 we have to find a way to make food righteous because we need to eat and we need to be healthy. And so now we're trying to change the discussion and say what infrastructure do we need to create to make sure that community food trade will be robust, will be rewarding for farmers, will produce healthy products, will produce fewer externalities. And really again, it's about building trust and building a sense of mutuality that we used to have in our society across the world. It's building mutuality that we don't have in a commodity system because we're transactional. And if we don't build that, we really cannot survive as a species. Ken Meter is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Ken is one of the most experienced food system analysts in the United States, integrating market analysis, business development, systems thinking and social concerns. Ken has worked for 50 years in inner city and rural communities, capacity building. His local economic analysis have promoted local food networks in 143 regions in 41 states, two provinces and four tribal nations. And I'm sure that number has grown since we last talked or this bio was written. He's also worked in 12 different countries, seen 12 different countries. He has the publication, the book that we're going to be talking about today, Building Community Foodwebs, which comes out officially April 29th this year. I got an advanced copy, have read it twice. It's one of the most fabulous reads I've had in a long time around food, food systems, food webs, focusing in deeply on agriculture and how for the US, how we can locally fix some pretty deep and hardened issues that we're struggling with. He is also the co-editor of Sustainable Food Systems Assessments, lessons from global practice published. And I don't know if I'm supposed to say this since his first book is from Island Press. This is by Rutledge in the United Kingdom. And it came out in 2019, also fabulous work. Chen's work can be found at Crossroads Resource Center, of which he's, I believe it's the president, Tools for Community Self-Determination. He has roots in Oldenburg, Rhemerhaven and Bavaria, Germany. You know, I'm in Hamburg, Germany. Chen, welcome to the show. I'm so glad you're here. Thanks very much for having me on, Mark. I tell you what, I am so excited that we have this opportunity to talk. We're going to go, I'm sure, down many different paths and into some rabbit holes and get into the depth and substance of things. I could really read three pages of your biography because you've been doing this for quite some time. You've touched many cities, many communities, many states in your assessments and you're working on this. And this book is actually a culmination over quite a few years of just research work assessments and that's been waiting to come out. This crazy period, this pandemic, this Black Lives Matters and racism against Asians and all the other crazy stuff we've experienced or were especially food insecurity, food issues during the pandemic and lockdown periods, given you a better model to work with or said, hey, I kind of thought something like this might come or that we could use a little bit more resilience in our food webs and therefore not only did I talk about it but I helped assess and help communities change that and lo and behold, there's some better models out of there. So my question is, how have you weathered this crazy time? And are there any learning lessons that we can take out of it that say, hey, there's some better models out there? Well, it's actually been a very difficult year for me. I'm mostly because I've got a, I'm old enough that I've been staying very much at home and a lot of my work is involved travel. So I've been really taken away from a lot of my normal partners and my normal opportunities. And of course, some partners who had hired me to do things were so busy dealing with the pandemic or getting food to people who needed it that they haven't had much time to talk. So it's been a very difficult year in that way. But I also think that the ground is really shifting in some really phenomenal ways at this point. I think, for many years, as I've been talking about food systems in various audiences, I've often said, well, what if there's a disruption in the food supply? What are we gonna do? And some folks who come back to me and said, you said that several years ago and we're listening now. And there's a, even in some small towns that I've worked with where the idea of planning for the food system seemed kind of absurd to people at the beginning. They're now calling me up and saying, you know, we're doing this. We realized we have to make some steps forward we didn't make before. And I'm gratified to have that happen even though it takes such a tragedy to play out. In some ways, I think, I mean, the other thing I'd say is actually right about now there's a webinar that I can't be on because I'm talking to you, but that's okay. I can get that later. But there's an out now discussion among the farm community in the US about saying how do we connect our desire for parity pricing and equity as farmers with the Black Lives Matter movement for equity and the BIPOC people of color call for reparations and for equity. And I think now farmers are realizing that they have been hurt in some of the same ways that blacks have been hurt. And certainly with a lot more privilege and a lot more safety, it's not like it's the same stuff. But I think that there's a new kind of understanding that there's more similarities than we expected. And you know, one thing I hope my book will do is to really point out that there's sort of a need for reparations in rural America in its own way, even though people have had a lot more safety and a lot more money to spend, there's been a real systematic drain of wealth out of the rural communities in the US to the tune of $4 trillion that I'm tracking. And that's only a tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more that we don't have data for, but that $4 trillion looks small in terms of the national budget. But in terms of the farm economy, it's huge because all the farms in the US together, their aggregate net worth is $3 trillion. So it's a really tremendous drain of money from our farm sector and from, more importantly, in some ways, rural communities that have supported farms to really run operations that ran wealth out of their own communities. So to connect that with the pandemic, I think it's a kind of a combination of very old lessons and very new lessons. What's, I think the new is really that we are discovering we have to plan for breakdowns. We have to plan for resilience in a very profound way, in ways we've sort of skied over because money was flowing and commodities were flowing. And we could say, oh, it's better to work and make a little more money than to try to do long-term planning. And I think that awareness is really settling into people in a pretty profound way. Some of the old lessons, I think, I mean, I was actually, I've been researching my family heritage a little bit after I got done with the book. And it turns out that my ancestors were invited from Bavaria into what's now Bohemia. They were invited across the border in 1577 or so, a couple of years before then, to start a new village. And one of the reasons they were invited in, as you know, not my family, but it was my ancestors directly who were the first ones in this village of Schneiderhof in the, what's now the Czech Republic. They and other German farmers were invited because they were rotating crops. And they knew that if they planted rye it would help suppress weeds. And they knew how to build soil in a very gravelly sandy environment. And this is something that universities in America knew in the 1930s, but forgot because it was expedient to think about how to produce more products with chemicals. And now that's just being rediscovered. And what I noticed is some of the university folks that I work with are claiming credit for having discovered this thing, which without even going back to the people in Minnesota who have been following these techniques for decades, generations. I worked on a family farm in 1978, 79, it was an organic dairy farm. And they had never used chemicals because in their spiritual belief they thought God did not want us to use chemicals. And they were selling their milk conventionally because there was no organic market for the milk. So, these were skills that farmers knew and that the university test said don't ignore that. But really it's something that's extremely old and we have sustainable resilient regenerative practices in our memory and in our genes and our heritage throughout the world. And I think that we're gonna be rediscovering some of those indigenous practices, some of those historical practices because we're gonna be forced to travel less, we're gonna be forced to be more frugal, we're gonna be forced to say how do we do this in a safe way when pandemics come? We had warnings a year before the COVID-19 broke out that we should prepare for a pandemic and no one really did. A few folks did, but as a society we didn't really make those preparations. So, I think in some ways it's sort of waking up to the fact that this is a complex thing, it's changing, we're gonna have viruses