Track & Food Podcast
Track & Food Podcast
Rooted in What? : Liz Carlisle and Aubrey Streit Krug Give the Lowdown on Perennial Agriculture
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This week, I'm joined by Liz Carlisle and Aubrey Streit Krug, co-editors of Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods (Island Press, March 3, 2026), a new collection from The Land Institute and UC Santa Barbara that asks a deceptively simple question: what would agriculture look like if we stopped starting over every year?
Perennial crops (plants that come back season after season without replanting) aren't just an agronomic curiosity. They're a lens for examining everything that's broken about the annual monoculture system we've inherited: the debt structures that trap farmers; the subsidies that reward the wrong behaviour; the land ownership patterns that keep wealth concentrated; and the labour arrangements that keep the people doing the work structurally excluded from the land they tend.
In this episode we talk about Kernza (a perennial grain that’s heavily featured in Living Roots); the Forest-Grassland-Grain structure of Carlisle and Streit Krug's book; and whether restaurants can do for perennial foods what they did for farm-to-table. The hard question at the centre of it all: is this a complement to the system we already have in place, or an argument that the system itself is the problem?
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email at trackandfoodpod@gmail.com
Coming up, talking farming, agriculture, and perennial foods. What are those? That's coming up next. Today's episode of Trackin' Food is brought to you by Scout Magazine. If you're wanting to learn more about Vancouver's food and cultural sphere, with regards to community news, new restaurant openings, central guides to some of the city's best offerings, as well as who's hiring, Scout is where you should go. You can find them at ScoutMagazine.ca. That's ScoutMagazine.ca. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm Jimmy Ma, your host as always. Got a great one for you today. Interviewed Liz Carlisle, who I had on the podcast back in 2022 when I interviewed her for her book called Healing Grounds. She is an associate professor at the environmental studies program at UC Santa Barbara. She reached out to me back in December about a new book that she had written with Aubrey Strait Krug. She is the director of the Perennial Cultures Lab at the Land Institute. Together they had brought out this awesome new book called Living Roots, The Promise of Perennial Foods, talking about the stewardship of kind of this new movement of being better stewards of our land and working with uh scientists and chefs. And this is a collaborative book where they edited it. They brought in about 30 or so different writers who wrote short essays, talking about some of the things that they're doing in their communities to reinvigorate soil health and culture. And it's great. It's thinking about our world and how we eat and you know climate change and all these things. Reading stories like this from people from all over you know North America talking about the ways that they're trying to invigorate and be better stewards of the food that we do and getting away from this idea that monocultures are what we need to do for our food systems. It's a really interesting way of looking at things, and I hope you know something that's gonna be moving forward in our communities. Yeah, so it was it was really great to sit with them and talk about it. The book is broken up into three different kinds of dominant acts forests, grasslands, and grain. They break it down into all those things. They talk about US policies, which are very similar up here in Canada. And yeah, it's just a very personal narrative-driven story. I really enjoyed it. Liz and Aubrey bring a wealth of you know expertise, but also just curiosity and passion for this kind of way of living. And, you know, as this being a hospitality podcast, I know I normally have conversations with people in the industry and talking about things that are locally more locally generated. But this book I think is something that's I'm very proud to have been able to speak with Liz and Aubrey about it and share what they're doing out there. This book just dropped in early March, so you can get it anywhere that you get your books to support those local bookstores here in the greater Vancouver community. But yeah, do pick up a copy of it. I'm holding it right now. It's an easy read. And you know, I like books. My last interview. I hope a lot of you had a chance to check it out with Marcelo DeSintio about migrant labor. That was an episode that I was really excited to do. And I even wrote a recent column about it, kind of piggybacking off that idea. I dropped it just a couple days ago, talking about what the true cost of blueberries might be if we were to pay migrant labor a little bit a little bit better and stuff like that. So if you do want to read that, check out the track and food Instagram feed. Um you can find it there, or also my personal feed. And you can listen to that episode on wherever you get your stuff. And I hope you really enjoy this one with Liz and Aubrey. They bring a wealth of knowledge and a really good personal perspective, and just they're great people, great people to talk to, and I really enjoy doing episodes like this. But I hope everyone out there is doing really well. It's the month of April, which is my birthday month, so I'll maybe hopefully have another episode for you later on this month. But if not, you'll hear from me in May. But without further ado, I'll bring on Liz and Aubrey and do enjoy. What's going on? And I have this new book with a friend of mine. And your book, Healing Grounds, that you did back in 2022, was quite amazing about regenerative farming. Um, my editor, Michelle from Scout, she is really big into this whole world. She works with farmers markets and she's really big into that. So she was really excited about that interview. And then when I told her that I was able to get you both for this one, she was uh elated, it's probably a really good word. So and then obviously reading the book. The book is amazing. It's so unique with so many fresh stories from so many different collaborators and contributors. So yeah, I'm really excited to speak with you both today. So I think this is really cool. Aubrey, you're from Kansas. Is that where you are right now?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'm in Kansas right now. Yep.
SPEAKER_00Okay. That is a state I've yet to go to, but what's life like in Kansas?
SPEAKER_01Come on out. She's owned a big party with a bunch of her friends in September. So there you go.
SPEAKER_00Awesome.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, late September would be a great time. So the organization that I work with that you think you've learned a lot about maybe by reading this book is the Land Institute. And we're celebrating our 50th anniversary this year. So we're having a big prairie festival at the end of September to celebrate. So that would be a great time to kind of experience the Kansas environment.
SPEAKER_00What made you want to get into this like field and want to like work for the Land Institute Institute? Because I read some of your bio, but it's always fun. It's nice to get it from the source and hear your words and what inspired you to be a part of this.
