335 Robert Paarlberg
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Kevin Folta: [00:00:00] Hello everybody. And welcome to this. Week's talking biotech podcast. This week's podcast. We're going to talk about a new book that was recently released, resetting the table by Dr. Robert Powell, Berg, and this book dives into the question of how do we get where we got with the current food system.

Explores a lot of the different facets and a lot of the different concepts about where it is, where it's going, where it came from. And, uh really has some, I really believe uplifting ideas with respect towards how technology will influence food in the future. So welcome to the podcast Dr. 

Robert Paarlberg: And it's great to be talking to you.

Kevin Folta: I'm really glad to have you on, 

, my history with re your work goes back a ways, , somebody who's always been interested in biotechnology and how that connects with people, especially those in the developing world. I was a big fan of star for science and found that to really be reinforcing a lot of what I understood and a lot of what I was feeling.

And I, I really [00:01:00] believe that about this book too. I really found this to fit well. In a crowded bookshelf of books available on w on the current food system and, and, and how that, how that behaves. So I guess really the big question to start out with, could you just start with your background and your connection to agriculture and.

Robert Paarlberg: Yes. My dad grew up on a small family farm in lake county, Indiana. And I worked on that farm when I was a kid growing up in the summertimes and learned to enjoy that my dad went on to be. An agricultural economist and a top government official and USDA. And I admired him. So I thought, well, I could, I could do something similar.

I, I achieved separation by studying political science instead of agricultural economy. But it turns out that was an advantage because the field of food and agriculture policy tends to be dominated by agricultural economists [00:02:00] or very few political scientists who, who invest enough to be able to talk to the economists.

When I did that, I learned I had. A niche advantage when they wanted to include a political scientist in a project or in a study or on a panel, I became a sort of a go-to person and I ended up working internationally a lot with. International food policy, research Institute, USA ID that bill and Melinda gates foundation.

And that was probably the most rewarding part of the career that I managed to carve out by my dad also did a lot of international work. And so once again, I was following in his footsteps 

Kevin Folta: and so much of the book really has this comparison of. The way we do things now at scale to produce large amounts of food through agriculture and kind of the more boutique niche ideas that some folks have a spouse.

And in the beginning of the book, you really talk about industrial farming. Okay. What does this really mean? We [00:03:00] hear this all the time factory farming. So why do, why does industrial farming take on a negative connotation when really industrial production of I-phones is considered to be a real boom? 

Robert Paarlberg: Yeah, that's a great question.

Well, I, I live in new England and most of the students that I've taught are from new England and most of them have an imaginary vision. Of what agriculture can be. It's a vision that is derived from what farming is like in new England, where most of the farms are very tiny and many are, are part-time organic CSA farms only significant locally and seasonally.

And most of my student. Like these kinds of farms and they wish that the rest of agriculture could look like that. And it's always a bit of a disappointment when I tell them that these farms don't produce very much food. If you look at all the farms in new England together, and that's in [00:04:00] Rhode Island, Connecticut.

Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, the total sales of all of those farms, large and small equal only about 1% of all farm sales in the United States. When, when my students learned that they, they pull back a minute and say, Hey, wait a minute. Maybe, maybe I need to broaden my perspective a little bit.

Unfortunately, very few have firsthand. Encounter with a real commercial agriculture in the United States, which tends to be located in, in fly over country rather than in Boston, New York and the, and the bay area. Yeah, it's 

Kevin Folta: actually really interesting. I, I my wife has a farmer, small farm and, and we do mostly farmer's markets, consumer director, market direct, and you know, it's amazingly small operation.

That's incredibly labor intensive. And the fun part about this for us is. I use this as an opportunity to connect people with how difficult it is to do this and how difficult it is to produce what we produce every week, which is actually quite a bit. But when I [00:05:00] say we, I mean, she show up the, lug it out of the truck on Saturday morning, but she's a one person operation and can't even afford to have labor.

And at the end of the day probably makes a minimum wage. If that, but it's her passion. And when it is great to be able to bring people out to the farm and show them, you know, this is what it, this is what it takes to make those carrots. And, and that's why they're four bucks rather than a dollar 50 in the grocery store.

And so you can use these opportunities to be real, real eye-openers, but people really do have a warped idea of, of what a farmer. 

Robert Paarlberg: Yeah. And a lot of people in California and maybe in Florida have a warped idea of what farming would look like in new England and December, January, and February. 

Kevin Folta: Yeah, exactly.

I know a lot of folks who I I've been scolded by people in Hawaii. Who've said, you know, I, I feed up my family and I do it all on our own land. And I said, well, what do you do for a [00:06:00] job? He said, well, I feed my family on the farm, you know, and, and he. 12 months out of the year, were people in Minnesota, you don't have that same kind of window or Canada.

So, so I think a lot of the folks who have major pronouncements about how we should farm don't necessarily think about how the limitations that others have with respect to climate and soil and everything else. 