to deal with, we're gonna have safety issues to contend with, we're gonna have injustice to redress and that all that's very uncertain or we've been kind of floating along on the idea that we can just kind of keep going and keep spending and keep buying because money will flow. And this is a really good reminder that those days may not last. That's for sure and I mean part of in your book and I've heard you speak before you kind of in some ways say we go back to some of that indigenous wisdom, go back to the roots or kind of the beginnings because agriculture industry is really an agrarian society 10 to 12,000 years old is the most successful, longest running economies our world ever seen. And but it's also the point in time when we started having these impacts on our climate the minute we started moving rocks, cutting down trees, plowing our fields, putting carbon into the atmosphere, nitrogen into the atmosphere and into our soils that we started impacting our environment. And some of those things we've retained and passed on through generations and some we were just lost because we're struggling how are we gonna feed everybody and how can we deal with more resilient crops and pesticides and chemicals. And so there's a lot of resilience lessons as I read your book that almost and what I hear from you that some of the models the assessments and the things that you break out bring out are just better operating systems better models for tough times but also for good times to have good types of foods a very local foods and with lots of biodiversity but lots of variety as well. So there's all sorts of beautiful things that emerge. And so I appreciate you sharing those thoughts with me. I really wanna jump quickly into this first section because I think we're gonna spend a little bit of the time there and that is you're addressing and you kind of tickled upon it with your $4 trillion the numbers that you've done with research of the food, the agriculture industry. And basically I don't know if it went back past the 30s but I know both times I read your book you have these graphs and talk about research of past history, how farming looked and how we produced back then and how that's developed over the years to give us a pretty fair assessment of the United States and how that has gone through farm bills and through subsidies and help over the years and what trends and things that we're seeing there was for me it was a great eye-opener and please if you need to open up some slides or presentations to kind of to explain that to us because it is a little bit with the numbers I would like to get your view, your take what's the real takeaway that we get over all these big numbers for the years what we should be coming to realization what we've done to ourselves or what the government or the whole food systems done to us. Okay, and I can share my screen and show a few slides and there are slides that are in the book so someone who is listening on a podcast can more or less follow along if they have a copy of the book to work with. This is a slide which is the adjusted net cash income for US farms from 1910 to 2018 which is a figure in the book. This one's in color, the book is not but this is now 100 years of history so goes back to 1910 to 2018 it's a very long stretch of time and it's basically all the data the United States publishes all available on public sites showing the cash receipts farmers earned which in this chart is the top line or the orange line and it also shows how much farmers have spent to produce their crops in livestock which is the middle line or the maroon line and then the lower line is basically subtracting the expenses from the cash receipts and that's in red in this chart for those people who can see this. And I think what's really amazing about this is this is publicly available data and it's reported every year by the USDA and very few people look at it because I think researchers are trying to develop new models and new sort of sophisticated ways of handling with data but often overlook the data that's really right in front of us. But it's a little hard to explain this for people who are not watching but what you see from the chart is that cash receipts and this is adjusted for inflation I should also add to so I've put this in 2018 US dollars but you see that cash receipts for all farmers in the country have increased from about $140 billion a year to something like $380 billion like I'm actually covered up in my screen right now but fairly substantial growth in real dollars a lot of ups and downs it's not you can really tell farmers can't rely on a steady consistent income because markets are changing, weather is changing, global incidents affect this and it really does get it's a remarkable how much uncertainty farmers cope with. What you also see is that the expenses of farming have increased from about $90 billion a year to really almost as much as farmers have made in 2018 up is again the same kind of $380 billion range and so and of course those rise steadily you don't have the same ups and downs but what's really notable is as soon as farmers make more money the costs of producing their products go up because implement dealers and fertilizer dealers and the folks who supply farmers realize that farmers have more money to spend and farmers when they have a good year often use that to buy a new piece of equipment or to buy to experiment on something new that costs more money so you have this kind of sick situation where farmers have increased their production and their sales over time quite steadily but they're not really gaining from the experience. I should add that I'm really looking at the costs of production and the costs of selling products I don't look at the other forms of income farmers take which USDA when they report net farm income they include other four sources of income and I'm looking at our farmers actually making money or not simply producing crops and livestock it's a slightly different calculation but I think it's an important part of the story to know whether farming is paying for itself. In this chart you can see that during World War I when Europe was devastated by war and couldn't produce a lot of food and the United States held off from getting involved for a while our farmers in this country shipped a lot of food to US to Europe to help feed troops to help feed people who were in trouble but also after the war and after the rebuilding that continued for a few years and that era from 1914 to 1918 is still I'm sorry 1910 to 1914 is still considered sort of the prime time some people call it the golden era of US agriculture because farmers were making about 40 cents on the dollar for everything that they sold. There were bountiful markets abroad because we were sort of a dominant producer and during the war we could ship food to Europe to replace food that was not being grown because fields were destroyed and farmers enjoyed pretty good times. Right after that from 1918 to the well basically through the 1920s we had a farm crisis that was notable in the United States but also global depression. So we had a lot of investment money going into urban development and the manufacturing development into more sophisticated industries than farming had become and farmers actually had trouble getting credit because they were so the bankers were so focused focused on developing manufacturing as an industry and developing urban areas as consumers. So we had eight years of a farm depression which the experts who studied the Great Depression in 1929 and the 30s anyone who looked at agriculture concluded that the global farm depression was a major cause of the depression not so much because it caused the stock market crash but because we'd weakened the farm economy so much we had no ability for farmers to rebuild the economy because farmers are building new wealth all the time building new commodities, new economic trade new relationships and that engine was so weakened by the 1920s that it couldn't help us recover from the stock market crash which could have been a momentary thing if we didn't have the basis if we had had the basic fundamentals the economy stronger. So that's a profound story which conditions are much different now but it was the reality of the Great Depression of the 30s. It was the 30s just like the pandemic crisis here this kind of caused us to rethink policy. It was at that point where the United States started writing policy for farmers where we said, we're going to support farmers we're going to create policy that makes rewards farmers with a better price. We're going to not do that by spending federal money as much as by making market mechanisms that ensure farmers will be treated fairly. And so we had that kick in and the losses of the depression started getting better in the 1930s. Again, unfortunately it took World War II and the buildup for World War II for farmers to really develop prosperity. But again, the foundation of effective policy made it possible for farmers to prosper when our farmers in the United States could sell food abroad to Europe, to troops who were fighting a war in Europe and then again after the war with the Marshall plan giving loans to Europe so they could buy commodities from American farmers. So very prosperous