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, I grew up in a really small town in Kansas. Both sides of my family are from there. Wheat fields and pastures surrounding us in the shadow of a big grain elevator, and was really, uh, I think growing up interested and sort of confronted with the reality of what it's like to produce food and grain around us and the the way that our town depended upon that. And but then also thinking about all the challenges of that, like what made that way of life really hard and how precarious it was. So, really thinking about this community in this place and like what's going to become of it over time. What kind of future could I see for myself here? What kind of life could I make? What do I imagine happening? And I think that kind of curiosity about what a good future could look like in this place and in the Great Plains is what led me to become really interested in the kinds of stories that we tell about how we relate to each other in the land and what kind of agriculture has been here, what kind could be, and how we interact with the land in ways that can sustain us. And so that led me down a path where eventually I was looking at these kind of agricultural literature pieces. And I had a mentor who said, Have you ever heard of the land institute? You have to do an internship, you should go do one at the at the land institute, which happens to be just down the road. I was like, No. So that was really what led me to like experiencing what this organization kind of in the backyard of this region in which I grew up was working to imagine what a more just and sustainable future based in agriculture could look like, kind of inspired by these natural ecosystems of the prairie and other landscapes that really feature perenniality and diversity, which are very different than the annual monoculture wheat fields that I grew up around. And so I think that experience as an undergraduate just opened some of my eyes to the possibilities and really connected me with the community of people and these kind of lineages of people in a lot of different ways who had been tried to imagine and create in a really practical sense like what would it take for us to be able to make these kinds of deep changes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's like an amazing way to look at going from your lived experience as a child and growing up in that community and then thinking about like where do I fit in this world and how do we how do we grow our food and how important it is. I mean, Liz, you're from Montana, I'm from Saskatchewan, just right above you. So I mean, like, and I grew up in Saskatoon and where I grew up is you know, canola and wheat and corn, you know, all that stuff. And and so seeing grain fields everywhere throughout my province and growing up in that is you know, potash is massive in Saskatchewan, you know, fertilizer and stuff like this, and reading about all the stuff that perennials talk about when maintaining and retaining nitrogen and fertilizers and stuff like this, going through your book was you know, it speaks to kind of the world that we live in now when you guys talk about monoculture and stuff like that. Yeah, I think it's really cool that you get to be a part of that organization. It was really fun learning about it, digging through this book. Liz, how are you? What's new with you? How are things?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, good. Yeah, I've just I've been enjoying um, you know, some perennial convenings and storytelling with Aubrey. We just kicked off the book tour, and so we've had our first three events, and I'll be going to join Aubrey in Kansas in a few days. So it's been wonderful to actually gather in person with a bunch of the folks featured in this book and also with the broader community of people doing this work and also meet some people who are kind of getting plugged in for the first time who are excited to come and taste some perennial treats and hear some stories and think about how they can get involved.
SPEAKER_00Amazing. Are you at the university right now? Are you at home?
SPEAKER_01I am. I'm briefly here. I'm just near the University of California, Santa Barbara, and it's a classic sort of coastal foggy day. So very much in my coastal ecosystem at the moment.
SPEAKER_00Well, there you go. Yeah, I'm at Vancouver's been interesting. This is the first year in 43 years where we have not seen snow. So uh yeah, we've had a quite warm and mild winter. So it's been uh a beautiful day today. So it's a great start to the day to talk to you two. Everybody out there listening, I'm interviewing Aubrey and Liz today about their new book, Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods. This book has about, I mean, looking on the back here, going through it, you guys probably had about 30 contributors, I'd say. That's about that, I'd say. You have people from all over. I mean, talking from indigenous stewards to people who've been working farming for their whole lives. The stories are personal, they're very narrative driven. It's really beautiful to kind of see the contrasting different styles of what and how you got these people together. I have a few questions for you, so I'm going to dig into that. I guess one of the first ones I thought about is I'm going through this book and I'm reading it and I'm seeing all these different stories in these essays. But then I kept asking myself, is this a climate book? Is this a food book or is this a political book? Or maybe is it all three? Liz, maybe I'll let you jump in there. Maybe you can kind of give me some ideas on what you guys were looking to do and what you were trying to achieve with this book.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a great question, J, because I think it is kind of all of the above. And I think I feel all these things at the same time. Like I feel this sense that there are a lot of different crises in play at the moment. And, you know, I want to try to address climate change. I also want to try to help my community be more resilient to climate change. And then at the same time, you know, I want to work on all of these issues that are causing incredible inequity and divisiveness and really making it hard for our society to come together to meet big challenges like climate change. And so I think what was exciting to me as I dug deeper into perennial foods and this movement building around them is that I see this as a movement that has the power to really address all of those things at once. And so instead of feeling overwhelmed by how can we one at a time go at all of these many crises to think about how do we come together as local communities and as larger communities to really create a future that is more reciprocal and helps us sort of heal many, many wounds at once, while also coming together with these joyful celebrations of foods that have these deep connections to many of our cultural traditions and many of our places. So it really is, I think, comes out of the sense of needing to respond to this moment, not only with, you know, how do we deal with the immediate emergency, but how do we come together to create a future with our plant relatives that is more durable and more joyful and more equitable for our long-term human future.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting that we live in societies nowadays where most people live in big cities and we're kind of like pulled away from the systems and the way we grow our food and the way things are. You know, we just grow to supermarkets and we think about those things. And it's kind of oblivious for a lot of people. And it's understandable we all have lives, we all have busy careers and things to do. But I think it's slowly starting to creep into our society where people are starting to understand the farm to table movement, understanding our connection to the world that we live in. Can you speak to this, Aubrey, a little bit and how it maybe personally feels for you to kind of advocate and editing a book like this and bringing it to kind of the masses? What do you think people are going to hopefully take away from what you guys are trying to achieve here?