Robert Paarlberg: If you look at CSA farms in the United States in order to, to break even the most, a CSA farm manager, Have to pay themselves nothing.

Yeah. It's a lot of CSA farms start up and a lot of them drop out. It's, there's a huge churn there driven by hope and idealism. And there's a real reward and connections with local communities are wonderful, but you have to realize you're not getting into. Commercially promising way of life. Well, that 

Kevin Folta: really was very clear when you talk about a couple of different [00:07:00] farms in new England, in the book in contrast CSA farms, I guess the one thing that's that was particularly apparent is that it's kind of impossible to do this, unless you have somebody in the family who can afford health insurance through their job or something like that.

And that is that really the most common structure for a CSA type. 

Robert Paarlberg: Yeah. And when you saw it and think about it most farms now in the United States get a majority of their income from off. One reason it's that way is that our definition of what constitutes a farm is so lenient, you only have to have a thousand dollars in annual sales to be, to be counted as an official farm.

And so a lot of tiny little part-time hobby farms, retirement farms are counted as farms and nearly all of their income comes from retirement assets or, or investment assets. And. Or a job off the farm by the spouse, 

Kevin Folta: or potentially the value of the land and hoping for its future value to be your [00:08:00] nest egg.

Right. I mean, that's a big one in Florida. Absolutely. And so a lot of this discusses, those kinds of ideas about the idealism around the small family farm and what it really looks like. But the other part of this is. How farms look through time. And when people say they want to get back to the good old days where they really good old days for farming.

Robert Paarlberg: Well, the back a a hundred years ago, household income for farmers was only two-thirds as high as four non-farmers and non-farmers back then didn't have a whole lot of money. The. The physical toil was, was punishing. You could make it probably only by enlisting your children, which you usually try to have in large numbers for this purpose in in hard labor.

From the time they got up until if they went to [00:09:00] school at the time they got back from school and they'd be expected to leave school early in order to help out on the farm. It was, and it was very difficult of course, for. For women who were generally not given a leadership role in managing the farm itself, even though they worked extremely hard on not just raising the children and preparing meals, but doing chores around the barnyard, it was, it was it was endless toil.

And so it's no surprise to me that these farms. As soon as people could make more money in town, as soon as the kids could stay in school, graduate, get a job in town, in a factory, maybe making union wages with with a contract and some time off, as soon as they had a chance to do that. They did, and I don't fault I don't fault people for making that training.

Kevin Folta: And that really folds into my next question about what constitutes a family [00:10:00] farm. And have we seen an expansion of what a family farm is and how big it gets? 

Robert Paarlberg: Well, 95% of all farms or more, some people say it's as high as 98% of all farms in the United States are family owned. And that means maybe extended family members are on the board of the corporation, but.

These are our family enterprises. And many of them are of course passed down from, from generation to generation, with the children who want to stick with the business inheriting the business from from the retiring parent. And it's usually parents. It's usually it's most successful commercial farms in the United today in the United States today are.

Very close partnerships between between spouses. One of whom will, will, may manage the operation and the other may keep the books and make sure that all the labor standards are met and do the [00:11:00] taxes. It's it is, it's a teamwork operation, usually within very tight family. 

Kevin Folta: Yeah, I guess the other big question on that is as people leave farming in that land space is available.

Is that really serving as an incentive for existing farms to expand their operations and really use enabling technology to be able to handle it? 

Robert Paarlberg: Well, yes and no. In my way of thinking. That's one of the advantages of the, the large farm model that dominates agricultural production in the United States.

If you have, if you have enough acres, you can, if then you'll be well enough capitalized to afford the purchase of the very best equipment out there, including. Including variable rates GPS steered, smart technology that will save you costs on input on inputs and also [00:12:00] protect the environment from over application of some inputs runoff and, and pollution off the farm.

It's the So-called industrial farming model that isn't popular with my students is it performs much better for the environment and for the income of the farmers and the small local diversified organic farm alternative. 

Kevin Folta: That's a really good transition because your book also does cover organic farming and aspects of agroecology, which to many say we could feed the world if we just used organic farming.

So how does the. Argument breakdown. When we start to say that natural is better than synthetic in all cases 

Robert Paarlberg: well, I don't, I don't buy the, the distinction between natural and synthetic is itself a little bit synthetic when you think about it. But organic farming defines itself around that distinction.

Nitrogen [00:13:00] that is found in animal manure is considered to be natural and usable and appropriate for organic production, but exactly the same element in the periodical table nitrogen that is synthesized from the atmosphere in a factory that nitrogen is somehow forbidden for use in organic farming.

I think that's an arbitrary and an unhealthy. Distinction and it hasn't helped organic farming. Synthetic nitrogen is probably the single most important scientific breakthrough in agriculture in the last 120 years. And if organic farmers can't use it at all and that's it, they're not just trying to reduce wasteful.

Use of nitrogen is a zero. Tolerance approach to synthetic nitrogen fertilizer since they can't use it at all. Organic crop yields tend to be much lower than conventional crop yields. And that means that. Organic produce costs 54% more on average than [00:14:00] conventional produce. And so it can only reach a niche market that is willing to pay that much more.

