionally to 200 organically, only myself as an employee. I made more money that year and I’d made my entire life. And I said, there’s something to this.

TRAVIS: Those 200 acres of organic soybeans: that was Shawn’s first big pivot: from farming CONVENTIONAL commodities to ORGANIC commodities.

His next pivot I wanted to see for myself. So I drove up the Mississippi from New Orleans, where I live, to meet Shawn outside of Augusta, Arkansas.

AMBI: car door shuts

LUX: Hello?

SECRETARY: Hi!

LUX: Hey.

SECRETARY: If you’ll just sign in…right there.

TRAVIS: Shawn’s base of operations — his office, some farm equipment – are in a former nail factory that closed down in the 90’s. Also there: about SIX MILLION POUNDS of FRESHLY DUG UP SWEET POTATOES – stacked in crates – two stories high. Each crate is labeled with a color-coded system of tags, depending on where it’s being sold.

PEEBLES: everything that has a blue tag goes directly to a grocery store.

TRAVIS: Around the corner: the jumbos.

PEEBLES: French fries! Everything goes for french fries. Or potato chips. One of the two. Something you’re gonna slice or dice.

TRAVIS: Some slices end up on the other side of the world. 

PEEBLES: … we have a Japanese certification here on the farm…everything that pretty much goes to Costco’s winds up as a sweet potato chip in Japan.

TRAVIS: This time of year — early fall — Shawn’s got about 60 employees working as fast as they can to pluck and sort these sweet potatoes. By the time this warehouse is empty, Shawn estimates those spuds will have sold for a couple million dollars.

This is Shawn’s SECOND big pivot: growing vegetables. Lots and lots of them.

PEEBLES: …We do edamame. Sweet potatoes, green beans, black eyed peas, pretty much anything any major processor wants in organic volumes.

TRAVIS: The reason Shawn started growing vegetables? Once again – MONEY. A big company called Seneca foods found out he had organic land, and asked him to grow organic vegetables for them. Shawn saw it as a chance to specialize his business and make more money – so he said yes. And now, several years later – he still grows SOME commodity crops, but vegetables are his main focus. He says he’ll grow whatever he can in order to keep farming.

PEEBLES:]…yeah yeah there’s nothing that’s off the table. There might be a few things. We’ve struggled for years for eggplant because of a particular insect pressure. But no, there’s nothing there that you couldn’t produce in this area.

TRAVIS: He makes it sound easy, but swapping out one crop for another isn’t simple. After all –  it took decades to build California’s farming industry. So to set those things up in an entirely NEW region?

Marty Matlock with the USDA says it takes some complicated menu planning. 

MATLOCK: It’s not easy to decide: “All right. We’re just going to grow lettuce…and we’re going to move it from the Central Valley of California to pick a spot.”

TRAVIS: Every crop needs different equipment, different kinds of labor, different ways of being stored and transported. Roads and canals that make growing and shipping possible. All things you can’t just pick up and plop down somewhere new. There’s a lot more to getting food to people than just growing and picking crops.

MATLOCK: …Where are you going to take them to get them sorted, graded, packaged, processed for distribution?…That infrastructure is as important as the land and water and labor…without that infrastructure investment, we are not going to have production capacity because we can’t get the crops from the field to the consumer.

TRAVIS: So if the mid-Delta is going to become a big new garden – a place where America’s food comes from – we need a lot of infrastructure – on a big scale – like in California.

Whether that’s paid for by big companies, the federal government, or some combination – Shawn Peebles says: to get more people farming vegetables, like him…

PEEBLES: …that’s what it’s going to take. It’s gonna take a hundred million dollar investment from whatever corporation wants to come in here and put it. Because it’s certainly not the climate: we can produce these crops because we’re doing them now. It’s not a lack of water: we have the best water source in the United States in this area. There’s no reason why it’s not here other than there’s not that market.

LUX: it’s like, it’s like if you build it, they will come?

PEEBLES: Just like the “field of dreams,” you know? Yeah. …you walk out here and you build a hundred million dollar processing plant to process green beans or whatever, you’re going to have green bean producers. There’s no question

TRAVIS: But building that field of dreams isn’t easy. Farmers won’t grow GREEN BEANS if they don’t have someone to buy it. And companies won’t build new GREEN BEAN infrastructure unless farmers will grow these GREEN BEANS. It’s a classic chicken-or-egg situation. But in this case, it’s not a cute riddle – figuring out the infrastructure to support vegetable farming is a pressing need for our future eating.

To emphasize just how hard this can be – here’s a little case study about growing a new crop in Arkansas.

TRAVIS: It involves a man named Kelly Cartwright, who learned just how important trust and infrastructure are to farmers.