SPEAKER_02Well, as Liz was reflecting, people who contributed to this book are coming from a variety of different places and life histories and experiences and roles. Some people are coming through the sense of really a particular emergency or challenge. And other people are really engaging in long-standing cultural traditions of stewardship that they're bringing. And I think coming from climate, coming from food, coming from a sense of transformation, what's possible, and as well as repair and renewal of these cultural traditions, like all of these different pieces weaving together, I think are really exciting and I hope illustrate some of what's needed. We need people to come alive to their own gifts in this moment. And I think being able to see a variety of people from researchers and scientists to advocates and leaders to land stewards to artists to chefs, all coming alive in their own work and showing that kind of origin story of how they found it and how they really connected with the particular perennials of their places. Because whether you're coming from a forest landscape or savannah or a prairie or grassland or from you know a context that's really based in current crane production, all of these landscapes have their roots in perennial ecosystems. And I think being able to remember that and to think about what are the perennials who have been and are and could be in your particular place, and what are the ways in which your gifts might connect with them or lead you to connect with them, to steward and to recreate what's possible. I think that kind of diversity, but a sense of connection is what we hope that people engage with through the book, maybe finding some examples, some models, some new connections, but also an opportunity to reflect and listen and sort of look around where you are and to root deeper in that particular place.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, as you read the book, it really it's really interesting because it's like it makes me feel kind of ashamed that I'm not part of the system and like being a farmer and being you want to contribute in some way and you like look at all the things that people are doing and growing, and then you're understanding kind of their relationship to the land. You know, like I've worked in hospitality my whole life. I've obviously dealt with food and stuff like this. And as a journalist, you know, I've always been curious about things. You know, you read books from like Michael Pollan about Own of Boris Dilemma, and then you watch documentaries like Food Inc. that really kind of brings to the foreground of like where our agricultural systems are and kind of how horrible they are in a lot of ways about factory farming and monocultures and growing corn, wheat, and soy and like how bad it is for the soils. But then you don't realize it, you know, growing up in Saskatchewan, you're driving across the prairie land in the wintertime and then all the fields are just bare, and you don't think, oh, okay, that's just normal. They're gonna plant again, they're gonna seed pretty much right around this time of the year. But then you read about perennials and you start to understand. I guess for listeners, can you guys explain basically for anyone out there who basically has no idea what we're talking about? Um, what is a perennial food system? And at what point did you realize this wasn't just a farming technique, but something bigger? Aubrey, you can start with this one, I guess. I think a lot of people are probably like, what is a perennial? What am I supposed to be thinking about here? And I try to sometimes think about, okay, let's dumb this down a little bit so people can kind of catch up with us a little bit. And I want them to understand that this is something that's not really far-fetched. It's pretty it's natural. And I think we've gone away from that a little bit. And I think it you guys explain it quite well in this book. But Aubrey, I'll let you kind of maybe give the layman's terms.
SPEAKER_02Of course. So a perennial is a way of talking about a plant whose roots below ground stay alive throughout the year and for multiple years and allow that plant to stay in place for years, decades, centuries. So the plant doesn't have to be replanted, it lives for a long time for multiple years. And that's in contrast to what we talk about as an annual plant that completes its whole life cycle in a single year and then has to be replanted or reseeded in order to continue that reproductive process. And so when we are talking about these kind of perennial plants, we're thinking about these grasses, wildflowers, we're thinking about trees and shrubs, thinking about all of these kinds of plants that mostly have evolved across the ecosystems of this planet. And their living roots below ground provide some really important processes in play because they can hold soil. Um, so instead of ground being bare and subject to erosion to wash away or blow away, that soil is held in place. And those plants are taking different elements from above ground and bringing them down into the soil and feeding this kind of life support system of soil and helping it grow and sustain itself over time. So, all of these kinds of benefits of perennials are what we're really interested in when we're talking about perennial foods. And people might be really familiar with perennial foods already, but just not be thinking of them as perennial. People already are eating all kinds of berries and fruits from trees, nuts from trees. You can think about foods that can be foraged, backyard vegetables. You might know rhubarb or strawberry right now in your garden. And then the land institute where I work is creating and working on with a lot of different people, varieties, perennial grains. And humans have had a really long history of eating the seeds of grasses, including from perennial plants. And we have an amazing contributor who writes about that in the context of his community in Australia. So thinking about the ways in which all these perennial foods, including the foods of animals who are eating on grazing across perennial grasslands, could also come as a kind of perennial food. So that kind of bounty of possibilities is what we're looking at. And we're paying homage to the way that these plants knit life and earth together in these particular places.