years for American farmers in the 1940s. We have new chemicals coming in, new tractor technology coming in. So farmers can produce a lot more product at a time where people are buying food. Farmers are not making the same proportion of profits that they were as a 1918 but they're still doing very well. And at that time the farmers I interviewed who were started in 1950 just told me wonderful stories about being able to really start a farm by starting to farm. They could raise eggs for a year and make enough money to make a down payment on land the next year because the prices of land were in balance with what farmers could produce and the economy was again in the United States in a privileged position globally because we were dominant producers and other countries were having trouble. Farmers could do very well but sort of a hidden hand helping us be profitable because other countries were not doing as well. The chart also shows however that net farm income really decreased from 1947 or so to 1970. So again, as farmers get a little bit of profit that gets taken out of the system over time because people sell farmers more product or they find ways to gain the system to get more value from farmers. And so that did not last. And by 1970 or so we had a sort of declining farm income but people didn't realize how bad it was becoming. Then we have a real peak in farm income in 1973 which happens because farmers were asked by the federal government by Earl Butts when he was secretary of agriculture at the time to plant fence or the fence or plant as much corn and soybeans and whatever as they could because we were spending a lot of money buying oil from OPEC in 1973 when the oil crisis broke out. And we were buying grain in, I mean, we were buying oil in dollars and those dollars were leaving the country and nobody was reinvesting those dollars back in the United States. So the policymakers in DC had this what seemed like a win-win-win solution at the time to say let's have Russia buy grain from the United States in dollars because they had big bank accounts stored up with dollars and they had had some crop failures. So American farmers could supply those markets with grain. Russia bought that with US dollars because we insisted on that. And in a sense we pulled out of losing so much money from the oil crisis. We gave money to new farmers and we pulled some dollars out of the Russian economy and that created incredible prosperity for a couple of years, 1973 and 1974. However, that crisis was used very cynically by policymakers to get farmers to expand production, to export more product, to look more globally to markets. And there was a comment that Secretary Butts made we'll find you permanent markets abroad if you will just ramp up production to meet those markets. Well, there really were no new permanent markets abroad those happened because of a crisis in USSR agriculture. And so farmers took on new debt, they expanded production they plowed down fields that had been used margely they started using more chemicals. And then in two years after doing that they discovered the markets had collapsed and they could not sell this product that they had grown because everybody produced more and the prices were forced down and we had a lot of product but no basis of price. So that kind of came home in 1982, 83 when farmers realized that they could not pay those debts back anchors were in trouble because they were not able to sell they were not able to get money back from farmers who had taken on loans. So we had a whole reckoning in the United States which resembled the pandemic in the sense that farmers made the case to bankers saying if you foreclose on us, you're gonna lose us as a farm and you're gonna lose the loan value. If you write down the value of your loan then we can continue farming and you continue to have us as a customer and the bankers saw the wisdom of that. So we had a massive write down of farm debt in that era which led to farm economy getting more stabilized and farmers being able to get back on their feet and kind of kick up and pick up the pieces and become healthier producers again but they were still stressed by the debt they were still farming more intensively than the economy could really handle. And it wasn't a long-term answer but it did sort of temper the crisis for a while. We had a similar crisis in 2008 or so which really led to some prosperity for farmers in 2012 because in 2008 we had a global housing finance crisis which again was a debt crisis. And at that point, the ethanol industry was expanding in the United States and so farmers started looking to ethanol production but I think more importantly, investors were pulling out of the housing finance market and looking for something they could some safe haven for investment. And I recall sitting in a coffee shop in Minneapolis during this era with a friend of mine who worked for an NGO that did work with food issues, Oxfam. And we got approached by a grain trader who was sitting at the next table where he heard us talking about food issues and he said, can you tell me what's happening here? I just don't understand. And he was actually literally making grain trades from his laptop at the table next to us and heard us talking about the farm economy and he was more bewildered I think than we were. There was a really kind of profound moment in my education to see that this guy who made his living with trading was trying to understand how the economy was faring. And what happened was that investors invested in commodities because there was a rising value. There was some increase in sales and that kind of again, bailed out the economy but not in a long-term way. It was sort of a short-term cash flow and the basic fundamentals remained the same. So by 2018, you can see in this chart, farm income in the United States was actually below the levels we had in 1932 when we were the middle of the Great Depression. It was below the levels we had during the farm credit crisis of 1983, 84. And we weren't talking about it because things seemed to be sort of moving along and going along but we really didn't have that awareness of it because farmers had found other sources of income. They were mostly making their money with off-farm jobs and they were not losing their farms. We didn't have the same level of foreclosures but the fundamentals of the economy were not going well. I'll go to one more slide and I'll shut up. No, that's okay. I want you to go to that one more slide but there's a couple of things. So one, basically 2008 food, all food and anything to do with food systems turned into commodity but there's a couple of things that I'm not sure reflected and I wanna get your opinion here. One, true cost, natural capital, total environmental cost percentage of EBITDA is nowhere to be found on this. The other thing is obviously that and you touched upon it briefly, there's a big proportion in farming that is kind of almost the middleman syndrome where we're producing food for animals to produce meats, animal agriculture. So certain crops to feed those animals and then even before that, there's a certain amount of crops that are being produced for ethanol for plant-based fuels basically that I'm sure are adjusted here but it's almost like, so not only did we have the credit deficit swap kind of occur in the real estate market but we have also kind of running into this deficit credit issue in the farming industry. I believe this next slide or that you kind of go into that where there's even one chart where you kind of turn them upside down in some respects. And for me, that was just, I'm sure you're gonna go into that but there's not an invisible hand but there's some things in here that you're just like, how can this be a functioning system? How can we continue on this path? And definitely, it seems like a loser, you know? Well, and I actually, I would have to spend a minute to key up those other slides that you're mentioning because I do have them but I don't have them at my time to take me a minute to do that. But I think, I mean, you're absolutely right. This does not take into account the externalities or the costs of pollution. We have brown rivers in this country. We have farm chemicals that are in the water in our wells, in our waterways, our lakes or rivers and those costs are not in these charts at all. I think the reason I focus on this is primarily too. First of all, the main justification for the commodity system we have, this is a chart showing mostly commodity sales. It's not food sales, it's farmers raising commodities for international trade or for ethanol or for industrial processing. But the main justification is that it makes money for somebody and my effort is to show that yes, it makes money for some people but it also comes at the expense of rural communities that people actually do the production. So I'm really, I think in a very real sense showing that the whole justification for the commodity system we have economically is really bogus, it just doesn't make sense. And it's having perverse incentives that we don't take into account. And if the commodity system can't be justified in terms of making wealth for rural communities where the commodities are produced, then we have to think in very different terms than we have