Okay. 

Kevin Folta: And that's a really important point. I know that they actually kind of, here's a kind of a funny story before I get to my next question is we sell at the market and people will always say, is this organic. And I'll say, let me tell you about that. Cause we're conventional farmers all the way and I'll say, well, our stuff is more organic because we use synthetic fertilizer and the kind of raise an eyebrow because they don't even think about fertilizer when they think organic, they're thinking of pesticides and things.

And they'll say, tell me more. And I'll say, well, we get our soil tests. And we know what's missing. Then we have a fertilizer that's formulated, especially for that soil, so that we're just replacing what each crop needs. And we're not putting on extra. Like if we were to be organic and just put on a saturating amount of everything, whatever runs through into the groundwater runs into the groundwater, we give a very specific amount [00:15:00] and they always are surprised and we, it never turns away a single.

That they really just start to see the nuance that if that this isn't just a halo, that organic has it, that there are actual reasons why you may want to use synthetics to actually be more environmentally conscious. 

Robert Paarlberg: Yeah. You know in writing my book, I had long conversations with a local CSA farm manager in Carlisle, Massachusetts, and he was he's organic.

And I asked him if he ever wished that the organic standard hadn't been written only around pesticides, not around synthetic fertilizers that would open up many more production options that would be trusted by consumers. And that would give him easier. Ways to to produce his crops.

And did he want the organic standard to change? And he sort of agreed with all that, but he still didn't want the organic standard to change. And [00:16:00] who knows, but when I talked to people about organic, you're exactly right. They assume that means, oh, there's no pesticides. It, it never. Courage to them that the standard was created long before we had synthetic pesticides.

It was created around synthetic nitrogen, making it a, to my mind hopelessly hopelessly out of date. 

Kevin Folta: Well, could you, you touch on that idea that organic farming uses pesticides. 

Robert Paarlberg: Well, yes, as long as they're naturally occurring biocides, you can, you can use them like copper sulfate or or a soil bacterium back Cylus, thuringiensis these things kill insects, but since you find them in nature, they're they're okay for.

Organic and they're not completely harmless. Well, BT is pretty harmless, but a copper sulfate is not completely harmless to to, to non target species. 

Kevin Folta: Yeah, one important point about copper sulfate is that when you have organic [00:17:00] packinghouses that obviously tomatoes, you actually have, the runoff is captured and treated as toxic waste because there's so much copper there in the concentration that comes from the the effluent and that's in some cases, not all of course, but just for context, when we start talking about other types of farming strategies, a lot of folks claim to be biodynamic.

And can you give us a little bit of a primmer on Rudolf Steiner and what biodynamic actually means? And does it work? 

Robert Paarlberg: Rudolph Steiner was an Austrian philosopher. He was originally a Gerta scholar, but he discovered his true genius was in philosophy. He had a philosophy education. He had a philosophy of agriculture and he he built his agricultural philosophy.

Around the belief that crops could only be properly grown if they were infused with [00:18:00] celestial powers that came from the moon or Saturn or the sun. And so he, he paid close attention to. To the movement of celestial bodies and he insisted on, on fertilizing his crops with special preparations that included things like camomile blossoms that were tacked into.

A cow's horn and then buried in the ground. He thought the cow's horn would be the ideal device for capturing these celestial radiations and getting them into the preparations that he would use as, as fertilizer. He had a wide following, particularly in Austria and in Germany, in the 1920s and in, in the 1930s, there's there's of course no good science in this at all.

He was, he was. What used to be called a vitalist vitalists believed that there were two completely separate chemical worlds out there. [00:19:00] The chemistry of living things and the chemistry of things that were not living. And you couldn't nurture living things with anything except.

Chemicals that came from living things like animal manure or like, or like crops that would be turned onto the ground. It was, it was a theory of chemistry. That was, it was disproved in the laboratory almost 200 years ago. But he, he found that it, that there were people out there who wanted to believe that and were willing to, to follow his lead and biodynamic farming still exists.

There's. There, there are meetings abide on biodynamic farmers in the United States. I once tour to buy a biodynamic dynamic wine Operation in, in Sonoma, in California. And so it's, it's still around. And, and yet it was supplanted very quickly by those who developed what came to be called organic farm.

But the [00:20:00] idea is the same. You can't use any synthetic chemicals. 

Kevin Folta: Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. There's still our farms at the farmer's market that claim to be bio info or bioinformatic biodynamic, and one's a legit science. And I even asked you even asked the folks on the farm. It's like, well, do you do the cow horn thing?

And they looked at me like, what do you mean? So I also think it's become a brand that people relate to some sort of specialized version of organic farming that they don't really know what it means. No, it means something and same thing with agroecology. Now we're seeing more and more of a push for agri ecological practices.