SPEAKER_00Is there anything you want to add there to that, Liz, or your perception of what a perennial food system looks like? You know, how you'd like to describe it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a brilliant encapsulation of perennial plants and perennial foods. And to the second part of your question about sort of how we see this as a sort of teaching for people in this time, what's so extraordinary about perennial plants, perennial foods is that, you know, they harvest all of this energy from the sun and they use a really big share of it to invest in their root systems, which is it really means they're investing in this whole community of organisms underground that help each other out. And that's what allows the plants to live for multiple years through the winter, through the drought, through the floods. It's because they made this choice to take, you know, huge share of their resources to invest in a whole community of organisms rather than just their own sort of short-term gain in a sense. So, you know, we see this as a real teaching for people in a time that's very difficult. Like, how do you get through really, really hard times, this sort of winter, metaphorically? Well, how can we invest in really strong communities and in a sort of shared prosperity to give us as a society that kind of resilience that we see in perennial plants that have, you know, historically been really important to sustaining our human society. So they're kind of like these, you know, to draw on language from folks like Robin Wall Kimmerer and traditional ecological knowledge. They're kind of like our older siblings on this planet, kind of showing us how it's done, how you get through ups and downs of life. And that's a lot of what the farmers and scientists and chefs, people working in food, reflected on in this book, is in spending all this time with particular perennial foods that they love, whether it's olives or service berries or perennial grains or working with animals on pasture and seeing those perennial plants change over time. A lot of what they reflected on is sort of learning this deep teaching of perenniality. And that's something that has a lot to offer us as humans.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, there's a there's so many good stories in the book where you there's authors who speak to the stories of how perennial plants have actually saved them in a lot of ways. There's one where it talks about like flooding comes in and the perennial plants were like kind of like knocked over, but they were okay because of their deep root systems, and then talking about like, you know, how fires in a lot of ways can actually like stimulate grasses and growth like that. And then also like how you move farm animals or animals around pasture and that you know, how that regenerative growth starts right there. Up here in like British Columbia, you know, we've dealt with a lot of forest fires over the last like five to eight years, and then we've been dealing with a lot of flooding down in the Fraser Valley where a lot of our farming land is. And you think about like kind of the monocultures that are grown in that area and how we've, you know, you a lot of the old indigenous ways of stewarding the land we've kind of gone away from. I just kept thinking about how perennial cultures probably could have been, they were more invested there, probably could have saved a lot of the land, prevented a lot of the flooding, or maybe you know, helped preserve the soil erosion and stuff like that. So it's it's really interesting to go through that and think about that through the lens of all these authors that you've brought through this book, which it was super fun to read. I think that part was really interesting. You know, just it makes us feel like it's kind of like we're kind of silly to go away from something that's worked for so long. And I love your reference to Robin from Braving Sweetgrass. Uh, she's her book is amazing. I know so many people who love that in her work, and I you referenced it a lot. The other thing, also I was researching because this grain pops up in the book everywhere. Kernza is everywhere. And I read it so much and I had to look it up. And the root systems are huge, they're like they go so deep, like up to like eight feet or something like this. And it's I looked at this graph of like a picture between that and wheat, and wheat is so small, and you can just see the amount of like how much it can pull up through the roots and how much strength it probably just develops through that. I mean, have you guys had Kernza? Like, what did what does it taste like?
SPEAKER_02Is it it tastes delicious? Is it good? Um and I think that's another just aspect to name of it's amazing to think about the kind of ecological benefits that these perennial plants and food systems can provide. But in addition to that, they could also provision some really tasty and nutritious food. Um, and that is a really great thing. So pernsa is the perennial grain that comes from improved intermediate wheatgrass, which is a perennial grass that's from Eurasia that was brought to the US originally as a forage crop for animals, and then is now being domesticated as a food for people. And so Being improved, but there's been a lot of amazing work happening on it, and people are starting to grow it on landscapes and move it into cereals and breads and beer and all kinds of things like that. Had some great current pancakes, recommend it. And currentsa as a grain does have a it's in the wheatgrass family, but it's not quite like wheat, it has a more kind of nutty, almost cinnamony flavor. And it's been really enjoyable to get to get to know. I can recommend some kind of like flaked currentsa that's almost like an oatmeal that I especially like.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I I have a lot of friends who work in the beer industry, so I might just be like, hey, can you make me a current beer here soon? You know, I think that'd be I think that'd be a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I think we can where there's some we got something there. So the other thing is I got a question here. The dominant US and I should say Canadian food system is built around annual monocultures, corn, wheat, soy. Can you guys talk about like how we got to this system or maybe how you guys have like when you're doing your research through this stuff and how we ended up this way, why did we go away from perennial cultures? Like, why did we invest so much in annual monocultures? Is it just money? And do you feel like this system is something we can actually displace? Do you think there's do you think there's growth there? I mean, do you think we have an ability to kind of move away from this? And I mean, you wouldn't write a book like this if you didn't think so, I would hope. Um but I mean, Liz, is there any way like when you talk about this and you into the relation of that we of the systems that we know of corn, wheat, and soy, how do you work with that? And how do you think we got to that where we are? And what do you think we can do about changing that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, this circles back definitely to our conversation about healing grounds, because that book for me was a lot of trying to reckon with how we got to where we are and how we move forward to systems that really do serve people's needs in local communities. And I think the question we have to ask is what is our food system for? Like what goal has it been shaped to achieve? And I think when we look at the history of the North American continent, we see this export-oriented food system that has its roots really in a colonial model of what food systems are for, is essentially, you know, what was happening on the North American continent several hundred years ago? Well, land was being stolen from indigenous people, and then folks were brought over from Africa and enslaved and were laboring in plantations, and then that food was being exported as a global commodity. And, you know, although we've now had abolition, thank goodness, we still kind of have a food system model that is not that far removed from the idea that it's an export commodity rather than, okay, in any given place, the purpose of the food system is to meet the needs of that land and the people in that place. And so a lot of the perennial food systems that are highlighted in this book either have their roots in an indigenous food system in a place, or are sort of imagining what it would be like to belong to that place for, you know, a very diverse community that's thinking about the future of a place. And I think the exciting thing is it is already happening. And you do see the growth of more perennial and diverse and sort of local and equitable food systems happening in all of these different ways. So, you