 Does this practice adapt to climate change? And to which challenges? Does it sequester carbon in the soil or in perennial biomass or both? Does it reduce nitrous oxide, methane, carbon dioxide? And does it increase production? We really are looking for things that can do all of those things. And a lot of these practices do. And I think we, again, we want to credit ourselves for that. But also, we want to draw on all those funding streams to support these kinds of it, that there's water quality benefits and migrating wildlife benefits and pollinator benefits. And all these things are there in these practices some more than others. I don't think we're appreciating what good farming really does for all of the dimensions of what it does. Eric Jones-Meier is my guest on this episode of Inside Idea, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Eric is the award-winning author of Paradise Lot in Perennial Vegetables and the co-author of Edible Forest Gardens, as well as a contributor for Drawdown, Paul Hawkins' book. He is an appointed lecturer at Yale University and an international trainer presenting in English and Spanish in the US, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, and the Caribbean. Eric has studied permaculture and useful plants of the world for well over two decades. He's managed an urban farm project for five years, ran a seed company, and co-developed a farm business training curriculum that has now used in eight US states and three Canadian provinces. Eric's most recent book, The Carbon Farming, a global toolkit for stabilizing the climate with tree crops and regenerative agriculture practices, which was backed by supporters through a Kickstarter campaign. It's wonderful, but it's actually even more present is The Carbon Farming Solution, his book that was probably a precursor, if I understand right, Eric, to the Drawdown. Well, yeah, I began work for Drawdown just as I was wrapping up work on that book. So in some ways, I think of the agricultural parts of Drawdown as my sequel to The Carbon Farming book in that I learned so much more working at Drawdown. It was so interesting and exposed me to so many other dimensions of climate change mitigation, including those that touch on agriculture. Well, welcome to the podcast and I'm so glad you can make it, thank you for being here. Thanks very much for having me, it's a real pleasure. We really wanna talk about this wonderful book, The Carbon Farming Solutions. It's such a wonderful read. Don't let any of my readers, I'm holding it up for those who are on listening and audio. Let it scare you away, it is about 500 pages, but it is more in the direction of academic and very scientific, very factual, a lot of research in there, but it's written in such an eloquent, wonderful way, easy to understand for the layperson, for those farmers who are looking to get into carbon farming and other solutions of not just agroforestry, agroecology, mix use, perennials, and we're gonna kind of talk about that and go into that much more. I tickled on it in your bio, but I'm always on the show talking about the Drawdown and Paul Hawken and you are also in there as a fellow researcher, advisor for certain areas, was it specific numbers on the solutions that you were specifically working on and can you tell us a little bit more about that work and what it looked like for you? And as you mentioned, you had some learning lessons. Sure, well, I was there as a senior fellow for maybe four years or so and our team, the research team, our job was to run the numbers that ended up being used in the book. So we just compiled data from all over the world from all kinds of scientific sources and also from some industry and government publications and my first job was to choose which solutions, well, to recommend a slate of solutions related to agriculture and land use and with my coworker, their mom Tamara, we were in charge of all of the world's land. So that was quite a big task all the agriculture but also forestry and ecosystem protection and restoration. So we had a large mandate and a lot to look at. So we together we recommended a set of solutions to Paul and others and went forward then with those that were selected to really flesh out the numbers so that we could say how widely are they practiced now? What are the plausible and optimistic rates at which they might grow, continue to grow? And what are their climate and economic impacts and what would that therefore look like by 2050 in terms of their impact? So it was super interesting. And we actually build a model to integrate all of those together. So sometimes you'll see a particular solution like a forestation or biochar or now it's BEX where they'll sort of assume that they can have all of the world's biomass or all of the world's land. And at Drawdown, we actually mapped out all of the world's land and said what was happening on each piece of it so that you're not really double counting. We also allocated for all of the world's food and all of its biomass to say how much is available for other things. And that does give us in some ways a more modest impact, a more conservative impact for some solutions as a result but I think a more realistic overall, really an integrated approach that looks at, well, how much material is available for compost, let's say, or how much biomass is available for one of our solutions, newer solutions since the book is looking at insulation. How much biomass is available for insulation and how much is available for bioplastic and so on, which was super, super interesting, really, really very fun to work on that piece. I bet there are so many learning lessons, some new research, some things that you hadn't heard of. So since the Drawdown, there's been the Drawdown review. It's a free download. How much did you have part on the update on that Drawdown review, I guess? Sure, I was certainly part of that but I wasn't working as intense with Drawdown during that period. So I worked on some of the revisions of some of those solutions quite a bit on some of them. But really, Monta led the team during that period on doing those updates. But the numbers are more sound and more updated. New information is being published all the time so it's really helpful to be able to keep it fresh. And that's Drawdown's hope is to keep refreshing every couple of years with the latest information on these things because it is such a rapidly changing area. Project Drawdown is really kind of continuing to evolve and develop and be more robust with the data and the resources being done. And so even though it was kind of brought to light by Paul and it's now taken over by Jonathan Foley who's kind of the executive director and that but there's more reports and more pushes. There's now the science kind of division. There's a acronym for the science division, a Project Drawdown and they have their own site events kind of as well. I don't know if you've participated in them. One I was really interested in for myself was the report is farming our way out of the climate crisis that you participated in, which was very specific in farming and what could be done there and some things. Can you tell us a little bit more about your contribution with that and what some learning lessons and things that came out of that were? Yeah. John asked us to put together a white paper on sort of the state of the yard on agricultural mitigation. And maybe we can touch later. There are other things that matter like reducing demand and so on that are also relevant. But here we were looking at what's the state of the yard on emissions reduction and carbon sequestration and in particular what is sort of known and not known in those areas. And he has this really great framing that I've really appreciated about that, which is he says, if you imagine that climate change is like a sink in your house that's overflowing, the water coming out of the faucet is the emissions. And the first thing you do when your sink is overflowing is turn off the faucet, that's reducing emissions. And then you come in with a mop and you mop up the water, that's carbon sequestration. So you have to do both, but you definitely want to reduce emissions first and sequestering carbon without reducing emissions doesn't make a whole lot of sense because in this case, there's only so much the mop can hold or whatever. It's not a perfect metaphor. But so while we did look at a number of emissions reduction solutions in the drawdown process and we looked at the emissions reduction impact of some of our solutions that are mostly carbon sequestration, there's a lot of other research that maybe isn't far enough along to actually be a drawdown solution yet, but is very promising. So in this particular publication I looked, well, we broke down what are the main sources of emissions from livestock. So from agriculture with livestock being by far the biggest, there's the emissions of methane from remnant livestock, which is by far the biggest. And then when you add up all the different kinds of manure that's the next highest. Then we have synthetic fertilizers, then methane from rice and then there's sort of an other category that has a whole bunch of things. So for each of those we looked at what are the approaches to reduce