People saying that we can feed the world with agroecology. What the heck is agroecology 

Robert Paarlberg: it's mostly a pushback against the, the green revolution, which swept through Latin America and Asia in the 1960s and in the 1970s. And those who didn't like. Applications of what they called. Reductionist science, reductionist, Western [00:21:00] science to food production imagined that instead of trying to shape nature with external inputs, you should imitate nature and you should notice the way plants and animals coexist together in nature.

And you should produce food. By leveraging those same kinds of connections with very few inputs from off of the farm. So you don't bring in a synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, or you recycle animal waste. You stay away from monocropping you, you intercrop. So you have multiple different crop species in the same field.

It's gardening, it's really hand gardening. And, and so it has a romantic appeal. But it it's much too labor intensive to be of interest, to, to farmers who want to improve their, their circumstances. And so it's usually usually promoted by non-governmental organizations from advanced industries.

Countries who get grants from foundations or [00:22:00] international organizations to to create demonstration projects in Africa or in Latin America and make great claims for yield gains they'll they'll pay local laborers to construct these projects and to publicize the results, but actual farmers aren't, aren't so interested in all of that hand labor, if they're given access to a little nitrogen fertilizer, And a rototiller and improved seeds.

There they'll go with that. They're not gonna, they're not gonna hang around a building terraces and, and doing all of the, all of the pruning, all carrying in all of the, the maneuvers. It's it's so laborious that farmers don't want to do it if they don't have to. 

Kevin Folta: Yeah. That's the trick with farming.

And as we get to, as we get to the end, it's really all about how you can streamline and some of the ways technology helps us to streamline. So we're speaking with Dr. Robert Powell, Berg. [00:23:00] He's a professor emeritus of political science in the department of political science at Wesley college, but also an associate of the sustainability program at the Harvard Kennedy school.

This. Collaboratives talking biotech podcast and we'll be back in just a minute. And now we're back on collaborative talking biotech podcast. We're speaking with Dr. Robert Powell Berg. And we're speaking about his new book resetting the table, which is a real look at a cross section of issues in the food system.

And it covers everything from big farms, small farms restaurants, and. It starts to get into issues of modern farming. So let's start there with really the beginning of what was modern farming practices, beginning at the green revolution. And for those who don't know what that is, what was the green revolution and how important was it to countries that had 

Robert Paarlberg: food insecure?

The green revolution was an introduction of new farming technologies, including seeds and fertilizers into [00:24:00] tropical countries, particularly in south Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America, beginning in the 1960s and the 1970s, the new seeds were developed by scientists working for the Rockefeller foundation primarily in, in Mexico and in the Philippines.

And these new seeds were distinctive because. They were, they weren't GMOs. They were developed using conventional breeding, but they were bred to be stunted and, and short, that meant they could carry a much heavier head of grain without falling over. And they invested more of their energy. Into the growth of the grain then in the growth of the leaves and the stem and these these new seeds doubled yields.

If, if, if used properly with with fertilizer, sometimes they more than double [00:25:00] deals. And when they were introduced into India in the 1960s, the. They doubled wheat production in some parts of India, they very quickly tripled rice production and they saved India from what was a major food emergency in the 1960s.

Many many outsiders thought India would never be able to. The feed itself. And they even said it would be a mistake to give food aid to India, because that would only keep another generation of parents alive to have more children so that more people would die later when the famine came. But this these new technologies made made those predictions look silly because by the 1970s, by the mid 1970s, Andy was actually exporting.

Kevin Folta: And there's still a lot of critics of the green revolution. I mean, you have Vandana Shiva and other folks who look backwards and say that this was an absolute agricultural disaster. And so does she have any merit to the claims that there were downsides to the green revolution and really what was the net [00:26:00] balance of upside versus downside?

Robert Paarlberg: Well, her, her specific accusations are, are factually incorrect. She said the new seeds required. More water and fertilizer. Well, it's, it's true that when the seeds spread farmers did use more water and more fertilizer, but they were growing so much more grain that the use of water per ton of grain and the use of fertile.

Per ton of grain actually decreased. So she was factually wrong to say that these were input dependent technologies. They were technologies that actually save farmers from the use of inputs. It was a wonderful way to increase production without having to spend more on inputs and without putting the environment at risk.

She also said that these were these were not biodiverse Farming practices. These were a narrow seeds that were bred from a narrow genetic base, but that was wrong as well. The, the plant breeders that develop these [00:27:00] seeds introduced so many different So many different lines into them that they actually had more genetic complexity than than a field planted with traditional variety.

So she was wrong there as well. Her prediction was that these seeds would be so vulnerable to disease that the whole experiment would collapse and bring a disaster onto Indian farmers. She said that the yield gains simply weren't sustainable, but she said that back in 1990 and the yield gains have continued.

At a healthy pace ever since then. So far as I know, although she is still wildly popular with people who like to criticize the introduction of a science-based farming practices into the developing world. Yeah. Which 

Kevin Folta: it really is a great transition into the idea of genetic engineering, because India has been a place.