know, there are some folks in this book who have whole farms that are perennial in nature. Wendy Johnson writes about, you know, over a hundred acres where she has a chestnut and apple orchard and she's grazing animals on perennial pasture and she's growing kernza. But you also have Lisa Schultimore, who's a scientist at Iowa State University, writing about perennial strips, which is large-scale monoculture corn and soy farms in the middle of Iowa, adding, you know, 10% of their land as restored prairie and getting all these benefits. Two times as many birds, three times as many pollinators, 70% less nitrogen running off into the field, and for themselves, you know, better soil health and, you know, not losing all that soil that they're working to build up. So I think that there are lots of different ways that we see this more perennial and diverse food system sort of percolating up into the edges, as folks write about in some of the essays. Some of the change is very transformative, and some of the change is sort of happening over time. Keith Keeley writes this essay about how in ecosystems, you know, in disturbance regimes, sometimes you have to be ready with a new system to fill a hole when there's a gap somewhere. So I think there are all these different ways that change can come and is coming. I mean, I think the question is sort of what we put our strength behind as a society. Like what sort of future do we vote to nourish here?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, it's especially that one story. I think it's early in the book you were talking about, how she put those strips. You're reading that and you're like, oh my God, that's actually really intelligent. Like, that's really smart. I don't know why we've never done that. But then when you're reading it, it talks about how much more of the microbes and the bees and everything just like flock and they love it. And it's just like, and it's how it they learn already immediately how to work together. And it's just like this just seems so like prevalent that we should be doing this already. And it's just weird that we haven't done it and we've gone away from it. You started off in this whole field with John Tester, correct? Yeah. Was he a farmer like this? What was he like to work with this? Because I've seen him so many times on Bill Maher's show, and he's actually seems to be a very, very funny man. And I really like him a lot. But was he this type of farmer? Like was he someone who was really kind of into this world? And is this some or do you advocate for him to move that way? I don't know. I'm curious.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, in many ways, he got his start in politics because he was going to sustainable agriculture conferences, and that's how he started meeting people across the state of Montana and around the region. He's from this little town, big sandy, Montana, 300 people. And he was a school teacher, actually, and also working on his family farm, but was asking the same question of how can a food system serve the people in that place? You know, he was moving into sustainable agriculture in the 80s when a lot of farmers who were in grain systems were really affected by the farm crisis and, you know, rising fertilizer prices, falling grain prices, all kinds of chaos in the financial markets, a lot of debt that farmers were taking on. And so he was asking the question of how are we going to sustain this relatively small family farm in the face of an agriculture that's kind of moving to consolidation and also moving to heavier use of chemicals? And actually, there were folks in his own family who had health impacts with some of those chemicals, with seed treatment in particular. And so all of those things together led him to uh sort of burgeoning organic movement in Montana. And then when you start saying, well, how am I going to raise food without fertilizers and without herbicides? Then you have to think about, well, how is my crop rotation going to function ecologically and provide its own ecosystem services if I don't want to use chemical input? So yeah, he was really excited about a more ecological way of farming. And I think in many ways that sort of led him to think more broadly about how can the state economy of Montana and the national economy of the US be more regenerative and renewable rather than extractive, which is really our history in Montana, from extractive farming systems to, you know, history of mining and fossil fuel infrastructure. So it sort of started for him on the farm with how do we make farming systems serve people in place. And then that grew to him thinking about all the systems around farmers that shape what's possible in a rural community like Big Sandy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think for you to be able to enter into this world, and I think it kind of brought you to where you are now. I think to starting with someone like that, I think is a really cool thing. He seems like a really cool man. He's he's got a big energy, and I like him a lot. He's been fun. A question here I'm kind of curious about is if renal systems expand, how does that reshape what we eat? Are we prepared culturally for a future dominated less by wheat, corn, and soy? And I think that's an interesting one because I think a lot of people don't realize how much they are pervasive in our like in our food system. I mean, you pretty much I think you write in the book somewhere like up to 75% of what we eat comes from those three monocultures.
SPEAKER_01And it's four. I think you have to add rice in there.
SPEAKER_00There's a rice in there, yes. That's the other one. Yeah, yeah. Do you think we're prepared to move away from them or at least be open to the idea of kind of going into a different way? And like because I'm thinking of that in the way of like how restaurants work or like how you know farm to tables kind of normalize things over the last like 20 years. But then we have these other perennial culture of food systems like uh hazelnuts, elderberries, perennial grains. Do you think there's a possibility for us to like catch up there and kind of move into this slowly? Ari, I'll let you I'll let you dig into this one a little bit.
SPEAKER_02Well, I love the way that you're thinking about perennial cultures. The lab that I lead at the Land Institute, that's the name of it, the perennial cultures lab. And we think about this idea of you know, cultures of ways of being, ways of living, and thinking about them as perennials, ones that can last, but also cultures that are fed by sun-powered ecosystems and agroecosystems that feature perennial plants. And that's not a new thing in the sense that for a lot of our human history, people have eaten really diets of diverse foods that come from primarily perennial systems that include annual plants in places where annuals grow best and things like highly disturbed landscapes around river basins or deltas or floodplains. And so just thinking about this sort of broader human history, like we have evolved as social creatures to be able to eat a lot of different things in a lot of different places. And we know that this sort of current consolidation and homogenization of our diets to just really come from a few staple crops is actually pretty new in terms of our history. So I think that there's a lot of precedent for us to think about that kind of diversification of our diets. And I think there's a lot of evidence of why having a diversity of foods is really important for people. So I think that in those ways we can see how cultures can adapt and change and evolve. And there is a lot of possibility because of the nutrition, the flavor, the community aspect of what it's like to really value foods as part of our own ways of cooking, ways of caring for each other, ways of caring for place. And I think we get to meet a lot of those possibilities in the book of people who are already really enjoying working with these foods. I'll name Beth Dooley's chapter. Beth is an amazing chef who writes about working with hazelnuts, working with elderberries, working with Kernza and the joy that comes from that, and also what it's like to be able to pass on those kinds of recipes across generations in her own family. And I think that the ways in which people come together to reconnect with traditional foods, but then also to kind of create new ways of enjoying something like Kearnsa together is sort of bringing people together in new and exciting ways.