emissions? And there are lots of them. They're maybe not mature enough to be a proper drawdown solution yet you need to be at a certain scale and have a growth trend and have data available and things like that. But I'm very enthusiastic about a number of different kinds of feed additives people are looking at to reduce enteric methane from remnant livestock. That seems very exciting. It's not yet really a mature technology but there are a number of very promising studies. So one of the things I'm really interested there is in certain kinds of systems where you integrate livestock with trees, which I write about a lot in the carbon farming book. In some of those, the animals are consuming the leaves of trees like some of the traditional tree hay and pollarded fodder systems you see in Europe but especially some of the tropical systems do a lot of that. And the tannins in the leaves of those trees reduce methane quite substantially. So that's really interesting. And then there are also certain grasses that are used in tropical systems that reduce nitrous oxide from the urine of ruminants. So there's a whole bunch of things like that that are out there that may be stackable. And then some of the practices we wrote about have additional impacts that we didn't credit them for because they're just not, we're not really ready to quantify them yet but there are lots of, like when you reduce tillage, you reduce the emissions of nitrous oxide from decomposing crop residues, things like that. So there's this whole world of, often why I think in the carbon farming world, we've been so focused on carbon sequestration that we're not looking at the emissions reduction impact of our practices. And really we could be giving ourselves credit more widely. And on the other side of that, I think there are emissions reduction, there are emissions issues associated with some of our practices like managed grazing that may be in the regenerative agriculture world we've been a little in denial about. And it's useful to just take a good square look at that and say, what can be done to address this? What does the science tell us about what can be done to address this? And we also write a little bit in there about things that farmers are excited about that science hasn't yet taken a good enough look at like integrations of crops and livestock which so many farmers are so enthusiastic about right now. And it's not farmers fault that science hasn't studied those things yet, that's science's fault. So I'm trying to use Drawdown's platform a little bit to encourage research in directions following farmers lead on some of these kinds of things. That's so beautiful. And I promise you that unless you want to we'll tickle a little bit more maybe just touch on that but I'm glad we got it out of the way in the beginning because Paul and the book and the project Drawdown they get enough on their own and they're obviously and well-company with your research and data and help and pulling together a lot of things for around the world but I really wanted to just highlight your expertise what you've touched on over the years in the book and your work in conjunction with Paul. The last thing is, I noticed that there's this climate collaborative almost like a team where I see you and Paul and Daniel Nierenberg and a few other greats on as well. I don't know if that's a newer collaborative or if that's something that you're kind of on the advisory board or review board somehow with them. Well, I'm afraid I really don't know because it's early in the morning. We mean business, climate coalition I think it has something to do with the UN Global Compact but I noticed that you're just all over with your wisdom but I mean really I just wanted to touch upon your expertise and let the listeners know about the drawdown and what you were involved in but we truly are here to speak about your book which is a fabulous read and to go deep but we need to start kind of simple and lead people into the depth that we wanna go to and the way I'd like to do that is obviously I believe my listeners now have a good enough with your bio and what you've just explained how complex this is, what's involved in farming and capturing carbon and kind of changing the way we look at agriculture and our food systems and how that affects not climate but human health and many other things but because you've been working in that area and you've done things with food for us and urban gardening and many, many other things that you've done, you've just experienced with the rest of the world this absolute crazy time. So not only pandemic, black lives matters the Asian racism, the crazy inauguration many other crazy things during this time has any of that prior research that work you're thinking about how and where we get our food how we should be doing that because you've applied it into your life because you've been writing about it proven to be a better operating system a better model for life to help you get you and others or to give wisdom to others to get us through these hard times into one that's a little bit better for humanity but more so just for you how have you weathered this crazy time and where you say, boy, I'm glad I started this and did this a while ago because I wasn't as stressed about running out of food or running out of these things and I just it was it's a better system a better operating model. Sure. Well, to start in the very personal my home garden here we've been here now for 17 years and we're on a 10th of an acre so the garden is about 15 by 30 meters very small but very diverse, very dense very high in carbon and we're coming now on one year with fruit every single day in the garden including the greenhouse where in Massachusetts so our winters are very colder colder than German winters and we've been able to have a whole year of fruit every single day and leaves every single day leaves every day we've had done for years but now our greenhouse citrus are mature enough that we had some every single day all winter and it's been especially last in the beginning of the pandemic it was so helpful to when it was really just me and my son here to have so much excellent produce available eggs from our chickens and fruits and stuff our greenhouses to brag about it for a moment it was based on a design by a farm near her triple brook farm and it was built by my friend Jonathan so I didn't build it but I got to live with it it's 80% recycled material so only the plastic and the fasteners and stuff are new it's completely unheated and has no electricity so it's passively ventilated, it's passively heated it's very well insulated on the north side and even though our winter temperatures have go as low as about 23 below Celsius we only get two or three frosts in there every winter so we're able to grow tangerines and lemons and kumquats with no heat whatsoever and that I think is a really good model that a lot of people have been looking to it's a lot of work to maintain it would be if it had a few fans and the thermostat in there would be lovely for sure but just to do it really with nothing at all is so it just makes winter a lot more interesting and when you don't wanna be going to the grocery store or there are shortage of things at the grocery store to have that fresh food really it really does make a big difference we were really very pleased now I've got mushrooms coming on and asparagus and our first fruits are about to come on out in the garden the honeyberries are coming but we still have citrus left in the greenhouse so we're gonna carry carry forward all the way through for a whole year for the first time ever for us so you have to wait for the trees to get big enough to do something there so that has been great it's been a really good year in that department and there's been a fair amount of helping each other out with folks here in town that we care about we've given away a lot of produce and things like that to people who don't have enough who couldn't get fresh vegetables and things like that so it does really it gives you an appreciation for what seems maybe like a lifestyle choice or a hobby starts to become a lot more real I guess I'll say that about it yeah I mean you come out at a much different angle than most people but I come from farming as well organic farming so I probably can't even speak to it but a lot of people who aren't connected to food who've never grown food themselves are only used to getting it from the grocery stores just don't realize what they're missing and what connection it has and to take a hand in growing some of your own food even if it's just simple microgreens or sprouts or simple things that you see the normal victory gardens or vegetable and fruit orchards or trees that people do as an experiment or just to decorate their yards with it's a transition I used to live for a short period of time in Beverly, Massachusetts so I know exactly about the cold winters and what it's like up on the North Shore of Massachusetts and I also am familiar with what kind of a plot of land you have and I've seen your videos and it's absolutely like a food forest might not be right but you have a lot on that small space and I think you do it really right and I appreciate you sharing that I would highly