CARTWRIGHT: you have to be solid in what you have to present to the farmers because they can smell a scam a mile away.

TRAVIS: Kelly is the executive director of the Natural Soybean and Grain Alliance – and his background is in small business development and farming. Back in 2010, farmers in central Arkansas were struggling. Kelly and some researchers at the University of Arkansas thought growing something new could make farmers more money.

They settled on edamame. Those edible little soybeans you might find on the menu at a Japanese restaurant.

TRAVIS: Kelly and his team did some research, got some grants. They thought farmers would be thrilled about the idea. Not so much.

CARTWRIGHT: …when we first presented this to a group of farmers and extension agents, things like that, the reaction wasn’t very good.

TRAVIS: Farmers were suspicious. Why should they take a chance on this new thing they’d never heard of? Kelly needed to convince farmers that this plan would work – and would make them money. He had detailed conversations with farmers about how to handle insects and weeds. His team did physical demonstrations in the field for farmers. But the thing that sold them? Infrastructure. A businessman started building an edamame processing facility in the town of Mulberry, Arkansas.

CARTWRIGHT: all of a sudden is like, OK, here’s somebody is getting ready to put a building up …That was sort of a stamp of seriousness for these farmers like, OK, this is not some fly-by-night thing they’re going to put up, you know, a multimillion-dollar facility.

TRAVIS: Less than a year later, Arkansas harvested its first edamame crop – proving that it IS possible to convince farmers to grow vegetables. But it took a TON of work: conversations, demonstrations, more conversations, and a real-life processing facility. all for a crop which is almost identical to the commodity soybeans farmers were already growing.

TRAVIS: As a vegetable farmer, swimming in a sea of those commodities, Shawn Peebles faced more hurdles than just infrastructure. Let’s get back to Shawn and another barrier

standing in his way: MONEY.

It takes a LOT of money to run a farm. There’s land and equipment and labor, of course. But there are other things you might not know about unless you’ve tried to run a vegetable farm. Like how to store and move your crops around once they’ve been harvested. You can’t just toss fresh vegetables in a big grain elevator and call it a day.

PEEBLES:…you talk about some of the other hurdles. There’s so many in the vegetable business because what are you going to put your product in? Whether it be a squash or cucumber.

TRAVIS: Shawn moves and stores his sweet potatoes in wooden crates. He points to a wall of them – waiting for more product from the fields. Each one is huge – capable of holding one-thousand pounds. They’re also expensive.

PEEBLES: It would be a real challenge for a guy to walk into a bank and say, I need $600,000 just for the wooden crates to hold my crop. Cause that’s what we have here is about $600,000 worth of them. They’re not gonna loan you any money on a wooden crate.

TRAVIS: Shawn says these crates are just one example of how local banks don’t know how to finance vegetable farmers. For decades, they’ve only financed COMMODITY FARMS, and the whole farm-financing system is set up to handle commodity farming. So when Shawn walks into a bank and asks for a loan to grow five hundred acres of a vegetable they’ve never heard of..?

PEEBLES: and they look at you and, “well, what’s edamame?”

TRAVIS: Shawn has to start at the VERY BEGINNING. He has to explain every detail and REALLY break down the numbers….

PEEBLES: They have no idea whether that’s an accurate number or not. And most of the time they walk away from the loan because they just don’t understand it.

TRAVIS: SHAWN’S CREATED A WORKAROUND. One that mid-Delta vegetable farmers of the future might be able to follow: he gets companies to commit to buying a certain amount of his crops before putting anything in the ground.

PEEBLES: …everything that we produce on this farm is pre-contracted. There’s a home for it all. Right now, Eden Foods in Minnesota, we grow Black Eyed Peas for them. We do edamame for AVS…We do sweet potatoes for Matthew’s farm in Wynne and those wind up in Kroger’s and Wal-Marts – they market ‘em all over.

TRAVIS: Shawn requires a down payment from these companies to pay for the initial planting costs, and then gets the rest of the money when the crops are harvested. In this way, he’s basically using food companies to do what a BANK would have done.

This is the kind of approach to financing that other mid-Delta farmers getting into vegetables could copy. At least until banks better understand how vegetables are grown.

Now let’s talk about one more hurdle: labor.

Commodities – like corn and soy – can be harvested with one guy.

PEEBLES: …You got a lot of people in the Delta who are farming 20,000 acres today that do it all from a truck seat. They’re just making phone calls. This is different.

TRAVIS: Specialty crops – vegetables – are much more labor-intensive. You need people.

PEEBLES: …you need chopping crews. You need harvest crews. Where to house them? How do I get them?