been. So I think that's really the thrust of why I do this. And one externality I do measure which will be my next slide and then we can decide where we wanna go from there would be this one. And this is sort of the same chart basically but it's comparing one of the externalities that's food related, which is our health. And this is kind of a shocking number for me and for lots of people. But it turns out that in the United States, the medical costs for diabetes and related conditions in the US last time was measured, which is a few years ago was $327 billion a year. And that turns out to be 90% of the value of all the sales that farmers make selling crops and livestock in this country. So diabetes is a condition that would be treatable if we had proper diet and proper exercise, it could be preventable I should say. And this one food related condition consumes 90% of the value that farmers earn selling their commodities. So in a sense, every time I buy a bushel of corn I give a dollar to a farmer or three or $4 to a farmer and I give an equal value almost as much money 90% of the value to the medical system to pay for the cost of the diet that I have if I'm eating a sort of conventional diet in this country. And that's just one of the externalities. The other ones we mentioned are probably more expensive in ways that are very difficult to show but we have pretty hard data on this question. And I think it's really profound to say, okay, the food system we have is not only not building wealth in rural America it's not building reliable wealth for farmers but it's also making us ill. It's very hard to justify continuing a system like that. That's amazing. I really appreciate you going in and showing us that because it's so vital. If you want, you can go ahead and shut that down and we'll go on further. I wanna go a little bit more into it but we don't need to go into any more slides. The first part of your book is really so beautiful because it has these graphs, these charts and your research and the data that you get goes back quite a ways. And we can see the history of the US agriculture and farming industry and kind of how it goes. And I mean, throughout our discussion I don't really wanna give everybody everything in your book I want them to go out and buy it and read it and really get it. But there's so many nuggets of wisdom not only to get the history but how we've kind of created whether it's us or the politics or farm bills or whatever a system that's just not working for us long-term there's some, in Germany they would say hamster will if we're creating some bad cycles for ourselves that are bad models and getting us into a really, really rough situations that are hard to get out of. And the charts that I was explaining or was hoping that you had, which you don't need to show was really showing how farm bills, credits, loans that they give to farmers, the debt that they incur how on your charts that you did show you're showing that the income is really the worst it's ever been. And that is just a system that is not only turning food agriculture into a commodity and the minute you turn it into a commodity that it's not run by farmers anymore it's run by people who make investments and they're not people who know how to produce food they're not farmers they don't understand the big picture they just wanna get that money they just wanna produce it as cheap as possible fast as possible that's why I'll give you an example we here in Germany we get mangoes from Vietnam and Thailand and cashews from Vietnam and Thailand and different crops and they're being sold in the grocery store in plastic packaging awful plastic packaging for one euro or sometimes even less than one euro no way is that the true cost of transport logistics water energy harvest the whole environmental cost the percentage of EBITDA the true cost the fair trade of that mango and there's a huge impact and that impact is in a couple of places those who produce it the farmers and our environment and the health our health as human beings and that system even in a pandemic is one that has grown as a commodity food is like continuing to grow investments have grown because it's a safe bet because it's a basic need but how can you produce food at less than value of the natural capital and the true cost it just does it's unfathomable it doesn't make sense and there's this nice saying I've had many food authors and people on the show that have spoken about food and that's their farmers or that's their bread and butter their knowledge that Carolyn Steele is the one that I'm thinking of she said if you cheapen food you cheapen life and it's so true if you produce something for cheap less than true cost less than value somewhere someone and the environment is paying the cost down the line and it's a system that comes back to bite us and I really like how you say that but then you hit the ball home you make the home run because you kind of point and talk about the assessments that you do all over the world and especially in the United States and I think it's well over 14 States now maybe even more but you do these assessments that goes in and gives you the data the numbers and says this is how much Montana or New Hampshire loses each year by raising these crops and livestock this fished harvest and this seafood this is how much the residents spend on purchasing food that's outsourced from out of the state and here's how much is purchased and employees that come from out of the state or migrant workers or employees in general this is how much of what's produced in the state and just put all those data that number into perspective and then you say well in the 1930s or the 1970s or the 1980s Montana or New Hampshire produced 20, 30, 40% of all of its food today that number is or that percentage is 12% is 10% is 11% plus it's a bad it's a worse thing and it's just it's a multi-page very much more complex I don't think I'm giving a fair credit to some eyes how you do that but God what a treasure show what a toolbox of not only if you go to your book but if you go to your website at the Crossroads Resource Center you can see how cities and communities can go and have you do an assessment and say let's just look at the numbers let's look at the numbers from the USDA let's look at what what farmers are making let's look at the the model you're currently operating on and let's push that out in the future or even just take the snapshot today is it a better model is that one that's going to give you resilience would you want to put all your eggs in that basket and I love how you do that and I don't know if I'm kind of surmising it as nice as you do in the book but that's kind of what I wanted you to get into and even get us a little bit more I mean some other good stories if you have them of how you can say what you've learned over the years and in your assessments and why you presented those numbers in the beginning of the book what was your hope to achieve besides you talked about the diabetes and that is there are some other things that you're trying to show or really put your finger on tell us what's going on Well, I love what you said and there's so many answers to that question I'll try to be a little brief here but I think I got started in this because I got the chance to interview some farmers in 1978-79 in one community in Minnesota who let me work with their cows and plow their fields and so on and I had a chance to sit down with them in winter time when they were not as busy and I brought up my tape recorder and they told me stories about their farm economy and I think what was really profound is that they had insights into the national economy that I hadn't learned in college I hadn't learned in economics classes and they were absolutely right and these farmers in 1978-79 were predicting that there would be a crisis in agriculture which most of us didn't even understand until 1985 so it was just an incredible education and I went back, took those stories I went to grad school for a while and I did some research and found out there was federal data that confirmed the stories they had told me that no one was talking about and so I persisted with that mostly because I have a thick skull that wasn't because people wanted to hear this but it was sort of, you know my effort to try to provide some numbers and analysis that would help, you know in the middle of a farm credit crisis help provide us some tools to getting out of that I think that, you know and I mean, I think I also, you know I consider some of the crises we're in right now I mean, well, let me start with a positive story when I was in France and Holland in 1984 doing a tour of farms there I learned that the French government was basically had developed an industrial policy of investing in factories in rural France so they wouldn't create an inflow of people who are leaving the land as technology said in they said, we don't want everybody coming to Paris poor we wanna have people living where they grew up in some prosperity in their rural towns and they wanted to support rural culture rural heritage, food sheds there was, you know, in 1984 and I'm not sure this is still true but French farmers would sit down every year and plan how much they would grow and they would not grow more than