recommend that listeners go and watch some of those videos some of the tours that you take and I think that answers my question good enough that kind of how you can weather rough times you know, even though maybe it might affect you for sure in other ways but there's some other models to be used on different spaces I also got a lemon tree right in front of me indoors that provided, oh geez, I don't know at least 30 lemons just now now it's got probably not as many 20 buds on it but little lemons growing but it's a fabulous thing to have that connection to know how and to start thinking about where does that food come from and how would it be grown even if it's grown thousands of miles away what would that process look like and even if you understand it on a small scale in your home, your garden or whatever and that there's another on the other side of the United States Ron Finley, he's kind of a gangster gardener and he's growing your own food is like printing your money and he's gotten in a lot of trouble with growing food on the sidewalks and issues with public lands and things and the reason I bring that up is I've seen your videos and how you're situated in your art and some people who don't have any clue on what it is, what you're growing what you have might look at a food yard or someone who's growing a lot of food in the yard and especially using that when posting and using materials like letting that fall and kind of to regenerate the soils and different things they might say boy that yard looks messy and there's no lawn and things like that have you ever run into those things or any issues similar to like Ron and others? Yeah we have, I would say much less than in some places because this isn't, there's a lot of neighborhoods in the United States where you're not even allowed to grow food in your front yard. My city is, we say Rust Belt Town it's a former industrial town and most of the industry is gone. So it's not a wealthy town so a lot of people leave us alone there's other problems but they did at one point come along and tell us we're not allowed to grow food between the sidewalk and the street anymore. We were growing sorghum and cow peas there which love that hot asphalt conditions really well. But at the same time they had a program where they were giving away street trees and one of them was a juneberry tree which has edible fruit they didn't know that so they gave us a fruit tree to replace the food we were growing and they didn't know that they were giving us free food. So that worked out very well that turned out very elegant but yeah people don't like seeing all the sticks on the ground and the heavy mulch on the ground and things like that and we have a high residue system all cut branches off the trees and just lay them there on the ground. It looks like a forest floor and people don't like that but our organic matter has gone from 0% when we started it was a fresh construction site to 9% in you know that was in after 11 years. So I would say that's a very powerful result. That is very, very powerful. It's enough to increase our water storage roughly our sole water storage to about one tanker truck size. So mostly our neighbors don't care. They certainly haven't started to do what we do but they don't call in complaints against us or anything but it is a really different kind of guarding. I think you could do what we do in a way that more successfully mimics a suburban landscape. We really went all in on the crazy extreme diversity high density kind of approach but I think you could take a lot of pieces of what we do and make it a little more digestible or just easier for people to approach. It's very hard to go from a full lawn to we have about 250 species of perennial plants right now. So more than 50 that make edible fruit more than 70 perennials with edible leaves. Lots of plants for beneficial insects and pollinators, lots of ground covers, lots of nitrogen fixing species, lots of native plants. It's a very, very sort of extremely ecological garden, maybe more intensive than necessary but that's kind of what we like. And we grow some annuals too. We have space to grow tomatoes and carrots and watermelons and stuff. Those are wonderful crops, two corn, you know? But the thing is that if you go to much of the tropics, everyone gardens like this and nobody thinks twice about it. My mother-in-law in Guatemala has a garden like that with avocado and cherry and papaya and chaiote vines. It's like a perennial squash climbing the trees and medicinal plants underneath and plants she uses to wrap tamales and another plant for tying the tamales and tilapia and chickens. That's just gardening there, that's ordinary. So it's really, I think, more common to garden this way than not around the world but it's certainly not normal here, that's for sure. Yeah. In the U.S. it's really rough, it's not a common place. And Germany where I'm at and you have some, a little bit of heritage from Germany as well, it's a whole different thing. So most people buy these separate garden houses that they kind of buy in and then they can go to this garden house and it turned into something where you could grow food into more like flowers and some do trees and apples and different fruit trees and things. I had Sam von Aiken on the show. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He did a very interesting thing at Davos last year and does it around the world but he does this tree of 40 fruits and he does this grafting, takes these trees and then he grafts all these different species and they actually work. It actually really works and he's getting, you know, the not only are the blossoms and the color changes on this just amazing but, you know, he's getting 40 different types of fruits on some of these trees and has some real rare species. So it's really amazing what you can do and I don't know if that's a whole another tangent to get into grafting and splicing because, you know, isn't that just the original movement of some form of modification anyway? I mean, over years you kind of have that process occur that's totally outside of the lab but, you know, there's some really neat things that you can do and Ron Finley is another case that I just see some amazing things that gives people not only things to get their mind off but produces food during times of hard times which is going back to the old Victory Gardens. So I really appreciate you sharing that. I've seen the videos, I've seen that and I would suggest anybody go and look at those. I believe that's a nice lead-in to this very deep book and those of us who are kind of really interested in farming and environment and the climate have really been looking and hearing. So, you know, oh, it's not the oil, coal and gas industry that's one of the biggest causes of human suffering and climate change and greenhouse gas emissions that could be agriculture, could be food waste, things like that. And so a lot of people are looking at us and then eyes really light up when they say, boy, Bill Gates is doing a lot of land grabbing starting to do carbon farming and then you hear these buzzwords and there's all these carbon farmers popping up and people, you know, trying to heal the soils and then we had the documentary come out last year about our soils. I can't even think of the name now. There's been a bunch of there is Kiss the Ground. Kiss the Ground, that's from Rodale Institute. Yeah, there's been lots of them. Yeah, and so you're hearing this and this movement and your book's been out there for a while. I think it was an inspiration for a lot of them. Lead us into this as best you can of how we understand this, why are you going in this direction? And then I wanna go into how this has even started to evolve even more and some more learning lessons as well. Sure, great. Well, let's see, let me go back. So I've been, you know, studying perennial crops and growing perennial crops and in these kinds of food forest type systems since, you know, about 1990, so quite some time now. And, but my day jobs have often been in just more ordinary agriculture or organic agriculture type stuff, you know. I was running this urban farm here and I read up a by Tim Flannery called Now or Never which is the climate change book, a really little climate change book, but it just laid it all out so very nicely. And I heard him say, or I read in there that he says, you know, trees have great power to impact climate change, mitigate climate change, but there's only so much room for them because we need to leave room to grow food. And I thought, well, I know something about that we can combine tree growing and food production. Maybe I have something to offer here and ended up with any year I had left the job to start work on what would become the carbon farming book. It did take quite a few years to write. It was, it's a long one, but what I was really trying to figure out is how does carbon sequestration work and what kinds of practices do we have in the toolkit in order to do that? And then to look particularly at some of the perennial crops with real promise. And then just a very little bit to talk about some of the, how do you actually make this happen in terms of policy and economics and finance and adoption and those kinds of things, which