Probably more than anywhere else in the world could use biotechnology in so many different contexts because of its [00:28:00] diverse farming opportunities and the diverse challenges in India really could benefit, but they've only had a genetically engineered cotton. And in your chapter on genetic engineering, you cover a whole suite of different topics, but maybe I can help.

Maybe I could just ask you to give your thoughts on, you know, where are we now and where could we have been if we would have allowed biotechnology to move more rapidly into the developing world. And if there was less rhetorical, pushback and bad science, that was essentially scaring people away from modern genetic.

Robert Paarlberg: Yeah, this is this is a fascinating topic. Most of my students come into my class believing that GMOs have been forced it down the throats of poor farmers in the developing world by by profit-making corporations, headquartered in the United States and in Europe, what they, what they don't really know anything about is that those corporations have mostly been defeated [00:29:00] by the opponents of, of GMOs.

Those corporations came up with genetically modified wheat varieties that had never been planted commercially because of biotechnology, policy restrictions that have made it illegal to plant those seeds. We've never planted any genetically modified rice commercially either for the same reason. So the two most important food crops in the world, wheat and rice, haven't been grown commercially in GMO.

Anywhere much to the frustration of the companies that invested millions of dollars in developing a GMO varieties of those of those food crops. GMO crops have really only spread significantly for industrial crops like cotton that you mentioned in India and for animal feed crops, especially soybeans and, and yellow maize for food crops.

Almost aren't any GMO varieties out there being grown commercially a little bit of [00:30:00] a paja in Hawaii, tiny little bits of eggplant in Bangladesh, some white maize in the Republic of South Africa. Otherwise, almost no fruits and vegetables and no no GMO animals. It's a, it's a technology that could be doing valuable things for farmers in particular, but for consumers as well, that's really been killed in the cradle of, by the opposition that sprung up against GMOs beginning in Europe in the late 1990s.

Kevin Folta: And that's really been the thrust of the discussion on this podcast. Now for eight years, going on eight years has been, how do we familiarize people with biotechnology, really being the new normal, being an extension of what is traditional breeding and just another part of plant genetic improvement that has more precision than other ways we do it and making that the baseline because the technologies that are here, innovation.

And I look [00:31:00] across universities. I look at papers and journals. I look at what's going on in companies, I would say 99%. Or more of technology probably way more of the, of the products that have been developed to solve a problem for farmers or the developing world remain on the shelf. And what are some of the ones that you know of that you feel are particularly egregious examples of technology that never was allowed to meet the people it was meant to serve?

Robert Paarlberg: Well, I've done a lot of work in Africa and African farmers depend heavily on. On maize, it's white maize, not yellow maize and tropical white maize. And the crops are attacked by by stock borders. And the insect is inside the stalk. And so it's hard to get it with With chemical insecticides and they can't afford chemical insecticides anyway.

So an ideal solution for them would be to get BT maize, [00:32:00] which self protects against insects without insecticide sprays, and yet and yet BT maize hasn't, hasn't been. Commercialized in any African country, I think outside of any Sub-Saharan African country, outside of the Republic of South Africa USA ID and other private foundations have been helping to develop.

BT maize varieties using local germplasm, that's appropriate both openly pollinated and hybrid, and yet biosafety rules in these African countries do not make it legal for farmers to plant any of these seeds. And in fact several years ago in Tanzania, And an experimental variety of a BT maize was planted in a carefully confined field trial with government approval.

It wasn't being commercialized yet. They were just doing research on it. But the, the ministry of [00:33:00] agriculture decided to, to destroy the crop, they burned it. And because some parliamentarians were were wondering what's going on out there in that field. It's it's simply it's been, it's been so stigmatized in Africa by wild stories that have mostly been brought in.

European and north American non-governmental organizations spend so stigmatized that the farmers haven't had a chance to plant it. It's really 

Kevin Folta: sad. I've I've stood in the field of, or in the research plots for the beta. Beta-carotene in. Motoki banana, which would give a, the major food staple in those areas would have more vitamin a for, for consumers.

And their blindness is an issue there. And the other one is the xantham Mona spectral, wilt resistant banana trees. And you see evidence of these wilt diseases. They require so much care and good horticulture and good agronomic practices in order not to. Crop. And so many people there, if they [00:34:00] lose their crop, that's it.

I mean, these are small subsistence farmers on a few acres and they would benefit so much from these crops that are behind a barbed wire fence. And the other one that really bothers me is Kenya came close to. Releasing a BT corn and in 2012, that came to a screeching halt with the Sara Leni paper when the one with the rats and that paper has never been reproduced now in going on 10 years, in fact, four studies couldn't reproduce it and then.

Stopped the deployment of genetically engineered crops in Kenya. 

Robert Paarlberg: Yeah. It's still illegal to even import a GMO maze into, into Kenya, let alone grow it in Kenya. Yeah. And this is a, this is a controversial point that I make in my book, but I'm still willing to make it. I think that the battle for transgenic food crops in developing countries has mostly been lost [00:35:00] and.

