Landscapes Podcast [12] Holistic Grazing, Holistic Thinking - Nikki Yoxall

A regenerative livestock farmer defends localism amidst the recent surge in confident food system sustainability claims

Episode Description

A recent wave of sustainability claims confidently dictate how, for what, and where we ought to use land for climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Nikki Yoxall, a self proclaimed regenerative landscape manager walks through her thinking on land use decision making and responds to these critiques.

Episode Links

• Food without farming, Nature Sustainability

• Guthman on the problems with localism

• DeLind on the problems with localism

• Phil Loring – deeper meaning of regen ag

• Understanding Ag team in the US

• Paige Stanley’s rangelands research

• Pasture for Life

• Remembering David Stanley

• Carbon Cowboys Network

• Samantha Mosier article on evidence of benefits of Adaptive Multi-Paddock Grazing

• Soilmentor 

• Highlands Rewilding

• Hannah Ritchie introducing her new book

• An environmentalist gets lunch – Hannah Ritchie

• The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People, George Monbiot

• EU project on livestock futures

Landscapes is produced by Adam Calo. A complete written transcript of the episode can be found on Adam’s newsletter: Land Food Nexus.  Send feedback or questions to adamcalo@substack.com. 

Music by Blue Dot Sessions: “Kilkerrin” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

If you like the podcast please leave it a review in your podcast app.

Introduction

In a recent academic article titled Food Without Agriculture, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, a group of earth system scientists modeled the extent to which dietary fats could be produced through synthetic means. Their calculations estimate that the energy requirements of synthesizing fat through industrial processes rather than through agriculture would be almost two times as efficient when comparing it to palm oil production.

The authors argue that their findings suggest scaling up such synthetic production of food offers  “enormous potential reductions in greenhouse gas emissions as well as in land and water use.” The authors do note that replacing agriculture with synthetic food production may displace the 1 billion people employed in smallholder agriculture across the world, but they suggest this may actually be a good thing because moving people out of localized production and into urban jobs is ultimately a measure of progress.

They write,

“As economies grow, structural transformation shifts laborers from agriculture into manufacturing and service sectors, which ultimately results in higher incomes for everyone. Producing food without agriculture will be another step in furthering these existing trends.”

This line of argumentation represents what I feel is something rather new in debates about how to reduce the social and environmental costs of the food system, while still attending to the caloric needs of people in a world with a billion hungry.

There was a time, at least in popular circles, when the proposal to right the wrongs of the industrial food system was a return to the wisdom of the non-industrial food system.

Works like Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America, Alice Waters’ writing on Slow Food, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle, Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. They all created a powerful narrative that says the problem of today's food system is that we've lost touch with agriculture. That we need to forge new local connections between farmers and eaters and such a return to localism would be good for the land and the palate.

However, an uncritical localism hasn't delivered on its promises of transformation. Placing our hopes in the local, as scholars like Guthman and DeLind have pointed out, put responsibility for change at the point of consumption, was easily coopted by large corporations, and tended to make heroes out of culinary wizards and food system thinkers, rather than the marginalized laborers in the fields and in the kitchens.

In response scholars and activists have turned their attention to the structural issues that prevent such islands of gastronomic pleasure and sustainable production from expanding and becoming the norm turn to explore how to politicize agricultural production such that something like the benefits of the shape and ease model could be delivered to all instead of just elite consumers.

But a new framing of the problem has entered the mainstream. Like the authors of the Food Without Agriculture paper, maybe what we need is not less industrial food, but more. That, yes, the industrial food system has a slew of environmental problems, but that on balance, it is the protagonist of the story of reducing global hunger.

We ought to harness the ingenuity of industrial processes to produce more food with less land. And, opposition to the potential of these techniques is a backwards and potentially dangerous call to invite hunger back into the world. The latest evidence of this idea going mainstream is an essay from the journalist George Monbiot titled The Cruel Fantasies of Well Fed People.

in The essay, Monbiot restates this argument, that we ought to thank the industrial food system for reducing hunger, and that a call to local food systems is a recipe for quote, mass death. Monbiot eventually lands on this idea of developing new industrial processes for producing abundant food on as little as land possible as the most promising solution to reduce hunger without having the problematic aspects of agriculture continue to destroy the planet.