the economy would handle to keep prices high and there was a plan, annual planning plan facation every year in France to make sure that we wouldn't have these cycles of ups and downs and I think some of that may have been weakened by the European markets I really haven't had a chance to come back and see how that's changed but there were efforts to really say let's create equality and let's create equitable opportunity instead of completely expanding production to a level that farmers can't support themselves and they have to move and farm people or their children have to move out and if we had taken that approach internationally if we had said we're gonna invest in production in Brazil, in Indonesia, in Gabon and across Africa, industrial production as well as farm production really making those economies strong we wouldn't have the immigration crisis we're facing in Europe and the States today because we've basically taken the position that America and European countries and should dominate global trade and that we should basically expect people to move to Germany to work rather than having us invest in competing industry in Turkey or in other countries and so we've basically set up a crisis that we're now coming home to roost and of course there overlaps of the pandemic crisis because the immigration is more scary when we have the pandemic to contend with and the pandemic itself comes out of seems to be coming out if we believe the World Health Report World Health Organization Report that that's from raising wild animals in confinement in domestic terms I shouldn't say not necessarily confinement but raising that for markets rather than letting farmers letting the animals be wild so by not having systems at the local community level that were resilient, that were fair that were promoting a community self-organizing to produce its own wealth rather than expecting people to live an extractive economy we've created all these crisis we're now facing today and seeing those stories and having the chance to visit people globally really made a profound dent in my awareness I went to the Philippines in 1986 to cover land reform issues and I was kind of like naive and saying what do I do to help? How do I make this better with my reporting? And the Filipinos just said can your job is to go back to the United States and fix the United States because if they don't get their act right we can't get better and that's the same discussion we're now having in the United States today around rural issues around reparations if we can't get the basic fundamentals of the economy right blacks cannot get proper wealth they cannot people of color cannot rise they cannot have self-reliant communities of their own and farmers cannot build wealth for what they do and unfortunately we're seeing some of the same political figures Manafort and Stone cut their teeth in publicity doing work for the Marcos dictatorship in 1986 and they're still messing with us today and they got pardons from the last administration and that is very deep-seated work that's been happening behind the scenes without us talking about it without us analyzing it in ways that have really hurt millions of millions of people and cost billions of losses. So I think what's kept me going is saying that there's something story we have to tell and we have to understand and we have to really respond to if we're gonna have the democracy we deserve or we're gonna have the food we deserve if we're gonna have the trust we need to really have resilient relationships and resilient community planning. Well, I don't know if we should wrap it up and about the numbers and the commodities but I really wanna hit home you know, in some respects in the book you talk about commodities similar to how I do but there was this drastic mark in 2008 where really majority of global investments all shifted to anything to do with some form of the food systems turning that into this commodity and it really created this ripple effect worldwide where it's still going strong it's still a good investment but a cheapened food which cheapens life those who were involved in the food systems and kind of driving it as a commodity we're not really caring how far we shipped food across the world or who it was going to or how it was being produced the environmental cost, the health costs and those who were working on the products and a lot of issues still going on with that the United Nations started and last year through the Secretary General Antonio Guterres this UN Food Systems Summit and because of the pandemic it couldn't happen in 2020 but this year and June and the FAO in Rome will have a pre-meeting to the summit in New York in September there'll be the UN Food Systems Summit to talk about the very deep and complex web of our food systems and what we can do to kind of get a reform change on a global level and what roles the US plays in that and it's really shifting this view of commodity making food fair and that we paid a true cost to the total environmental cost when we produce food. In your book you kind of talk about in one of the first chapters about Arrow Alternative Energy Resource Organization based in Helena, Montana and gives wonderful story about Montana how they started to fill the food system which back in the day was very wonderful, Montana slipped from their fingers and they started to see that slipping from their fingers and some community and some resources in this organization got together and has done amazing things to really change the food system and make it the buzzword lately has been local but in your book you actually have it's almost a shift from local food to almost community-based food, the community-based food web and I wanna kind of have you tell us a little bit more about that and about those stories and why that plays such a critical role not only in your assessments but what kind of models or what kind of things are you seeing emerge out of the shift? I mean, we've heard regenerative, we've heard local those are all things are familiar but are we actually doing it? Well, I think the story in Montana is really a very timely story for our era right now and I think one of the and I really liked that you highlighted that chapter of the book and in a sense, you know that's a story about coping with a crisis much like the pandemic so it gets us back to the whole same we started with that in a very real sense we have a farm crisis brewing right now that's very similar to what we had in the 1980s but it was visible then people knew it was coming at them and farmers didn't have the other source of income or the off-arm jobs to sort of help them temper the crisis so it's a little bit more hard to wrap our fingers around it and address what I think is really brilliant about the Arrow approach in the 1980s was that farmers came to an alternate energy organization which was set up to help people with solar collectors and solar revans and stuff like that and they said, you know farmers use solar energy every day growing their crops will you help us? And they said, you know, we don't know what to do we're in this, we can't pay our loans off we don't like how we're treating our soil we don't like how the economy is treating us at all we don't know what to do, can you help? And Arrow had the wisdom to do a very pandemic wise statement they said, we don't know either but we'll help you develop solutions and they said, you know, this is not our area of expertise but we can raise some money for $200, $400, $600 at a time for a group of farmers in a community to sit down together and come up with a solution that makes sense in their world and their farm, their landscape, their climate and they basically just unleashed people to have a very creative response and they had a solution which said, okay get three or four, three or more farmers together you have one person who's a good researcher or an extension agent or someone who can kind of help with the numbers part of this and making sure the research is robust and write the results for us because not all farmers are skilled in that summer but not all. And they said, get a researcher and farmers together and come up with a solution and if we like your proposal we'll give you a small grant to run an experiment or to try to produce something. And out of that, something like 200 groups form called Farm Ranch Improvement Clubs across the state of Montana involving more than 600 people statewide they had the wisdom to not only fund the experimentation but then convene people as a statewide network every year as they got resources to do that to say what are you learning from your experiment and one of the requirements of getting grant was you had to report to the network what you learned. So that whole combination of let's have money a little bit to get a very small start started we surround you with expertise with social support, political support so that that becomes a broader issue and then it becomes an issue the state legislature has to pay more attention to and we translate what we learned in those experiments into state policy. But the fundamental step was saying I don't know what to do. And that's what the pandemic has forced us all into was saying we don't know what to do with this uncertainty we don't know how to respond