Advocates for highly productive biotechnologies would do well to redirect their efforts toward gene edited crops, which. In many ways have, have greater potential. They're much easier to develop, not as costly to develop. They're faster to develop. You could get African scientists into, into this game much more quickly since they are less expensive it makes sense to, to invest in gene editing, orphan crops that aren't grown by.

Large numbers of wealthy commercial farmers. There's not, it would be an ideal way to improve the orphan crops that are used by low income food producers and in developing countries. And it's talking about natural. These single point gene edited crops are almost indistinguishable from crops that have experienced natural [00:36:00] mutations.

You can't tell. The difference between these crops and crops that experienced a natural mutation and in Europe improving crops with mutations, doesn't classify them as GMOs. And yet when the European court looked at gene edited crops, they decided in 2018 that henceforth they would have to be classified and regulated by G like GMOs, which means a stifling blanket of requirements.

You don't have to, you know, you don't, you don't just have to label them and segregate them. You have to have an audit trail maintained by all of the operators in the marketplace for five years. Recording where each a GMO crop came from and where it went. This is going to drive gene edited crops out of not just farmer's fields, but out of research labs in Europe, just like the GMO regulations did to transgenic crops.

The risk now is that other countries will copy European regulations on gene edited [00:37:00] crops, much the way they earlier copied European regulations on transgenic. Well, 

Kevin Folta: that's a really good point. Do you think that they'll copy Europe or do you think they're going to copy places like China that maybe are being a lot more hands off with respect to regulating these kinds of technologies?

Robert Paarlberg: Yeah. I speculate in my book that that China's going to be the the actor that makes a difference in this case. And I think that's already happening China. Has invested enormous quantities of its own scientific manpower and its resources into gene editing. They have more gene editing patents for agricultural crops than the United States.

They've in a way they're out ahead of the United States in, in the gene editing revolution and just. And just this January, January 22 China put out a [00:38:00] preliminary indication that it's regulations for gene edited crops. If they're only single point mutations, if there's no foreign DNA, their regulations will not consider them to be.

GMOs, which means a full speed ahead. And if China goes ahead, on one reason, China would do that is that they don't have to worry about a European or restrictions on these crops. China doesn't export a lot of agricultural produce to Europe. So if China goes ahead with gene editing and if the United States and most other Western hemisphere countries do the same thing, that's going to leave Europeans isolated.

And my hope is that they will realize responding to pressure from their own scientists that this court decision on gene editing has to either be. Re litigated or they have to rewrite their GMO directive in order to in order to make it possible to turn this technology loose. Otherwise, as. As European [00:39:00] scientists said back in 2018, this is going to be the death knell of agricultural biotechnology in Europe in the years ahead.

Well, and 

Kevin Folta: then the ability of European farmers to be able to compete and you and European consumers to be able to have affordable food because so many of the innovations are going to be enabling for. To work in conjunction with the next newest technologies. And what about biotech? Animals? I mean, the issues we have here in the states, you know, you mentioned Alison van and then who's been a guest on this podcast, probably more than anybody else who basically says she can make biotech animals that are useful, but no sense in doing it because you can't get them deregulated.

Do you think that's going to change? 

Robert Paarlberg: Oh, I, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. It's a fight between USDA and FDA as to who gets to regulate what part of this new technology and those fights tend to resolve only slowly. People are even more skiddish about biotech [00:40:00] animals than they are about. Crops. We have a lot of wonderful applications, even before gene editing you know, we had an inviro pig that, that produced less phosphorus in its manure.

It was developed in Canada. It's a wonderful idea. And yet it went, it went nowhere. My hope is that we can, oh, and then there's the Aqua advantage salmon which has its transgenic genes from other fish allow this salmon to keep growing 12 months of the year. It doesn't, it doesn't go into a, into a non-growth period for four, four or five months the way the way normal Atlantic salmon do.

And so it reaches a market weight much sooner. Having having eaten much less feed and having excreted much less waste. It's a, it's a wonderful improvement. It's going to be grown on land in tanks, in the center of the country in Indiana. So there's no risk of any [00:41:00] of any any interaction with wild salmon species and, and they're sterile.

Anyway, you'd think that this product would be wood. It's been around. For more than a decade and only got FDA approval a few years ago. And now it's blocked because a lot of retail stores have promised their customers. They're not going to put it on the shelf because it's because it's GMO. 

Kevin Folta: Yeah.

But there's been a lot of pressure on them from the anti GMO groups. So the, all the Costco's and Walmart's the big buyers, there was so much pressure on them to not accept this new technology. Some of the. Restaurant suppliers have said, we're going to go ahead with it. And probably because it's a, it's a good product that is less expensive because it can be farmed with a lower carbon footprint and all that stuff.

But also the idea that you don't have to have these massive nets of farming salmon in the ocean, right? Plus you leave natural populations [00:42:00] alone. So if you're talking about fishing or some of the other aspects of commercial fishing, this solves that problem. And so you have all of these great benefits of this technology that we would think that the environmentalist and other folks would be.