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, I love that chapter. That was that was actually one of my favorite chapters, actually. And I remember reading it and I was just like, wow, this is actually making me really hungry. Um, but I think a lot of times it starts with like farmers markets and the ability to be for us to be close with the farmers and the people that we speak to. Vancouver's got here in Vancouver, we have so many farmers markets that are active and CSA bags and stuff like this. And people really like a lot of my friends and people really dig into that part of the community and they're really excited about it. My editor for the magazine, she works at one every Saturday. She's always there helping out with a lot of the local farmers. And then a lot of the restaurants that I uh that I know of, they really try to like situate themselves with speaking with a lot of the local farmers. I have a grocery store right around the corner who just he's like, I got these turkeys from this organic farm, and they're just like raised so and he's so excited about that. So it's there is enthusiasm, and I think we see it, and I think it's really exciting. And I hope to try Kearns of one day and soon, and it's stuff like that. I think is really cool. But it does make me feel a little bit sometimes pessimistic about the way our grocery stores are set up, the way our government subsidies are set up. Do you have you guys looked into like when you were doing a book like this? Do you guys look into any of the government policy initiatives? And do you see any advancements or any growth in that area where the governments are kind of adapting or like, or I guess are you guys going to be advocates for kind of like pushing, like, hey, we need to start looking at this? Is it do you need more work on the ground when it comes to like government initiatives and advocacy? Is that something that you guys are working towards or speaking with people who have or working them that way? I don't know, Liz, if you have any thoughts on this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So, you know, as you mentioned, there's 30 different essays for this book for poets, and they're all situated in different ways and sort of spoke to different opportunities that they're pursuing and also different sort of challenges that they're running up against. And several of the contributors did mention, like crop insurance, you know, like it really in the United States heavily incentivizes you to stick with something like a corn soy rotation because the payment that you get is based on your 10-year average yield. And if you step out of that box and shift your acres to something else, you can't get that back. So, yes, definitely, you know, thinking about federal policy here in the United States, a change in our crop insurance system, which is our primary subsidy essentially to sort of current monoculture. If we change the way that we use taxpayer money to instead support a movement towards a more diverse perennial agriculture serving, you know, local and regional needs, reform to crop insurance, also maybe moving some of that money out of that part of the farm bill and towards there's all these great smaller programs in the US farm bill that do support local food systems and community processing and offer cost share to farmers who are doing things like planting perennials for the first time or cover crops or establishing a hedgerow. So we have some good policy models already in place. But if you look at it, sort of a pie chart of where all the money that the US Department of Agriculture invests goes, there's a huge slice of the pie that's subsidized crop insurance for corn and soy and wheat. And then these little teeny slices that are like really punching above their weight in terms of, you know, a small amount of money going to local food hubs, for example. But then the people who run those food hubs are doing incredible work to buy food from these amazing ecological farms in their local area and make sure that folks have food security in that place. So absolutely policy change is a piece of this, and a number of the contributors speak to that at all levels. You know, people also talk about like starting this amazing food forest in Atlanta, Georgia. And, you know, that's a policy initiative on a local level as well, and sort of tapping into resources at local levels. State level policy or provincial policy can be really important. And a province like British Columbia, you know, is exactly the kind of place that can be a leader. Places like Vancouver or British Columbia can model things that maybe would then become models for national policy. I see that in California here in the United States. So obviously now is a challenging time in the United States to do really ambitious things at a federal level, but we can do some really great things at state and local levels that then sort of give us proof of concept and an example of what we might be able to spread more broadly.
SPEAKER_00Is it challenging in the US right now? I don't know. Is it? Is the world?
SPEAKER_01I mean, then I would say, given that you live in Vancouver, do you not see all of the people coming across the border?
SPEAKER_00No. I feel like the world is the world's in a word place right now, that's for sure. Uh it's definitely something that uh it speaks to, I think, kind of the way I view things. Um I actually just did an interview with a really great author from Calgary who wrote a book on migrant workers here in Canada and kind of the exploitative nature that Canada's unfortunately use them. There's a chapter early on in the book, and I looked at this one line, it says about, I think it was written that black Americans only own about 1.5% of agricultural land, yet make yet migrant and minority workers make up a massive portion of the labor force tending to that land. In Canada, we see similar similar dynamics with temporary foreign workers that we bring from other countries to come in to help us farm our land. And I spoke with this author recently who wrote a really good book on this. I think it's called Precarious, The Lives of Migrant Workers and all this stuff. And I don't know if you guys went too much into this stuff, but obviously in that chapter it was touched on a little bit. But how do you guys sit with that kind of contradiction, the sense of like the idea that people that are like ones who are doing a lot of the work and in the fields and the land and stuff like this, but are not really any reaping much of the kind of the rewards? And I don't know if that's something you guys really dug into or if you guys have any thoughts on, but it was just something that was kind of hit with me and I thought about it a little bit. Also, like if perennial agriculture is about long-term rootedness, how do we reconcile that with labor force that is intentionally temporary, structurally kind of excluded from ownership? Is that something you guys ever thought about when you guys were going through this book? Did that ever present itself as something that's important to you for us to kind of acknowledge? I guess I'll let you touch on that, maybe Aubrey. I don't know if that's something you thought about or interested in.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'll lead off and Liz can chime in too. I mean, I'm so glad that you brought us to Leah Penneman's essay, which was the lead essay for the book. Leah is the co-founder of Soulfire Farm and really thinking about this, these connections between labor and land. And I think that thinking about those in the context of perennials is really important. I mean, when we talk about some of the benefits of perennials, we can think about the ways in which, oh, they don't have to be replanted every year. You don't have to till the field every year. You can think about some of the possible benefits to labor. But I think also it's very possible as we go through the history of and reality of plantations that have featured monocultures of perennial plants, that you could build perennial food systems that also don't provide of social benefits or that fit into more broadly extractive systems. And so I think that's where thinking about like which perennials where and how they're grown in a systemic way, both ecologically and socially, is really important for us to consider and to reckon with as we imagine what a more just and perennial and diverse food system can look like in a variety of different places. And I think being able to really pay attention to the kind of complexity of these human and plant relationships over time and the different experiences people are bringing to them is really valuable and needs to be considered as we think about the kinds of changes that you're describing at all sorts of different levels, what happens through individual actions that can take place and in the community scale, and then the people who are advocating for the broader systems in which our food systems interact within the context of this planet.
SPEAKER_00Uh Liz, I'll let you jump in if you have any thoughts. Yeah, it was just it was a part that really kind of hit with me a little bit. That was really good. I'll say it was one of my favorites. But yeah, I'll let you touch on anything.