to a global pandemic we have to really think things in a different way. And I did an article for the Economic Development Journal for the International Economic Development Council and the key thing where there was people responded to their constituents and said what do you need that's different than what we're doing and how do we think about that in new ways how do we come up with new configurations and out of that has come some tremendous lessons. So now in the United States at least it's second hand that we understand there are people who need food whether they're medical workers or homeless people or low wealth people they need food and we're gonna get food to them by buying it from farmers near them and conveying it to them. So we're investing in farmers to build community food trade. And that was a hard sell two years ago and now it's like everybody understands that's gotta happen. And I think that fundamental question is really that the sound bite would be we sort of have to choose in some ways between commodities and communities that we've invested heavily especially since World War II and creating a commodity system that's very robust where we can ship food thousands of miles in a matter of days very reliably. William Cronin is a historian. He's written some wonderful books. My favorite one in this line is Nature's Metropolis about the city of Chicago where he points out that commodities are really intended so that someone who's sitting in an office far away from the trade can buy a number two corn and know that it's got certain characteristics that they can count on. It's all about distant relationships impersonal transactions and mobility of food. But it's also about relatively inert food that can be stored, put on a shelf and will not lose a lot of character in the time it takes between growing, buying and using. Well, what that system doesn't handle very well is the fresh foods people are trying to raise for their neighbors that rot really quickly. That the green peppers or the onions or the, I should say more of the peppers and tomatoes which are going to spoil really quickly. And we don't have the infrastructure that allows that to be traded efficiently and effectively in communities. And we don't have the community relationships where people can know a farmer that can raise those very perishable products reliably close to them and know what the farmer's going through, help the farmer out, invest in that farm and convey that into broader commercial circles. So we've created a system where community food trade is very inefficient. Some economic developers I was talking to, on the internet a couple of days ago were saying, well, we don't care about investing in agriculture because it's such a bad way to make a living. And you really can't take that stance about food. We have to find a way to make food righteous because where you need to eat and we need to be healthy. And so now we're trying to change the discussion and say, what infrastructure do we need to create to make sure that community food trade will be robust, will be rewarding for farmers, will produce healthy products, will produce fewer externalities. And really again, it's about building trust and building a sense of mutuality that we used to have in our society across the world. It's building mutuality that we don't have in a commodity system because we're transactional. And if we don't build that, we really cannot survive as a species. So I think it's a very profound moment of saying, of taking that challenge and saying, how do we make this all better in a very global way with a lot of viruses coming at us, a lot of social turmoil coming at us, a lot of displaced people who have to be taken care of, a lot of dislocation across the world. And it makes for a very uncertain and very unsettling time but I'm hopeful right now that people understand how big these obstacles are and how big the issues are. And I hope the book will help inspire some people to say, yes, it's happened in Montana before, it's happened in Colorado before where economic developers and public policymakers bought farmland at the development value to keep it in farming. And it's happened in Northeast Indiana where economic developers decided to really build a food network that would connect people who grow food with food manufacturers. And those are all happening all over. There's a lot of stories I wish I could tell that I didn't have room to fit in that book. There's a lot of things I have to learn about this as I go forward and a lot of people whose voices don't show up in this print of your book but I also hope that the economic story helps convince people this is really worth doing and shows us what we're up against but also doesn't make us feel depressed about the potential for really moving forward. So I like the book for being a good critique and some positive stories at the same time. And if people can get through the economics, I hope they'll, I mean, I still cheer up at some of the chapters after reading them 20 times. I still feel like I can't believe people took those risks and I can't believe that people were so courageous at that time. And I hope that people who read the book will feel the same way. Well, I definitely feel that way and I love it when I read it. I've only read it twice, but it has been absolutely wonderful. I mean, it doesn't even come out until a couple more days, six more days officially. I would suggest everybody buys it. I have to put one more last plug kind of in the numbers and the economics of things. So farming as the oldest and agrarian society is the oldest economy in the world. And so when you talk, we're talking farmers, we're talking agriculture, you've got to have a good knowledge of economics and something in that system to today has went wrong over time. And so you talk about that in those numbers, you present it there. And there was this switch, not only where we're relying on farm bills and subsidies and loans from the government and some things that kind of got us in bad cycles, but we also made the decision, at least in the US and in other countries as well, to say, instead of producing locally like we used to do, how we started for our own communities, I think it's better we're gonna produce for someone else, we're gonna ship this far away and forget about the local products and just have that be our main source of why and how we're gonna do business. And now that's really started to shift and there's this huge awareness now, that it's a more resilient, it's a better model. Let's cover the local first. And then if we have some extra, we can ship some elsewhere, but really that local model and which is more community-based as you described in your chapters as well, is just a better, more resilient model of farming, of doing business in general. Doesn't mean that we're not global citizens anymore, doesn't mean that we don't have this global perspective and do that, but it means that we're keeping the soil health and the regeneration locally to make sure that we will be able to farm, we will be able to have healthy soils and that for future generations. And that kind of leads me to your thoughts, your feelings, what you've touched upon in the book and what's kind of seems to be the new buzzword, so to say regenerative agriculture. It's actually like I said in this book, Organic Manifesto from Maria Rodale, the Rodale Institute, it's really about regenerative organics. Another one from someone you probably know, Helen Noring. She wrote Local as our future. Another person I've had on the podcast as well is Douglas Gaaton. He does pictures really about getting back into local. What are your thoughts on regenerative agriculture and on organics on these movements, these buzzwords? They're really not new. Well, they're not entirely new. And I was actually, the Rodale Institute was using the word regenerative agriculture in the mid-70s when I was first learning about farming and food issues. And it just made a whole bunch of sense to me. And I started using the word and people just kind of like turned up their noses and said, what's that? And I stopped using the word mostly because it wasn't communicating with people, but I also never stopped believing that that was the right thing to do. And to me, regenerative means that farmers and communities have the means at their disposal to build the agriculture they have. They're not depending on lots of inputs from far away. They're not depending on equipment that someone else makes in a manufacturing setting that's too pricey for the returns they get from farming. But basically you have the resources at your disposal to create the menu of food items that you'd like to have. And it means being more sensitive to cultural nuance and climate nuance and being more sort of local in that way. But it was really funny in my path because after stopping to use the word, I've had a couple of people approach me this year saying, this word regenerative has come out in the last two years and it's already a buzzword and nobody knows what it means and it doesn't have any meaning to me at all, so let's find some other word. And I think that that's a tragic thing because the pace of destroying a concept is much faster than ability to kind of take it in and make it real in our lives. But