The essay successfully provoked many responses, but the one I was most interested in highlighting for today's episode came from farmers, embedded in this project of renewed localism. that very much feel their life's work is dedicated to feeding people in the most environmentally sensitive way. How do these farmers reflect on these new waves of sustainability arguments that reduce food production to a question of land use and efficiency?

In a world that is demanding new land use arrangements to address our coming environmental problems, is there still space for an ascendant localism?

Nikki Yoxall is a farmer, grazier, and PhD student in Northern Scotland. I've always appreciated her way of thinking about the food system and learned much from her work developing the practices of an agroecological livestock management approach. So for this episode, in the wake of this new emboldened argument against localism, I wanted to showcase how Nikki goes about her work and why she might place her hope in managing land for healthy ecosystems, rather than following the advice of land use optimization.

Interview Transcript

*The transcript has been modified slightly to improve comprehension

[00:06:09] Nikki Yoxall: My name’s Nikki Yoxall. Researcher, grazier –  I'm not quite sure I'm comfortable with academic yet –but researcher and grazier seems to work

[00:06:17] Adam Calo: You're one of these people who is studying the food system, but also actively embedded in being a practitioner of the food system.

[00:06:23] Nikki Yoxall: Yeah, that's right. And being embedded in it came first.

[00:06:27] Adam Calo: Well, let's start with that. The grazing side.

[00:06:29] Nikki Yoxall: In terms of how the business is structured, we work with local landowners to help them deliver soil health and biodiversity outcomes by using cattle as a tool, as ecological engineers to help us to do that. We produce one hundred percent tree and pasture fed beef that we sell to the local community. So that's the business model. We also work on another farm as share farmers. So we provide the labor, the landowner provides the land, and then we share the herd 50 50. So that's a slightly different model. It's very much about working in collaboration. So our whole business is based on partnership collaboration. Co-development of aims and objectives.

And then in terms of the actual kind of how the grazing works, we would probably describe it for most people as mob grazing, because that seems to be the term that many people are becoming more familiar with. I prefer the term adaptive multi paddock grazing, which is often shorted to AMP, because it reflects the kind of adaptive nature of what we're doing and the fact that there isn't a hard and fast rule about how we plan our grazing. My husband and I are both … have gone through holistic management training, which was devised by Alan Savory. And whilst I am challenged by some of the social and political issues surrounding Alan, his framework for thinking and decision making is phenomenal and  genuinely life changing for me. So, we use holistic management as a way to plan our grazing and decide how we're going to manage that landscape as a decision making tool.

[00:08:01] Adam Calo: I noticed that you, in one sense, described the cattle as a tool to deliver a service, but in the other sense, you describe yourself as a farmer in the share farming model. Do you separate those two identities? Are you a farmer in one and the other one you're providing these kinds of services to for biodiversity or carbon mitigation, for example?

[00:08:20] Nikki Yoxall: That's a really interesting question because I quite often change my language to suit the audience. So, share farming is quite a well-known term. And I often get described as a farmer and it's taken me a long time to kind of come to terms with being a farmer because I don't own a farm

So there's lots of cultural expectations of what a farmer is and how they look and who they are, which I may be not quite comfortable I align with. So yeah, how I describe myself,  I often describe myself as a farmer, but predominantly a grazier. But then that term isn't really used in the UK so lots of people don't really know what that means. I think what is important is that I see myself and the cattle and my husband as playing kind of equal roles in this. And actually the cattle have more of an important role 'cause they're the ones that are actually doing the work. It's our job just to create the conditions within which they can do that work. I quite often think of myself from some of my other work as a convener or a synergist, someone who's bringing together the relevant people, into a relevant space to make better decisions or to undertake action. And I think that's probably pretty much reflected with how we're managing the cattle.

We're finding land, we're bringing cattle to the land. We are giving them the space that they need and the conditions that they need to thrive and then making decisions around making sure that that works as well as it can.

[00:09:44] Adam Calo: I mean, this is super interesting to me because a lot of what I've worked on is this idea of norms of farming and how that seeps into policy. And so a lot of efforts are trying to create, say, new farmers or to support farmers, but not necessarily supporting the processes that we might see on the land.

But it sounds like you're much more interested in processes first, farming later.