SPEAKER_01100%. Yeah. And I think also the question you raised about like how can people be sort of deeply rooted when so much of our food system is sort of uprooting people, or people have this sense of only being temporary and not through their own choice, right? In the case of migrant workers, I think a lot of people speak to this sense of like belonging to a place in their essays and the importance of that. And especially if they have a lived experience of not belonging to a place or having been excluded from a place or excluded from reaping the benefits. One of the amazing stories that Leah Pennerman tells in that essay, aside from the incredible four and a half acre agroforest at Soulfire Farm and all the inspiration from Haitian agroforestry systems that she speaks to as someone whose whose father was Haitian American, she also talks about Harriet Tubman and how Harriet Tubman had actually worked in apples when she was enslaved and didn't get to enjoy the fruit of those trees that she was made to plant, but dreamed of one day being able to plant trees that her community could freely enjoy. And she did it. She planted this apple orchard at her House of Freedom in Auburn, New York that bears fruit to this day. That was something I learned for the first time reading Leah Penneman's essay. So I think it really does speak to the sense of being able to enjoy the fruits of those perennials that your community works to establish and being able to belong in a place so that you can be there long enough to invest in a long-term food system like a perennial food system. So all the ecological benefits we're excited about here, the climate resilience, the reduced emissions, the soil health, the cleaning up air and water pollution, all of that is all contingent on people being able to belong to a place long enough without being undermined or booted out that they can make those kinds of investment in place. So I do think that these questions are really closely linked, these questions around social belonging and these questions around perennial food systems and sort of ecosystem management.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was that I mean that essay was really like it really hit a nerve with me in the sense of like we have, you know, it's something that Canada's had to reconcile with over the last little while, but our reconciliation with Aboriginals and indigenous communities and you know, giving back land to them and giving them kind of autonomy over their land. And I did some work with some indigenous people up in North Vancouver Island who are really land stewards for salmon out in this province. And we had a lot of salmon farming community, a lot of salmon farming out here, and they're trying to get it out. They want to make sure that what's better for the ecology of British Columbia and stuff like this, and you know, just giving them a voice and giving them kind of a sense of belonging to what they have. And governments in NBC and Canada are having to kind of come to terms with a lot of that. It's been a lumpy road for sure. But yeah, but then reading her essay and then kind of understanding that and you know, speaking with that author about the migrant worker stuff. I didn't really know much about that history in Canada. And, you know, obviously I think it still is a little bit uh it's still in the United States somewhere, especially down in Florida for Oh, in California.
SPEAKER_01I mean, we had a huge issue, especially in the context of current immigration policy of folks are absolutely essential to our agricultural economy. The agricultural economy in California has been built around the assumption of migrant labor and specifically folks who come without papers, who have been like specifically recruited and targeted to come and do harvest work and who are risking their lives and their families' lives in order to do it. So I absolutely see it like all around me in my own county, that these are issues that we need to really reckon with if we want the folks who do the work in our food system to actually benefit 100%. And one thing to recognize the problem, you know, and then it's another really interesting thing to think about like what does repair look like of these many hundreds of year histories of extractive food systems that extract from people's bodies and extract from land and all of this. So that was actually one of I think the really interesting. Things about this collection is hearing a lot of different stories about different ways of doing repair work in different places and different communities. You know, Elsie Dubray's essay about buffalo restoration at Cheyenne River Sioux. Mariah Gladstone wrote a little bit about buffalo restoration in her context at Blackfeet Nation as well, and the restoration of cultural fire. We were talking about that a little bit earlier, Jamie, and sort of how both of the places that we live in have just been engulfed in these really destructive wildfires. And there's an increasing understanding among sort of the Western science community that, you know, these indigenous cultural burning practices of these kind of slow and low fires were part of what prevented those destructive fires in the past. So I think it's really interesting to hear from a variety of people from indigenous communities, African American communities, various communities that have experienced marginalization within the food system about different really ingenious strategies of doing repair work on the land and with people. And I think, you know, for me in this sort of editorial role in this book, there's a lot to learn from there that, you know, is one step to see that, oh, the past is not the way we should continue to doing things. But that doesn't necessarily tell you what's necessary for repair. And so being able to kind of take leadership from impacted communities about, okay, what does that process of repair look like going forward? It's an incredible privilege.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this must have been so fun for you guys to put together. How did you guys find all these people? Did you know them all personally, or did you just been reaching out to them? You're like, all right, this works will be great. Like, and did you guys like divvy up the stories, or did you guys each interview everyone? And how did this work out for you guys? Like, how did you guys? I'm kind of curious because I was like, these essays are amazing. And like, I don't know, I'm like, how did they find these people? What was the process for you guys about doing this? This must have been so fun.