I've learned a lot more about since then. And that the really cool thing is it's just photosynthesis, you know, they plants remove carbon dioxide, it's so cool and gets stored in the soil and the organic matter and it gets stored in the biomass of perennial plants. And I really essentially, none of the practices we have in the carbon sequestration toolkit were developed to sequester carbon. They were developed because they're good for the farm or they're good for the surrounding ecosystem. And that's really good news. We're not trying to make people do something strange or awkward on their farm. We're just trying to assist people to do things that they may have always wanted to do anyway and weren't able to for lack of money or tenure or just time when you're farming, you know, just time to get anything done is pretty hard. So we really looked, I really looked in the book, you know, at the range of things from better ways to grow annuals like cover cropping and compost application into ways to integrate perennials with annuals like various kinds of agroforestry systems. I'm just starting to work on a book on that now better grazing, integrating trees with grazing and then a whole of the fully perennial systems and then a whole suite of sustainable land management practices that it's just amazing that there are so many ways to do this. And while the discussion has often really only focused on depending on where you live, you know, conservation agriculture or cover crops or organic farming or regenerative agriculture or grazing, there is such a huge toolkit available and some do have much more powerful impact per hectare than others, but those often tend to be more expensive to adopt and take more years to become profitable. So their adoption rates are lower. So on the one hand, you want as many people as possible to be doing those extreme carbon practices, but on the other hand, we'd like lots of farmers to just add cover crops at all in the first place would be great, right? So it's sort of a multiple approaches need to be happening all at the same time. And the first step for most farms isn't planting rows of trees in the middle of their crops, right? It's cover crops and then in terms of emissions reduction, you know, reducing your nitrous oxide at least using the right amount of fertilizer then changing the amount of fertilizer. And then maybe, you know, some windbreaks or some riparian buffers around the edge of the farm maybe contour strips of perennial grasses coming through if you're on a slope. There's sort of a gradual series of steps you can go through and most of the world's farmers are still at step zero, you know, haven't even begun that journey at least here in the US. That's very much the case. So I really tried not to write it as a prescription or saying this is the best or the right thing just to give farmers a tool to say, what do you want to, you know, what's right for you? What's right for your farm? And also, and I put all the references in and the science in because I wanted to influence the policymakers and the world of finance, the people who lend to agriculture. And I won't claim the credit for it particularly, but policy and finance have really begun to shift in this direction over the last, you know, five or six years. Again, not so much due to my efforts, but people like Ratan Lal and some of these other folks have really made a tremendous impact in that area. And I'm really surprised by how it's on the one hand, it's all going so rapidly, much more rapidly than I could have anticipated. On the other hand, it's not nearly on pace to meet the carbon budget requirements. So I'm both very pleased and very discouraged by how things are going at the same time. I imagine that your perspective is somewhere around there as well. It really is. We, in some respects, I feel like we have put our foot on the exponential roadmap with some doubling downs and some ambitions that we've started. As far as food goes agriculture, I think we're still a little ways away in that respect. And it really, as you said, it takes all of us, it takes many different facets of tools that are in the toolbox, we need to use them all because just doing one or two isn't enough to even tickle the surface of the problem. In your book at the first, you really start out about the climate crisis. You talk about the IPCC reports, you talk about what's going on in our world or environment. The FAO said in 2015, with a traditional industrial agriculture, we have about 70 harvest, 60 harvest left. That was in 2015 and they've since come out last year and the pandemic says we have about 45 harvest left to a traditional industrial agriculture. We're seeing that it's going back to Roosevelt's time, the dust balls that's ruining our soils, it's ruining our waterways and creating a lot of ripple effect problems. And I would say, yeah, the industrial agriculture is a big chunk, a big chunk that are kind of still stuck in the dark ages of agriculture and they're stepping on their own tail and kind of ruining the entire industry for themselves and for the rest of the world. But the small hold farmers, the ones that you talked about that for them, it's just gardening, but they have chickens, they have diversity, they have trees, they have all these things there and they might just be feeding themselves or their small community and not a city, but they're actually have the biggest potential. And so the reason I bring that up, I wanna know a little bit more about the science that did that science or did that climate crisis draw you more into saying, hey, here's a great solution, was that on the radar before? And then secondly, how do you get farm, I know a lot of farmers and I also know a lot in different countries, Island and China and Vietnam and different areas. How in heck do you get them to read a book like this or how do we create programs that are helping them to transition to some of these new ways of looking at the way carbon farming or agriculture in general? Or well, in some ways, the first thing to do is look at what people in a region are already excited about and already doing and what's already spreading among them. So like in the Sahel region in Africa, as farmer managed natural regeneration which is just like the most exciting story in regenerative agriculture to me in the whole world. And then you say, okay, well, what can we do to accelerate the spread of that rather than saying, no, you have to come in and do this other thing that Eric wrote about in his book. I did write about farmer managed natural regeneration but how can we assist you to do that? What kind of, so I work with an organization these days called the Global Evergreening Alliance. It's a very large global effort based in Australia to encourage the really enormous scaling up of agroforestry, better annual cropping, better grazing, forest restoration, these kinds of practices. And our first project, I'm a volunteer fellow with them. Our first project is an $85 million effort to enhance farmer managed natural regeneration in seven countries in Africa. Just basically to say to the organizations that are already doing that work and already spreading that practice, what kind of resources do you need to scale this up and move forward? So I think in some ways that's my preferred thing is to look at what farmers are already excited about and say, great, let's just help you do that. What do you need to do that? Do you need training? Do you need money for staff? Do you need whatever demonstration farms and new places? Whatever, you know, all the different things that one might need in order to do that. And I also think one of the first things I think actually is to start shifting subsidies away from the practices that are bad for the climate. Because that starts to free up a lot of money for other things globally as of about two years ago, the world was at about $700 billion a year in agricultural subsidies. And the report I read said only about two of that was environmentally friendly practices. So it's not that there isn't a budget there. It's that it's being spent on other things. So can we shift some of that stop paying for the bad stuff? It's probably step one and start to encourage other things. And then there's a whole range of ways to encourage practices that setting up of demonstration farms to show some of the new practices. Because often there are really great practices that farmers don't know about that they might really like, that they just have not had the opportunity to see. So one of the things I'm hoping to do is get farmers, get some money for farmers in the United States who are in the regenerative agriculture world to visit some of the farms doing agroforestry in France and in China, where you can see just amazing things being done in a climate similar to theirs. And also to get some people to Columbia, which is the world headquarters of Silva pasture to see that just absolutely phenomenal things that are happening there. Because if you can't go see a farm near you, you could at least go see one that's doing something similar. You could take a couple of farmer leaders from one place to go see and then come back and then get to tell their groups about it, things like that. So I think we can provide