This is a great application. 

Robert Paarlberg: Yeah. This this raises one of the central puzzles that my book tries to, to address. Why is it that some of our best educated and most progressive citizens. Welcome science with open arms when it comes to human medicine or when it comes to climate change. I mean, follow the science is the, is the, the COVID era mantra follow the science is the response to climate change.

But when it comes to agriculture, no, no, no, they don't want the science anymore. Why, why is that? And, you know, I puzzled over that question. Part of it is [00:43:00] some of the new scientific breakthroughs in agriculture, including GMOs were primarily beneficial to farmers, not to the final consumer. And so they could afford to be highly cautious toward these technologies.

Farmers in the developing world couldn't afford that, but they're not making the rules. Another reason I think is, is almost. Almost spiritual. I mean, it used to be that that organized religion was the number one enemy of modern science, but we're now in a secular age and organized religions. Don't wheel that much more power anymore.

So what's going against science today. I think we have found a new secular religion in our respect for, and even our worship for. For nature. And we know that science, powerful science in the wrong hands can do serious damage to, to nature. And so we [00:44:00] end up mistrusting science, but this too is, is based on.

On a misperception of the past. We think that, oh, the, the, the artismal agricultural practices or the pre-scientific practices of the past were much safer for nature, but that's just not true for every bushel of production. They did much more damage to, to the natural world. So the. The popular confusion on these these matters is almost almost unlimited and it'll take a, it'll take good podcasters like you to sort it all.

Well, I hope 

Kevin Folta: so. I guess the other hypothesis I've always had about about why they don't care about medicine, but they care about food is because food is a mobile. And food triggers a part of the brain that is dealing with panic and, and fight or flight. Right? Whereas medicine is a much more hopeful cognitive type of thing.

Doctor explains to you why the treatment will help you. If I tell you that this change in the [00:45:00] food will. It perceived in two very different ways. And I think that's, there's something to that. But I also liked your idea about the religion of nature. And I always remind people that I've been beating back nature my entire life to stay alive, that I'm fighting entropy and I'm, I'm getting vaccinated.

I'm. You know, taking medicine, I get surgery, you know all the things that nature throws at me to take me out. I pushed back and I, and I do it from my neck. Do these podcasts from my not natural computer on, you know, I get in my not natural car. I'll fly on a, not natural plane pushing back against nature, but working in concert with it really is where we need.

Robert Paarlberg: Yeah. I mean COVID came from nature. HIV came from nature. Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, the, the tsunami that destroyed the coast of Japan came from nature. These are, this is not a benign natural world out there. You know, the other, the other pushback sometimes is linked to a mistrust, not just of scientists, but of, [00:46:00] of corporate scientists.

There's a deep suspicion, especially among people who are already comfortable. That corporations are not to be trusted, but the same people that don't trust agricultural corporations buy iPhones. They, you know, they, they drive a Mercedes automobile. They're very selective in the corporations that they decide to to shine.

Kevin Folta: Yeah, that's really true. It's funny. I used to start my talks by saying here's what's happening at the apple store and I had the apple store with the iPhone and the line around the block and the apple store with the Arctic apple and people who approach people protesting. And it's just to flip sides of this of technology.

And really, that's kind of where I'd like to go to kind of wrap things up is the end of your book. Last chapter is really focused on, you know, the new technologies and really how. Rather than agriculture going backwards, which can't work. How do we have agriculture go forward? And what are some of the new ways that technology will be applied and [00:47:00] enabled to assist farmers and you show some beautiful examples of things that are happening already.

And what are some of your favorite examples of how technology or robotics or whatever are really starting to assist farmers in being more. 

Robert Paarlberg: Well, of course, robotics are very important in California today where there's a labor shortage. And even if you pay $20 an hour, you can't get people to pick strawberries.

And so we need to move the robotics revolution in agriculture, which has actually actually gone quite a ways already. Into the harvesting of delicate perishable products. I like strawberries in my book describes how that that revolution is, is going forward. We also need to help farmers with. With solutions to very complicated management problems.

And so companies will deliver information services to farmers that solve those problems. And, and with. With [00:48:00] a combination of much better, real time data, weather forecasts, artificial intelligence farmers can now for uh, scripts, a subscription fee find ways to to avoid wasteful steps, to avoid damaging decisions and manage their, their.

Manage their farm operations more efficiently. I think we're going to go much farther in the direction of precision with every year that goes by. I was astounded in writing my book. I, I paid a visit to a corn and soybean farm in, in Eastern Indiana. And they were using not just GPS positioning and variable rate application equipment steered by GPS.

They had an RDC RTK base station on their farm, which sent correction signals to the incoming GPS signals and allowed their equipment in the field to know their [00:49:00] precise location with sub inch accuracy. This is astounded me. So I've bench accuracy in a cornfield. They use it for everything for four applications of fertilizer, lime, and even seeds, seed spacing in their field is adjusted according to.