SPEAKER_02It's been amazing. And I think, you know, we started conceptualizing the book and thinking across these different perennial ecosystems of forest and grassland and grain. And and the book was really built relationally, thinking about who we knew, but also whose work we knew of and who knew other people or had suggestions and who it was a good fit for at that time um and where they were with their own creative work or practices. And so I think it sort of grew organically in that way. We started with building those kinds of relationships. And there are so many people who have such amazing stories to tell. I hope that this just helps catalyze and encourage even more people to think about what their kind of story might be. And I think that being able to go through the process in a really collaborative way was important for us. I mean, I think we provided some prompts and invitations to write a kind of personal narrative to tell us your why, tell us the kind of origin story of how you came to this work, and then work with the process of shaping that back and forth. So Liz and I were able to engage with everyone in a really, I think, generative way around helping fine-tune or helping encourage or having conversations to spark things. But everyone had probably way more stories than we could fit into a single book. And it maybe in some cases is a real challenge to pare them down to just a handful of pages. So it's just an entry point, I think. And hopefully through this work, people will discover oh my gosh, I need to learn more about this person and their work and the communities that they're connected to. And it will just become a pathway for deeper engagement.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's pretty cool what you guys did here. And I was just like, my brain was just like, I'm like, how do they do all this? Like, where did you get all these people? And and it also speaks to like how many people out there really care, how much people really care about how they want to like they care about the land, they care about the people that are around them, and they care about you know, doing really cool things. It's very exciting to see that there is a lot of change in this world and a lot of a lot of people really doing some good advocacy and stuff like this. I always I'm kind of curious about this one thing because I think anybody out there listening, I know we don't have much more time here, but I'm one last question for you guys. If someone listening wants to support a more perennial and just food system, what would you advise them? And you know, what would you say to them? What would you say to them as maybe like a diner or like what if you were to give any tips to anyone out there listening, kind of like what can you do to maybe be a part of the system or learn more about it? Or what advice would you say to someone like that? Liz, what would you do or say, should I say?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Well, I think learning more about the place where you are is a really wonderful place to start. And I think learning about the indigenous history of the place and thinking about, you know, what food systems have thrived in this place for a long time and learning about how we can support, you know, the continued flourishing and in some cases revitalization of those food systems is really important. You mentioned also farmers' markets. And I think sort of learning who might be working with berry crops or nut crops or animals raised on perennial pasture in the place where you live is a really great start. And then it is also really fun to learn about some of the newly developed perennial foods. Aubrey can maybe speak with a little bit more knowledge about some of the ways you can go on the internet and access some of those newly developed perennial grain crops. But that's been fun for me to order some things in the mail and try some things in my home kitchen. And I think also on the growing side, and this a hundred percent includes urban people. You know, if you have access to a garden space, maybe you want to get together with some neighbors and think about, you know, a micro urban food forest or urban orchard. I've seen some of these things in in little pockets that are just amazing. And then also, you know, we as folks who are consumers can think about supporting farmers in various ways too. And getting to know people at a farmer's market is a great way, but also plugging in with larger organizations in the community that do advocacy around the food system and helping to sort of share your voice on the policy level as well can be really, really, really helpful.
SPEAKER_00Very cool. I love it. Yeah. Anything you want to add to there about the hoppers?
SPEAKER_02I think I would just add that there are so many things, ways that people can plug in, whether it's through learning or reading or through connecting in their communities, it's sort of looking around you at the place, um, and it's human and more than human uh context, or by taking action. And I think because of that kind of so many possibilities, it's really, I would really encourage people to kind of look and listen in the context of their own lives. Where are they finding a sense of wishing for something that was different, or where are they feeling really motivated, or what would feel fun in a really meaningful way to them? And for some people, that's getting in the kitchen and trying new foods, and for other people, it's getting out on the land, and for other people, it's heading to the library or showing up in an advocacy situation and making your voice heard or writing your own story. And so I think being able to really think about what might light you up so that you can really dig in and sustain that and maybe really trying to think about just taking that first step of acting and letting that feed what comes next. So I think encouraging people to try that bite of something, um, let it sustain you and interact with these perennial plants in a maybe in a hands-on or sensory way would be really, I think, important. I love that we have the technologies that we have and we get to talk to you through through this way, Jamie, and connect across these places and across time. And I also think it's really satisfying to be able to see and hold and touch and taste something at this moment and to be able to come back to that. And with every breath we're taking, we're interacting with these plants around us and the land and this planet. And so just being able to be present to that moment and see what might emerge.
SPEAKER_00Very cool. It's great stuff. I think you guys have edited and brought together a really cool book. So many great voices, uh, so much to learn. It's been about a month since it came out. What was it, March 3rd? I think it came out. Was it March 3rd or 6th? I think. Yeah, March 3rd. Yeah. Uh yeah. So it's been out a bit almost a month. What's been the reception? What's been the reception so far? What are people saying? What do you, what's the feedback you guys are getting so far? Anything you want to share with how's it been for you guys just putting it out there in the world? I mean, this is a couple years in the making.
SPEAKER_01Really fun. I mean, well, I'll say we started at the perennial farm gathering with um a bunch of folks who are super excited about perennial food. So I think that was wonderful for folks in this community to think about, wow, we really do have strength in numbers here, you know. But I think maybe the most common reflection I've heard over the past three weeks is people have been sharing that they're just excited to think about something positive. It's like, what is something positive that's happening in the world right now? And to engage it a little bit longer timescale. I think there's a sense of being overwhelmed by this just like breakneck pace of this 24-hour news cycle. And so I think this sense of like, wow, there are folks who've been working patiently and steadily for decades to build a better future for their community. And they really are thinking like many, many generations into the future, and they're informed by many, many generations into the past, like even our evolutionary past of thinking about how we live with the plants and microbes around us. And I think just that more expansive sense of time and of a process of change that is nonlinear, but it can nonetheless move in this really positive, almost like evolutionary direction. That's something that I've heard people feel excited about. And I feel excited about it too.
SPEAKER_00No, it's it's amazing. Well, I want to thank you both. Everybody out there listening, it's called Living Roots, The Promise of Perennial Foods, Liz Carla, Aubrey, Strait Krug. Um, you guys have brought together something pretty amazing here. I think it's a great book. I think I urge everyone out there listening to pick up a copy. It's a wonderful read. It's really invigorating. The stories are quick, they're not very long, it's easy to digest. And it's actually something that's really it's I think it's personal, but I think it's also very you're gonna walk away from it thinking, you're like, wow, I didn't see the world in this way, but I didn't realize this possibility. And I think it's it's like you said, it's a very positive book and a very fun read. And I think it's uh something that you guys should be very proud of. So I really appreciate you guys bringing this to my attention and to the scout listeners. And I wish you guys all the best on your tour. And you're gonna be in Kansas soon, Liz. You guys are gonna have some, yeah. Awesome, that's exciting. So thank you so much, and I wish you guys all the best on everything. I really appreciate this.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Jamie, very much. We really appreciate it, too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, it's good. You know, I want to highlight good people out there doing really great work, and I think this is great. So I think this is really cool. So I thank you.