[00:10:04] Nikki Yoxall: Yeah, and I think what I've had to do is find alternative processes because policy as it stands hasn't supported those. So policy, particularly the CAP. But now as we're in, … I'm based in Scotland, so quite involved in supporting new policy design as in a post Brexit context. And that none of it really is supportive of the kind of work that I'm doing. Which is very frustrating because there's these expectations around where your animals will be and how long they'll be there for and what kind of animals you have and how you demonstrate economic responsibility. And so things like share farming don't really fit into that, which is why we kind of have had to share the herd 50 50, but we can't put them all under one herd number because we need to demonstrate that the landowner owns the actual animals that are there.

But we also need to have some of them under our ownership. So there's all these kind of complex, difficult procedural issues and obstacles that we kind of have to overcome. It feels like an assault course. You know, get over one hurdle and then something else crops up and you have to wade your way through that, and then you realize that you needed to fill in this other form or do things something slightly differently. Everything that we are doing is done in spite of not because of the policy environment within which we're working. And as much as possible, we try and avoid it. So for example, claiming subsidy is not part of our business model. But everything that we try and do is almost outside of that policy structure because it just, in some ways makes things easier,

[00:11:33] Adam Calo: A lot of the times in the a alternative agriculture research we see all this work like you and others are doing, and we say, oh, you know, this is innovation. How do we stimulate innovation? But then I'm always thinking, you know, why isn't this the norm? Why do you have to create these types of models that are almost loopholes to the standard operating procedure?

You mentioned holistic grazing as part of your background, I've also heard you use, regenerative farming or regenerative grazing. What are the sort of the key principles that kind of make up these concepts?

[00:12:01] Nikki Yoxall: There's been attempts to define regenerative agriculture by a number of people. and I think there was some really interesting work. Is it Philip Loing who was kind of looking at, actually it's not the practices or activities themselves, it's the way that they are structured and the decision making that goes on behind them and the kind of governance of that that makes something regenerative or not.

I think from all of the different organizations that I engage with and all of the different work that I do, the definition of regenerative agriculture that most aligns with my thinking probably comes from the Understanding Ag Team in the US. So this is, Gabe Brown and Alan Williams and others, who have developed a consultancy and a kind of knowledge exchange organization that runs various programs. They base their work on the six principles of soil health, three rules of adaptive stewardship and the four ecosystem processes. And they're clearly pulling on or drawing on the work of the Rodale Institute, Savory's holistic management. I mean, there's very clear links back to all of that, but I think the way that they articulate it is really, really clear.

They talk about knowing your context as the primary thing. Actually understanding, that what we are doing practically is a reflection of who we are and how we want to steward land. Not disturbing. So in nature there's no mechanical or chemical disturbance. And so trying to reflect that as much as possible in our farm practice. They talk about covering and building surface armor or a shield, which is predominantly from biomass, which is going to protect the soil surface.

If we think of the soil as a skin, we're able to protect that with plant matter. They talk about mixing it up. So a diversity of plants, microbes, insects, wildlife, livestock, and people. Looking to mother nature, it doesn’t produce monoculture, so why should we? And actually recognizing the benefits of diversity. They also talk about keeping living roots in the soil. Because we recognize that roots feed soil microorganisms, which feed our plants, and the reciprocity that is inherent in that process. then growing he animals and soil together. So recognizing that the healthier your soil, the healthier animals, the healthier animals. Again, that reciprocity.

And I really love these ideas that come through the kind of symbiosis of the livestock system and the soil and the ecosystem that it exists within. And then they go on to talk about this adaptive stewardship, which is recognizing that there are compounding and cascading effects of every decision or every action that we take. Recognizing disruption of everyday routines. And doing the same thing all the time isn't always great. So introducing kind of periodic plan disruption helps to move things forward. Keeping in mind, the effect of the action disruption's not a bad thing as long as it's planned. And that diversity is is a core component. And then all of that is kind of underpinned by these four ecosystem processes. One is energy flow, one is the water cycle, one is the mineral cycle, and again, diversity.

So the fact that diversity flows through all three of those levels, if you like, of the framework for their thinking, just highlights how important it is.

[00:15:00] Adam Calo: That's an incredibly detailed answer, but also multi scalar. So you have all these different dimensions that you are care about or these principles that you're drawing on. But then in the debates about sustainable agriculture, or even just sustainable livestock production, one of the key factors that always rises to the top is, which practices mitigate carbon emissions, because that's such a priority now. Is that focus on emissions reduction appropriate in your context?