some, those kinds of pieces and there's, can we encourage, can we put more money in payment for environmental services for governments to pay people to do things? And then there are various kinds of access to markets and maybe access to better prices. That's another whole thing. And then there's, there's carbon markets, carbon offset markets, which are very, you know, thorny, challenging issue, but certainly we're starting to see that coming into play in agriculture really just last year. We began to see that starting to show some real payments for farmers in some places. So there is the real diversity of practices. And I really believe in a diversity of practices. I don't think carbon offsets alone or more, or premium prices alone or payment for environmental services alone is enough. I think we really need to go aggressively at all of those different kinds of practices because different farmers need different things in order to, to make it happen. There's so many different kinds of farmers in the world that, but I like looking at successes and saying, okay, what can we, what can we learn from that? And there's so many different kinds of successes. We can look at really state driven things like, like the restoration of land in Western China. That was very much a government dictated practice. We could look in Cuba where there was sort of a partnership between a grassroots effort among farmers and the state and university working together. We can look now we're starting to see some buyer, buyer driven adoption like here in the U.S. we have a, a macaroni and cheese company, Annie's macaroni and cheese who are paying for the conversion of something around maybe it's 40,000 hectares of organic wheat production at Danone and Francis starting to invest a lot of money because they, they want to be able to buy those projects that are products that are grown in a climate friendly way and they can't get it. So they're financing their own suppliers, their own producers to make those changes. So that's something I did not anticipate when I wrote the carbon farming book or I certainly didn't think it would happen so soon. So there are some encouraging signs. Like that. So that's a little bit of a walk through some of those kinds of things I'm seeing around the world. We see some philanthropy too. Some big foundations starting to, to get very excited about this and put some money into it. That's, that's great. So, and some of the big investment, some investors are getting very serious about it. And the challenge is often how can a large impact investing company. Access farmers who are so independent and on their own and often not aggregated in groups of the size necessary to accept that kind of investment. So people are trying to figure that out as well. I think right now you probably know a lot more about that than me as a part of a large farming family. Yeah. Was there, I mean, as you touched upon those things leading into the book, the climate crisis and those are more things or something that occurred. Why you kind of built built in first kind of really talking about climate IPCC and things before you moved into. A little more depth of that. It was partly that I needed to educate myself. I had a lot of experience with that. I had a lot of experience with that. I had a lot of experience with the speed on things. And I. I really felt at that time. That I hadn't seen a good. Summary of all the issues about what's happening. What's causing it. What's agriculture's role in that. What are the projected impacts. And what can be done about it. And I think that's the issue. And I think that the ACC's 1.5 degrees report, I thought was a really great. Tight summation of things. And then their, their land and climate report. That was what maybe two years ago. Now. I thought it was really great as well. I read that from cover to cover. And was a thousand pages long. Yeah. And I think the world is in a different place now in terms of understanding. And yet still, you know, the nature of what's happening. In the past. It's really been a big representation the other day for some. Some gardeners at a botanic garden and they didn't know what the projections were for their own part of the world for climate change. And it is. When you look at those maps. It's very scary. Even in the. Places that have, are the least likely to be disrupted. It's still very scary what happens in agriculture. the world we're seeing and great projections for increase in rainfall intensity has a really big impact on erosion. So some practices like cover cropping, like reducing tillage, like some of the agroforestry practices if they're on contour, or converting to perennial crops can really or just increasing soil organic matter are not only important for mitigation but are really important adaptation strategy to dealing with intense rainfall events followed by long droughts and for an individual farmer I think adaptation is so much more important than mitigation no one's going to stop climate change on their farm but everyone has to adapt to climate change on their farm and it's that's why it's nice that so many of these practices do both and that's another piece I'm working on right now is trying to to say okay does this practice adapt to climate change and to which challenges does it sequester carbon in the soil or in perennial biomass or both does it reduce nitrous oxide methane carbon dioxide and does it increase production we really are looking for things that can do all of those things and a lot of these practices do and I think we again we want to credit ourselves for that but also we want to draw on all those funding streams to support these kinds of that there's water quality benefits and you know migrating wildlife benefits and pollinator benefits and all these things are there in these practices some more than others you know I don't think we're appreciating what good farming really does for all of the dimensions of what it does I love that you're you really give us this holistic systems view and I I believe my listeners are now getting where we're going with this all because it's it doesn't do the whole food systems any justice to just focus in on one siloed or one one one aspect of of the system because it's very complex and it has to do with a big diversity of all sorts of different farmers types of farmers types of crops annuals perennials industrial ag to small whole farmers to victory gardens you know it's it's everything and then you also need to touch on well how does that affect our waterways how does that affect our soils how does it affect transportation logistics also fuel industry chemical industry and many things like that and you you kind of take us it's I don't want to say it's it is a very technical there's a lot of data a lot of valuable things in in in there but you also take us on this journey to give us this enlightenment this better understanding of how complex our food systems are in general it's not just agriculture in general and and so I think you do it more than tickling but you you as you kind of go through the climate and the politics and and how those systems you touch on on a few things before you really get into what okay what here are the solutions bam bam bam they're all over they're local they're for your diesel these could work these are possible fits and and a nice both sides of the coin explanation and many respects and in that you you touch upon one kind of agriculture and food being a commodity it's kind of traded back and forth and you don't say it exactly like that but you say okay we're shipping out thousands of tons of potatoes out to other countries exporting them at the same time thousands of tons of potatoes are being imported in what that doesn't make sense and it's so true not just with potatoes with many many different types of crops or even certain types of crops that are just sent somewhere else to be washed and packaged and then sent back in and there's these just inefficiencies are some things that are just don't make any sense occurring and the reason I the reason I bring up this section of the book is because it kind of also ties into going local or localization or building community food webs or building community farm webs so that the farmers are are first doing what they traditionally did taking care of the local community first before the shipping product off clear across the world and and and you also address it that also has to do with labor you know who who are your work workers that are going to come in and help you harvest and package and process and and take care of those goods that you're producing and so I would like to get your touch a little bit more on on that aspect that we need to understand better but what are you seeing in trends of maybe going back to local and building these food webs I have I had one gentleman a wonderful guy Ken meter on the on the podcast he wrote a book called building community food webs and what he does especially in the United States he does assessments of different counties and states and areas around the world where he goes and says you know your you guys are shipping this much out of the state and this much out of the country and it requires this many inputs and what's the balance sheet does that make