to me, it really does have a profound meaning where you say with the resources we have at our disposal we can create a food system that meets our needs. And if we ask the question that way rather than how do we make the most money by shifting commodities around the globe, you get different answers. For sure. I mean, there's two chapters in your book. One is really kind of building the market power for farmers. And then the other one is really the shifting from local foods to community-based food systems. Are there some general models that you're seeing that are really helped to do that? Or is it really community-based from community community that these models can look a lot different? Or you say there's kind of, there's definitely not a one-size-fits-all, but what are you seeing over the years? Well, that's a really wonderful question. I think first of all, I think every answer is local and everyone is unique. I mean, you have the conditions my family faced in Bavaria or in the Czech Republic are very different climate conditions than they had when they came to the United States. And they actually tried to bring that life to America and found that it wouldn't survive in the political world that we were in here. They didn't come to become wealthy. They became to have a better life doing what they were used to doing. It wasn't the American dream of getting rich as an individual is about building a community life that was more robust. And people understood that was about regeneration at some level. And I think a lot of it is that the model of Montana where you basically have local experimentation would bring people together. So we have the Milan Urban Food Policy Pack, which is allow cities to think about their food system but also come together and compare notes on what's the working and what's not working and how do they measure that success and how do they do the best job they can locally. UN Food Summit, you mentioned may be a very profound forum for that too, but it really starts in people having very strong local conversations and having that trust and having that sense of we can build this with our own resources and our own ingenuity. And then coming together, not to get more famous but to really share results very honestly, we had a national effort like that called the Community Food Security Coalition where more than a thousand people would come together every year to talk about what they were trying to do experimenting with and their food issues. And people got very supportive. They really helped critique each other's work and build a lot of visibility and some political clout for that. Models like that are very effective but unfortunately that coalition failed in 2010 from some management questions but I think it's that spirit of really doing what you can. As you said, global work where you basically are doing what you can locally but also learning from each other and learning how it's different and the same in different places. But it's all about building trust and having a resilient conversation where you embrace change and embrace difference instead of fending people off and you think about what can you do the best in your area that other people can't do as well and also how do you treat everybody who lives near you in the best way possible? I'm definitely in the show notes of wanting to make sure everybody gets the book and list all the websites and places where they can find it but also wanna drive them and push them to take a look at your Crossroads Resource Center because it is a plethora of information and also where you can get into discussions with you and your colleagues to have some assessments done. If you're, I see that there are some already on your list for Salt Lake City and some other cities that are really showing some interest that they want some help there for their communities and even on a state level. I just sent off four of your assessments that you had for New Mexico specifically around Santa Fe area to a good friend of mine, Diane Hatch. She's also been on the podcast to just show her the plethora of information and data that is there. I have probably the hardest question for you today is the burning question, WTF. And I know in this 12 months of craziness we've probably all said at one time or another about what's going on, but it's not the swear word. It's actually what's the future's? Laurel, so multiple scenarios for the future. What's your vision from you specifically and your dealings, your work? What's that model? What's that shift that's really gonna get us into the future kind of a guide or roadmap? What's your idea? What do we have to look forward to? What's the futures? Well, I mean, I've never been very good at predicting the future. And I think we have really big obstacles. One of the tragedies of my book is that it's really difficult work. I have a friend who's a food organizer in Iowa, Jan Libby who came to a meeting about 10 years ago and saying, I've heard of slow food, but this work is glacial. And it's really, we're running upstream against so many forces right now where it's much easier to kind of ship food long distances than to really sell it to your neighbors. And we have people with low income who can't afford the kind of food that farmers who are young and want to raise can raise. We feel like they can't afford organic food or can't afford to sort of shop around for the best farmer. But I also think that people who are pandemic really helped us realize how lonely we are. And it helped us realize how sort of separate we have to be for a while, but also the need to reconnect is pretty strong at this point. And I think that it helped us realize that we're going to face crises like this as long as we keep generating crises in our own lives. And whether it's about a pandemic or whether it's about immigration crisis or the injustice of how black people and people of color have been treated in this country especially, we're going to have those crises. And really there's only one fundamental answer, which is to get to know each other and to be open-minded and to have some struggle with each other and get better concepts and also build a lot of trust and build some networks that really help people respond to these crises and come up with better answers. And I think that we're not in a situation where people are saying let's get back to the way it was. I think we're in a situation where people are now saying we have to develop a better future for ourselves. And we see some very hopeful signs in the US about discovering that public policy plays a pretty effective role if we do it right. We have a lot of people who don't believe that yet and it's a very difficult struggle to kind of get them to understand it. But we have so many global conversations about people trying to come up with better food systems for themselves everywhere on the planet. And we have so much realization that we have to take care of climate disruption that we've caused. We have so many conversations about how we need to have better health and we just need to be more peaceful with each other. I mean, those are very profound movements and in some ways they've been going on through human history and they've come in waves of success and also waves of frustration. One of the reasons I wrote the book is to remind us and myself that this is long-term work. It's very slow work and it goes kind of across generations. So grandchildren pick up from their grandparents the right things to do and they carry it forward. And I can learn from my ancestors from the 16th century some tricks that have been forgotten in this society. So it's a combination of looking backward and developing more heritage, more roots as well as a process of really being innovative and creative. But I think one of the troubles we have is that we often praise individual achievement more than we praise communities being strong. We often praise technology more than we praise a culture of people coming together to develop solutions for themselves and with technology they can actually control. We often believe in buying better things rather than being able to produce them on ourselves. And I think finding those balance points and finding that kind of getting back to where we know we can do for ourselves. We know we can come up with social success. We can come up with individual achievements that's balanced and harmonic with group success and we can sort of use tools that are appropriate and we can afford rather than squandering a culture for the sake of things we'd like to buy. I'm hopeful that we have a young generation growing up right now that really is very serious about making things different than they were. And it's very fun to see them roll up their sleeves and do work. My generation had its era in the 1970s trying to sort of do some of the same process. And we're revisiting some of those very same cycles. Yeah, we are. There are only three more questions I have left for you. They're all really for my guests, for my listeners, excuse me, to kind of help them get a little bit better picture of what they can do and how they can be involved and think differently and kind of what your experiences have been. Before I go into those questions, is there anything else about your book and about your work that you would like