The digital map of the soil in that particular square meter of the field to be optimal, it's that kind of precision is, is something that no one could, could dream of 20 years ago, but for large, highly capitalized farms, it's becoming it's becoming really. 

Kevin Folta: So in your synthesis of everything we've technology coming and really, you know, I feel that technology is a little late to the farm that we, because we had manual labor still available at one point that we relied too much on that.

And didn't think of robotics. Plus the question of [00:50:00] can a small farmer or medium-sized from our large farmer afford more. And software and service contracts that, you know, adds another layer of expense. So with that in mind with, you know, technology moving ahead, what is your kind of, what is your outlook going forward in terms of farming in north America?

Do you see. Being sustainable economically. Or do you see this kind of going the way of other industries and really just depending upon imported food from other 

Robert Paarlberg: places? No, it's, it's highly sustainable. What I point out in my book is that a. There's no such thing as an average farm in the United States, we have so many different kinds of farms and there's room for all of them.

I call it multiculturalism. Most of our production will come from very large farms with annual sales. Above half a million dollars. It's something like 84% of our production comes from those very large farms, but [00:51:00] they only represent 7% of our farms. The other, the other 93% of our farms are all over the map.

Tiny little CSA, organic farms, retirement farms. Part-time farms where there's a lot of income coming in because a spouse has a good job with a tech company, a virtual worker enjoying the rural lifestyle. We have we have farms. We have farms now that are mostly. They mostly make their money doing barn weddings.

And I think that's wonderful. It's to imagine that farms are going to be wiped off the map because most of our food comes from the largest of those farms is it's simply a. Simply erroneous. 

Kevin Folta: Yeah. I tend to agree. I think we see a resurgence of small farms that can produce items that you can't produce on large farms because of the issues of shipping that we can produce.

Things like fruits and vegetables, especially [00:52:00] that people have never tasted. Things like persimmons. Like they, it never had a right persimmons in their life because you can't ship it. We can barely ship it three miles to the market, but when people taste it, they go, this is amazing. And I've never had anything like this 

Robert Paarlberg: before and local restaurants are going to seek you out because.

You can give them things. They can't get anywhere else and you can give them something that is fit that morning and ready to be served to the fussiest of clientele. It won't be pulled out of the ground and Nicaragua three days ago. It will be it'll be perfectly. Yeah. 

Kevin Folta: And then with that patina of also being a locally produced item with a lower carbon footprint, fewer food miles produced by a local family, keeping your money in your own community.

All those other edges are important ones that really. Provide an opportunity for smaller farmers to be more vital. And I know our place in 10 years, we'll be growing things that you're not supposed to be able to grow in Florida because we're taking time now to figure out how to [00:53:00] do it. We're busting the patterns on things like apples and pears and, and we'll be able to have a fruit.

Tastes better that you can't buy in the grocery store. So trying to find those niches and fill them and is a really, is really where we have to go. And maybe one other thought that one thing I learned from your book that I'd never heard of before. And I, I F I failed to mention this earlier. The idea of.

Ghost kitchens. Yeah. What is a ghost kitchen. And, and, and is that just another example of people getting innovative to 

Robert Paarlberg: deliver? Well, it goes, kitchens were developed before COVID but they've spread more rapidly since COVID of course, with people ordering food to be consumed at home instead of, instead of one restaurant having one kitchen and delivering food from that one kitchen and also serving an on-scene, there'll be an industrial building unused industrial building that will have one big kitchen.[00:54:00] 

And it will, it will prepare and deliver foods that have different restaurant brands. To, to different customers who never show up at the restaurant it's they don't have to pay for, for decor. They don't have to pay for tables and chairs. They don't have to pay for a parking lot. They don't have no ambience required.

Just a big efficient. Kitchen staffed by a very professional chefs who prepare exactly what they know the customer wants and send it under different labels. Some of it could be Chinese, some could be Mexican, some could be could be burgers and fries. It's coming from one location and it's being branded differently depending upon who's buying it.

But it's. It saves so much money. Having, having a restaurant where people come in and sit down and eat is phenomenally costly. These ghost kitchens [00:55:00] reduce the cost of preparing food that you can get to someone to eat in their own home dramatically. And they're spreading. 

Kevin Folta: All of this has been a really fascinating look at the major topics of the book, but I would urge people to read it.

It goes really quick. And I got through it in a couple of sessions, resetting the table straight. Talk about the food we grow and eat by Dr. Robert Powell, Berg. So the paperback version is available for about $17 on Amazon and other places where you consume your reading materials. So Dr. Robert Pearl Berg, it's very nice to meet you finally, after all these years.

Thank you for a very nice book. And I hope to talk to you again. I 

Robert Paarlberg: enjoyed it. And likewise, thanks a lot, Kevin. 

Kevin Folta: And as always, thank you for listening to the talking biotech podcast by collabora write your reviews and the places you consume. Podcast media. We appreciate all the feedback. This is a talking biotech