sense could you make that money here could you help the community here could you heal our soils here and is the return big enough to to justify the the means and things and so I'd love for you to touch on that if you could as well sure okay no small questions on this show none at all well first I guess I'll say that um if profit is the only thing that matters you can't mitigate climate change we just have to have other things that also matter and we don't right now really fundamentally that is a problem because it makes all these bizarre weird things happen that make no sense in any way for anybody except to the bottom line so those those other things have to be done um another example of that is the the incredible amount of food that is food that people could eat that is fed to livestock about a third of the crops we grow go to feed livestock while there are hungry people in the world that just seems wrong and and the livestock that we raise all of them can eat things that people can't eat and it might mean that we would have a lot less livestock if we only ate livestock that was produced in a climate friendly way and we're eating things that humans could not eat like grass or food waste or what have you tree leaves but that's I think that's the personally I think that's the version of livestock production that that makes sense that India feeds something like eight or ten times more people per hectare than the United States does even though we produce more tons of grain per hectare because that food is getting eaten by people and the grain here is mostly going to you know feed hogs and cows and and make ethanol and things like that so I like that measure rather than yield per acre or per hectare human beings fed per hectare it's a really different way of it's a different way of prioritizing things and as far as shipping things around you know I went on a journey about that with this book because at first I thought well local has to be better and then I was reading all these studies that said local food often has a worse carbon footprint in terms of transportation and I really drilled down and got an answer to that and then I draw it out and I got to learn a whole lot more about the transport system so as it is now local food is often worse because individual cars are such a terrible kind of transportation in terms of climate change and if you have to drive more to get local food like drive to this one to get strawberries and drive to that one to get your eggs that's more driving it would be in terms of transportation better for you to go to the supermarket and because the you know um ocean container ships and trains and stuff are have less emissions per ton of product moved a kilometer it can be more carbon friendly to buy it from the supermarket what's missing there though is what is needed at the to to to change to transform transportation at the local level and the thing I really think that makes so much sense here that's happening now is the food hub where you know these food hubs will serve as a processing and storage and marketing aggregator for a bunch of like medium-sized local farms not the tiny ones that can sell everything at the farmers market but the people and not the ones who are ready to have their own giant warehouse but those folks in between you know they bring in that that product they have all the you know processing and and and cool storage and whatever and then they can send out full trucks to supermarkets to local supermarkets that I what I that's a wonderful in terms of local economy and local food production but I think we're not singing the praises of that as the ideal transportation system in terms of emissions for agriculture because every truck is full halfway full truck has much worse emissions per ton of food that's brought along it and you're not having you're not having everyone drive to the farm now if there was a bus to the farm or a electric trolley or a train to the farm you know or if the food is coming into urban centers and people pick it up already where they're already working or they're already downtown it's the extra trip we want to avoid the extra trip I think the food hub I haven't run all the numbers on this but I strongly suspect that that food hubs are one of the very very best transport systems for agriculture in terms of emissions and and then one of my students last year maybe two years ago was exploring the notion of then once you're out with the you know delivery supermarkets have all kinds of food waste what from that food waste can then be brought back to the food hub and then you can build a little bio refinery there to make oil and plastic and all kinds of other cool things out of that food waste livestock feed pellets things like that so can you really make it a hub not just for production but also for management of waste and production of other products that to me seems like a very very interesting notion of how we sort of re-regionalize food production and and we don't really necessarily want to be growing food for all these industrial uses at a time when they're still hunger in the world but if there's food that is wasted compost isn't necessarily the highest and best use of food waste making some of these other you know getting into people is first making some kinds of products out of it is next and then I think livestock and then we have compost and you know the very worst thing would be would be landfilling or incinerating so I'm very encouraged by some of those places and I really look to Germany as a place where the circular economy is so much closer to being part of the mainstream than it is here not that it's perfect in any way but I think it's a little more on the table for discussion in certain ways and but when I've traveled in places like like well like Guatemala and Mexico you see a lot of that never went away a lot of these things are just still continuing to be a circular economy because they never fully made the transition to a wasteful economy in the first place so that's for me a very useful model is to look at how things are done in some some other parts of the world but I'm certainly looking looking to Germany and looking to parts of Europe as a inspiring model there as well if you don't mind I want to go a little bit deeper and ask you a couple rough questions in there that come up in general one is the diversity is not there on the crops that we are exporting at these you know it's cheaper for us to send it to another country than it is to sell it locally and there's you know this fierce debate that the carbon emissions are even lower than doing it local um there there's a few things that are inherently wrong with the model beforehand and I want to kind of ask you what your thoughts or feelings are if you ran across it in the book is one we're not accounting for the true cost or the total environmental cost as percentage of EBITDA on those goods I mean here in Germany I'll give an example here in Germany we get a lot of mangoes from Thailand avocados from and cash used from Vietnam and you know for one avocado one mango it's it's one euro there is no way in hell that that's the true cost of labor transport the waters the natural capital the resources shipping packaging and that and then you know maybe waste in the grocery store but that that it's only one year on so we're selling food cheaper because it's become a commodity how by by including the the total environmental cost or the natural capital the true cost of the resources that we use because that's totally been out of that equation for a long time did you ever get into that and do you think that would skew the model so that we say no it's actually it is better to produce it local and we need to start getting more diverse crops I mean look at your Boston and it is pretty diverse yard there if we if we started apply that on a little bit bigger scale I think that we would have some fabulous results and so if you can maybe address that as well I'd appreciate it um well I'm not a not an expert on those things in any way but I like to read about it in science fiction and stuff especially Kim Stanley Robinson is one of my favorite writers on the topic of what does an economic system look like that um has money and banks and profits and businesses but also fully accounts for the environmental costs and benefits of of how things are produced and transported and processed all up and then the supply chain and also values the human beings that are involved as workers or as you know neighbors who are affected by contamination and and on and on and I do think that's a very very very necessary project I don't have you know I don't have a platform laid out for that or anything but um but I do I do think that's essential I don't think we get where we need to go without that um and I keep meaning to learn to learn more about that but I have really appreciated over the years that that Kim Stanley Robinson is always writing about that in his in his science fiction books I think and pulling from the real work that's being done one of the movements that's interesting there is called the solidarity economy and there has been um I think the place that that's been most widely adopted is in Brazil I'm sure it's completely then gutted by the new