us to know that maybe we didn't get a touch today and touch upon that are vital for us to know and take away that you'd like to give us? Well, I think the thing I'd add is that I was a independent journalist back in the early 1990s when the WTO was being framed and I actually was able to get to Brussels for some of the meetings where the GATT was supposed to pass on to the World Trade Organization regime and we had a tremendous struggle at that time because people spoke up and said, this does not represent our will. This is really something where technocrats run the process and politically well-connected people have a lot more control than farmers do and there was a big turmoil about that process that I was able to cover as a journalist and do some research about at the time and the efforts to harmonize globally were often done to promote more better corporate interests and better top-down power rather than really promoting community self-determination and self-organizing and the stuff that really democracy is about. And I think we're seeing those chickens don't come home to roost right now. And we now have people who are more used to connecting globally who are technologically more savvy in terms of knowing wonderful tricks with social networking, with computers, with accounting, with all that. And I think people realize that this is not about, my favorite farm was a beautiful farm and wears nice clothes. It's not about this wonderful gourmet food business that may be down the street and sells really expensive food items. It's really about something bigger. It's about building entire systems that support good farming, whether it's flashy or not, but farming that's rewarding financially as well as protecting the environment. It's about building a system where we create the policy mechanisms that really allow communities to thrive rather than policy mechanisms extract wealth from us. It's about having the knowledge base that allows us to share information with each other in a very open way, very transparent and respectful way rather than getting prescriptions of what we need to do to serve a system that's not serving our own interests. And I think the awareness of that is quite high. I think the pandemic really gave us a wake up of saying, we have to be prepared for disruption. We have to be prepared for the fact this is complex. We have to learn to think on much more complex weight lines than we have before. We have to learn about resilience and trust more than about what's the new shiny object. And that's a tough struggle because people are still running after the shiny objects. But I'm feeling some hope that the people I've been talking to for decades are starting coming around now because they're realizing that this is about taking care of the people near us. This is about building systems that allow people to self-organize rather than about a system that can be imposed and translated everywhere else. I think it's fundamentally an awareness that we need to build community more than have better commodity trade. It's unbelievable how many farmers know it but how many farmers don't know it. And I don't know if it's an equal balance that growing your own food is like printing your own money in many, many respects not only to give you resilience and during hard times but it is an economy in and of itself whether you're doing it for yourself or whether you're doing it for your community it's a very powerful and powering thing. The last three questions I have for you really is if there was one message you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that had the power or has the power to change their life what would it be your message? I don't know if I have a single message like that I think that, I mean, for one thing I think my insight from my book is that this is a series of very small steps that are taken by people against great odds that over time develop enough scope to really shape a bigger discussion. And I think one thing is I see a lot of people giving up and it's hard for me some days to not give up too because the obstacles can be quite strong but first of all I'd say this is long-term work it comes in cycles and it goes. It's very much the heart of our culture when I look back on my ancestors from Alsace or my ancestors from Germany or Bavaria they framed their cultures around what was easy to grow in our place and what can we celebrate our culture around because we knew we could grow it and we knew that reliably we could make it part of a cultural fabric. And that process has been eradicated for generations. So, I'm not, you know we kind of have to get back to that place where we think that culture is something we produce rather than something we consume. And it's based, you know all of this is based on us interacting with a landscape becoming indigenous in a certain way, if you will where we say we have heritage that survives across generations about how we live in our land and our climate even now as it's changing how do we really learn how to be adapting to those changes? What should young innovators, journalists, farmers in your field be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make a real impact? Well, I think the thing I would say is that there's a tremendous core of young journalists or podcasters or people who are doing social networking around food, around all these very profound issues around injustice, around reparations. I mean, there's a really tremendous ferment right now and we have a whole re-energized cry for equality especially out of Minneapolis where I live after the recent events of last year. I think I would just say mostly say that some of the stories are exciting to tell are stories about something you can buy or something that, you know a famous personality or a person who rises to sort of a significant leader and those are good stories to tell and that's great but also the more quiet work that happens between the scenes is sort of how do people really get along? How do we build the chance for communities to determine their own future rather than just sort of elevate people who become famous and move away or they become prominent but they don't really stay rooted where they live. Those are tough issues. They're tough issues for me to face in my life given how much the potential to being rooted has been taken away from me in my time. So I think I would say think about how to be rooted and trusting and respectful and how to really have some of those struggles about concepts in ways that are really fair but also nourish a better life. What have you experienced or learned in your journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start? Wow, I think I was groomed by my high school and my parents and my generation in so many ways to kind of leave home forever and to go somewhere that would be more visible and more successful. And at the time, I'm actually living in the house I grew up in so I actually was able to come home to Roost in a way that many Americans don't have that privilege anymore. Apparently because my parents were old and they could connect me back to a reality. My great-grandfather meter was born in 1833 so I have amazing scope in my family where sometimes generations are now 15 years or 16 years. So that combination of sort of having rootedness and having stories to tell and a sense of heritage which gave me a kind of contrasting narrative to go away to college, get make a lot of money and become famous or become successful in some other way. I think having a robust community life more than I had would have made it easier for me to negotiate those choices. I think having a sense that, boy, being indigenous is a privilege. It's not something, it's not a mark of savagerness and kind of knowing that we can really create a life that's rooted in a reality in our climate, in our culture in a way that's pretty profound. I wish I had known better than that. And I probably picked up more of that than a lot of my peers did just because of how I grew up but I wish I had known more. I think I wish I had known more people who believed in conflict resolution who could really sort of walk me through resolving differences rather than trying to sky around them or trying to bully people away from them. And those are still difficult lessons for me to learn but I think we have some young people who are very schooled in all those who are turning the tide. And that's one of the reasons I dedicated the book to the new generation of leaders coming forward that give me a lot of hope and a lot of energy. Well, you're a hero of mine, Ken. I really appreciate your book. I appreciate all your work and your assessments over the years and what you're continuing to do. And I hope you get back to even more coming out of the pandemic that you'll get back to some not normalcy but to the great work that you're doing in the field. And I really thank you for letting us all inside of your ideas and into your book and thank you for being on the shelf. Thank you so much. Well, thank you. I think you're the first person I know I've read the book twice. So thank you for that close attention to the book and for giving me a chance to talk with you about it. I really enjoyed this conversation, a great deal. Thank you very much. Take care, Ken. Bye-bye. Thank you, Mark.