TRAVIS: Almost all of Shawn’s employees are temporary farmworkers who work full-time during the growing season. They’re people who not only make Shawn’s farm run, but who contribute to the local community, AND the local economy.

PEEBLES: We farm 7000 acres…I have 60 full time employees, thirteen tractors, untold amounts of equipment because of the labor intensiveness of the crops that we produce. So we feel like…organic production –  and vegetable production –  is an opportunity for the delta to repopulate.

TRAVIS: Like so many rural places in America, the population of the mid-Delta has declined in recent decades. Shawn thinks vegetable farming could start reversing that trend. Shawn employs so many people that he’s turned an old hospital into a kind of dorm for his workers to live in.

Because Shawn’s operation has gotten really, really big. Consider what it takes to harvest those sweet potatoes, for example. For every tractor moving through the field there are about 15 people sorting the crop as it comes out of the ground. Multiple teams work simultaneously, around the clock. Two acres of sweet potatoes fills an 18-wheeler.

PEEBLES: So we got 200 truck loads have to come in here

LUX: So it’s like a whole whole caravan…

PEEBLES: yeah we look like a small city running out there and we’re 24 hours a day. So at night we just glow.

TRAVIS: Shawn’s operation is like a California vegetable farm. But reality check: he’s one guy with one farm. For the entire Delta REGION to glow we need a LOT of Shawns.

Shawn’s a trailblazer – forging a new path. But he’s also kind of reclaiming an OLD path. Because when Shawn’s dad was first farming, mid-Delta farmers used to raise all different kinds of vegetables. In part, because there were companies to handle those crops.

PEEBLES: …if you go back 40 years ago, you had produce companies all over the delta. Birdseye was here. They were in Searcy … We had another one, Bush Brothers – Bush Baked Beans – they were in Blytheville. We were all growing crops for them at those times, so it was very diversified. Plus, every farmer raised watermelons in this area. It was it was normal that if you were in farming, you had at least 100 acres melons.

TRAVIS: The shift away from vegetables – and toward commodity crops – took place throughout the 1970’s and 80’s. There are lots of reasons for that, including federal farm policies that encourage commodity crop farming. Remember Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s directive to plant fencerow to fencerow?

In any case – it makes you think – if the Delta has changed before, maybe it can change again.  If other farmers follow Shawn’s blueprint – if companies and the government help farmers do so – then maybe we can come somewhere close to making this vision of a new garden into reality.

TRAVIS: Before working on this story, I never really considered if my local grocery store would have food in the future. I never worried if I’d walk into the produce section and – poof – no apples. But without making major changes to the food system, that seems like a possibility.

I ran this by Marty Matlock, with the USDA.

LUX: I mean what we’re talking about here is – are we gonna be able to eat in the future, essentially… I’m leaving the reporting on this episode feeling like kind of like, holy shit, we got to really figure this out, or there could be big trouble…And I’m wondering if you think that’s too dramatic…?

MATLOCK: It’s not too dramatic.

MATLOCK: It’s been about a hundred years…since Americans writ large knew hunger. We did know hunger. My grandparents knew hunger…So you see, we forget. We forget that we’re vulnerable to these things.

TRAVIS: You know, Eve, I was really hoping Marty would give me a different answer. I wanted him to say I was being too dramatic.

EVE: Instead… he was pretty blunt about what the stakes are.

You know, in every episode of Hot Farm, we’ve talked about solutions to these BIG problems. Growing cover crops and perennial crops and more vegetables we eat, and trees. Building resilient supply chains and finding common ground with farmers. Solutions that – ideally – could prevent a climate change-food-apocalypse.

What if consumers demanded food – grown in ways that heal our climate?

TRAVIS: Exactly. And you know – it’s not a black or white. It’s not like we have to choose between either the current system or no system. We can create an entirely new system.

And look – I don’t want to end this story on a positive note just for the sake of ending on a positive note – but I DO think it’s helpful to look at overwhelming problems from different angles. Tom Philpott – the journalist from the beginning of the story – he does a good job of this.

PHILPOTT: It is really easy these days to fall into climate despair. But there are also problems that are really interesting to dig into to solving…..the future doesn’t have to be one of scarcity and sort of, you know, scrapping over declining resources. It could be – with the right kinds of policy changes – a future of abundance and a future of regional variability, which could be really nice.

That’s it for Hot Farm.

This episode was reported and produced by Travis Lux and edited by me, with additional editing help from Alison MacAdam. Research and additional reporting for this episode by Boyce Upholt. Hot Farm was conceived by me, Eve Abrams, 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. Special thanks to Ed Swaim at the Bayou Meto (MEE-tuh) Water Management District.

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 enjoyed listening to Hot Farm, give us a rating, write a review.  It helps others find the show. And thanks for listening.