administration there but there was a very very a very large national effort that provided loans only to these solidarity economy businesses that met all of these criteria and another thing a very closely related piece there is that there was a very ambitious effort for sort of agroecological and agroforestry small producers all schools in the country had to buy at least a third of their food from those businesses from these businesses that could check off all those things on their list so uh I think that experiment in Brazil and it's a very very large movement there um has been um one of the most successful though again I I think that's all been gutted by the new administration there um but I think there's a lot of lessons to learn from that and um I it's just on my list of something I want to learn more about I I haven't yet seen anything that makes me think this is it that's the proposal let's go I'm ready to put my weight behind this entirely but I don't think there is a silver bullet that's for sure we definitely need something that's uh uh diverse and and I believe it'll be multiple different solutions on on how what that looks like culturally and locally the reason I kind of lead you in that direction with that questioning is you do have some fabulous solutions and I kind of want to go back to how we started you know you're in Boston your barrier or urban environment not rural at all and there are most cities in the world most even uh smaller urban areas uh there's a lot of food deserts there's a lot of pockets where there is no food and all that farming all that industry or that food is coming from outside somewhere so it is there is no way to to get it locally and I mean from your your example of your yard and your your lot that you have but also in some of the practices and things you write about there there is this thought you know how how do we bring it back into the cities how do we flip the switch that we have a little bit more resilience or security in our cities so that we're not trucking that we're kind of impacting that fossil fuel industry that other industry in some respects by bringing some of those things back to the cities and urban areas can you tell us more about that and also how you touch upon that as kind of some solutions in the book as well sure um most of the world could do a much better job growing food in cities than we do Asia is really leading the way there's more than half of the world's urban aggregate I mean almost all of the world's urban agriculture is in Asia just so much there's so much farther ahead than anybody else really especially tropical Asia um let's see um I mean well there's all the kinds of practices you can do in cities between the kind of stuff we do in our in our yard to street trees and and parks could have you know fruit and nut trees in them and and all of the urban agriculture and urban garden kind of things we already see the rooftop things I would love to see rooftop greenhouses in cold parts of the world there's so much waste heat in cities um in my city for example we have a high speed computer processing center that does work for a bunch of universities and I sat down with their engineer they produce enough waste heat to heat um 14 acres what's that about six hectares of greenhouses all winter long to tomato growing temperatures so there's a lot of waste heat in cities that could be going into rooftop greenhouses and and so on I'm not so excited about the kind of vertical farming the sort of high tech led growing things not not that I don't think it's cool and everything but um I think there's only so much of that that actually is really feasible but for growing like salad greens and stuff I could definitely you're not going to grow wheat or potatoes and those kinds of systems it's I think there's a there's a there's a role for for that the big thing to me about gardening in a city or farming in a city is anytime your growing food where food was not being grown before you're taking pressure off of farms and you're taking pressure off of forests where forests are being cleared so um maybe not literally and not without forest protection being in place but in terms of the big picture of what we want to see happen on the planet we want to protect forest we want to prevent the loss of carbon from deforestation and all the other bad things that come with it so growing more food everywhere we can does or maybe that lets a farm take a little bit of land out of production and put a little strip of you know a pollinator meadow or some trees along the river or something back in place um so it's it's actually very important even though the amounts of food are modest the level of intensiveness is very high the yield per you know square meter is very high in an urban farm in an urban garden but its benefit is also just about that it gives a little more breathing room to the rural areas for a few more trees to come back and things like that I think that's a really important component and all the you know the nutrition and the the sort of benefit to the soul of growing things and I've been involved in urban agriculture now you know for a couple of decades here so I've seen all that and here at least it's very much about my city about half of the folks are migrants from Puerto Rico who come from agricultural backgrounds and it's an important part of keeping their culture and traditions alive and I think in cities around the world they're migrant and immigrant populations who have that experience who who it's so important for their physical and cultural and spiritual well-being to to be able to grow that food and the things you grow in the city are not again probably not staple crops maybe but the the high value very short shelf life things like fruits and vegetables and culinary herbs that it really makes a difference it's a fresh in terms of their quality and their nutrition and things like that I don't grow a lot of you know potatoes and stuff in my garden I really focus on fruits and greens and things that are at their best when they're really fresh not that I wouldn't if I had more land but if you have to choose in the city those are the things to me to really focus and that's all that's what you can't buy in a food desert is good fresh greens or good tomatoes or good fruit whereas bread can move around a little bit more without losing all of its quality a little bit more so those that's a few thoughts on that anyway yeah there's definitely some some other options I don't know how much you've gotten into this just on a personal level yourself but I've been producing food not just in farm and in big ways there's so many different tools at our disposal from preserving from canning to dehydrating to fermenting to you know different options to produce or to extend food that from you know beyond its freshness period so that it can be used in winter so it can be used in hard times so that I can go that extra mile that we've kind of lost that so we have a little bit of a food storage or something for the winter times or the different changes of the seasons and and there are some cultures that that do that pretty regular for seasonal type of food I we're running out of time I could talk to you for forever and so I really want to now get into the the chunk of the book and then finish up with four last questions what is your overall hope for the book for us and some of the biggest takeaways that you you think we should know that you could please share with us and touch on touch upon that that people would need to know sure okay well honestly my biggest hope for it has already been fulfilled not particularly because of that book but was that people would just take heed that agriculture is an important part of climate change mitigation and that has happened that really happened I think during the Paris Agreement I was there in Paris and it was all wasn't me but it was very exciting to be part of it anyway so that I think was the moment when it kind of came on the radar I well I think one key takeaway is there are lots of ways to do this another is that there are limits there's only so much we can do it's we can't keep burning coal and soak it all up in the soil there's only so much we can do another is that the more trees the better in terms of carbon and that there are lots of farming systems that include trees including for cold climates and also to look to the farmers in the tropics who have done the least to cause climate change and are most affected by it and are developing or continuing to practice now for thousands of years some of the most powerful practices we have on a per hectare basis and do what we can to steer resources in their direction so that they can continue to do that and expand their efforts to do that you want to touch it all a little bit about emission reduction demand reductions some learnings that you've had on not as awesome some new things emerging sure what we've really what I really learned in the drawdown period is just how that first of all food waste being such a big issue maybe what 30 40 percent of the world's food is wasted so all the emissions that come from growing that food are like wasted emissions that didn't even do any good so if we can tighten that up that's really huge and I think there's pretty universal agreement that that's a good idea at least in theory so I think that's a great strategic priority and then in terms of diet it's it's looking at on the one hand which foods have the most emissions associated with them because some have much more emissions than others although it depends on how they're grown of course and also how much land it takes to produce certain things so like managed grazing fancy grazing like holistic grazing or or adaptive multi-paddock grazing does a great job of sequestering carbon in some cases a really outstanding job but it takes twice as much land as growing the food for a feedlot so on the one hand great with the carbon on the other hand taking twice as much land to grow the same amount of protein and both of those take way more land than growing beans for protein so that just sort of helps me frame in the larger sense certain foods are more resource are more land intensive cashews have pretty low yields compared to a lot of other nuts they're really delicious I really love them but they don't and they're very labor intensive to produce as well so like taking a step back to look at the bigger picture of which foods demand the most land and have the most emissions is also a really big component so anytime we have a practice that grows more on a unit of land that's desirable my favorite example is from Columbia this intensive civil pastor model where they they actually plant a tree every like 30 centimeters over these blocks and they are browsed down by livestock they're nitrogen fixing trees so they're sort of like clover trees in a way and they found that their stocking rates have gone up two to ten times as a result of doing this without standing carbon sequestration they're reducing methane because they're eating the leaves of these trees that are high in tannins that is and and it has the same footprint as a as a feedlot in terms of how much land it takes to do it so you would still be better off growing beans on that land if you want to make the most protein possible but given that the whole world is not likely to go vegan we're still going to want some livestock that to me is the very best way we have in the world of raising beef and dairy today and I enjoy those foods so but I don't eat them very much so I'm really interested in that practice and there are some people trying to figure out what that looks like in a temperate climate as well because there isn't necessarily a reason it couldn't be done here we just have to figure out how to adapt it here so that's that's a little bit of a walk through those those things in terms of our timeline right yeah yeah I mean that's absolutely perfect I really appreciate you taking the time and and we maybe need to schedule another call to go even deeper because I know you're constantly working on the great things you're you're of a plethora of knowledge and it's very deep I almost feel guilty only providing us with one hour to talk about it because you did years work of research and continue to do that and and you're have a broad depth of wisdom and still it's probably only a fraction of everything that we need to know to understand the big picture fully four last questions for you the hardest one I'm going to give you today is really the burning question wtf and it's not the one you've probably been saying pulling your hair out during this crazy time it's what's the futures and I want to know for you farming carbon farming solutions where are we going what's the future what's your hope do we have a roadmap is there a plan well yeah um I guess I have my plan what's the big plan um I want to know your plan so broadly the plan is rapid scaling up and I think moving from helping farmers you know take that first step and then the next step and then the next step starting again with you reducing overuse of fertilizer and getting some cover crops in there and moving up for the crop farmers anyway you know um and my plan is to really keep trying to on the one hand push the science forward but also get that get that information in the right hands so that the IPCC is pushing a broader range of practices so that each country as they as they prepare their nationally determined contributions their national plan under the Paris agreement that they're adding more that they're really including and specifying agricultural targets which most of them don't um or or they're so vague as to be you know meaningless um um and uh and really I would also really like to see a huge increase on the consumer demand like we have seen for organic or for sustainably produced lumber and things like that I think that can be just a massive driver so that kind of a podcast like this has a huge impact a huge listenership and can um I think uh that that has a big it's not the only thing that needs to be done but I do think it's one of the big big pieces so that's um and and there are a number of practices that I'm watching closely that are sort of um a drawdown we call them coming attractions things that are bubbling up like seaweed as a feed to reduce methane from livestock like um intensive silver pasture like pasture cropping like uh perennial grains and we do have a couple of those coming out of the gate now and perennial rice in particular seems very very promising and that's really big that's a real world commodity crop right there so um uh you know keep going with it there's I sort of see a phase one and phase two phase one is the crop the practices that are ready that we just need to throw resources at getting them to grow and then phase two is researching and developing for these the next set of practices with maybe even higher benefits that just aren't quite ready to be adopted at that big scale yet because they need maybe more breeding work or more research or some or adapting to a new climate or in some other way they need to they need to take off that'll be my my short answer for question one what else you got I really appreciate it um the the last three are really for my listeners if there was one message that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that had the power to change your life what would it be your message sure I think the first step for all of us is reducing food waste in the home that's been a ongoing challenge for me with a young child in the house and um just it's like the first and most obvious thing we can do is not waste the food we buy starting with that I think that's great and then if you have the opportunity to plant some fruit trees and berries and stuff so much better yeah what should young innovators farmers researchers scientists in your field of think uh be thinking about if they are looking for ways to make a real impact I think one piece is to look to look at what farmers are excited about but no one has studied yet because you know that's going to take off if you can find uh if you can really confirm benefits to those practices then something that already has momentum is so the place to be focusing then the last one is what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know from the start um well my math has gotten a lot better I will say that but um um I think that that that it's really not just about the production part in terms of carbon sequestration and emissions reduction but also it is about the global food system and how much land it takes to produce this or that kind of food how much is wasted what the supply chain looks like that all those are equally important levers along with carbon sequestration that the all those different dimensions of complexity in the food system every one of them has places we can make a big impact the the United Nations came out last year actually with the United Nations Food Systems Summit which is finally the discussion around food strong involvement from the FAO and just the awareness around food farming agriculture different solutions that we have out there to fix this huge problem because we're realizing it's our basic needs it really needs to be addressed and so this year in June we'll have a pre-summit meeting in Rome with the at the FAO in Rome pre-summit food system summit and then in September in New York um I'd be surprised that you don't get an invitation if you don't get an invitation because we'd love to see you there and then definitely if you can make it into to Glasgow for COP26 and Glasgow that would be great because you have a plethora of knowledge and wisdom with solutions of what we can do worldwide in all countries to really draw down to to help and fix this pollution and I just need to thank you for letting us inside of your ideas sharing your book and your wisdom we'll put all the links in the show note descriptions and everybody can go and look you up and refer to your work and and I hope to see you around and maybe we can schedule even deeper dive sometime very soon Eric thank you so much and have just a wonderful uh day well thanks so much it's a real pleasure to get to talk about these things and mostly I'm just here you hold up in my basement writing so it's a very nice break from my spreadsheets and research and stuff to get to do this and it would be my pleasure to come back anytime and talk some more thanks for such great questions thank you very much have a great day take care