[00:15:24] Nikki Yoxall: I think what's important to remember when we're talking about emissions is are we actually talking about actual emissions or are we talking about net, some sort of net emissions? Or are we talking about emissions efficiency? And I think that those terms get really confused, and that that is often used within agrifood space to reflect how environmentally sound something is or not. Emissions are often perceived as a waste. A brilliant man who was involved in the Pasture for Life Research group, which I  chair, who sadly passed away earlier this year, would always talk about you can't deal with waste unless you are dealing with the source of the waste. Actually he would then go on to talk about how we often call something a waste when it is just part of a cycle. And I think that's what's really got lost from our conversations about, particularly methane, is that we've seemed to have forgotten that is a cycling gas. And has been lumped in with emissions relating to fossil fuel burning, which isn't part of a cycle because it's where the cycle has been so disrupted. I mean, obviously those emissions can at some point fall into the carbon cycle, but there's so much being emitted that it's very difficult to create that balance, whereas methane emissions have existed as part of a cycle –a 10 to 12 year cycle—within the atmosphere already. So I think we quite often conflate different issues and kind of put them under one banner for ease of simplicity, I suppose.

But actually it doesn't really reflect the true nature of what's going on. And anytime we look at something through a single lens, whether that's biodiversity or emissions or water quality or social justice or whatever it's going to be, there are inevitably going to be impacts and unintended consequences. And I think what we need to get better at is creating frameworks where we can understand all of those consequences that they're compounding and cascading effects that Understanding Ag talk about, and that we're able to justify our decisions I guess in some ways, not explain away, but to understand those trade-offs.

And at the moment, we're kind of so focused on pitting biodiversity against emissions or against water quality or against food access, where actually all of these things are relevant and it's really, really complex and it really doesn't, enable sensible discussion. If we're only going to ever focus on one thing, we kind of get into this either or binary position where actually we all just need to get much better at holding multiple ideas in our minds at one time and finding ways to either reflect or justify or explain those when we're in conversation with others.

[00:17:56] Adam Calo: Is there a tension here though? I think about someone like my former classmate, Paige Stanley, who you know is doing really careful work on trying to unpack how different practices and different contexts relate to soil carbon and other outcomes. The idea is you're delivering these outcomes to landowners.

You're saying, look, my practices can deliver X, Y, and Z 'cause it's based off of these scientific practices. But then if a, yes, one dimensional scientific understanding shifts, that might threaten your business model.

[00:18:26] Nikki Yoxall: Yeah, possibly.

There are changes to the research, but the research isn't catching up with us. I think one thing to remember with the sort of grazing that we're practicing is it's really under researched. I mean, the work that is being done predominantly in the US by people, that's being really kind of led through the Carbon Cowboys Network by Peter Bick, who's a filmmaker, but has been really supporting and looking at and researching the impacts of grazing in the US has been really fascinating. There was an article, I think by Samantha Mosier, that was looking at what are the kind of improvements in soil properties and they're really starting to quantify this stuff. So basically there was greater carbon and nitrogen stocks in soils, and also multiple soil organic matter. Refraction increases as well. They also found that there were base saturation electrical conductivity was improved, where adaptive multi paddock grazing was implemented. The same team looked again on another farm or on another ranch and looking at that to understand the stabilization through mineralized association, mineral association. All of these things are adding to that research base that we are pulling on and that we're drawing on. The challenge that we have in the UK is that when you talk about this, people go, oh, well that's in the US it's completely different. We have a real issue at the moment, particularly in the space around UK research and innovation, particularly for farmer led activity. It’s  

very difficult for farmers to access that funding because the expectation from the UK government is that there's some kind of thing or product at the end of it that they're able to sell.

And there's a huge amount in the application about how are you going to commercialize whatever it is you're gonna find out. And actually that kind of is incomplete antithesis to what we're trying to do, which is to understand how do we best, internalize that knowledge and use that to our advantage to support healthier soil, healthier animals.

Farmers are absolutely at the forefront of this work. So many of us are out there doing this recording what we're seeing using apps like Soil Mentor to record our observations to try and build a picture of what we're seeing. And it often feels like we're kind of out there on our own without the scientific community supporting us. It often feels like they're kind of five paces back going, oh, well, we're kind of interested in what you're doing, but we can't really replicate that in a study.

So we'll kind of replicate a bit of it. And then inevitably the outcome doesn't really reflect the reality of what we're experiencing 'cause they've only been able to research a part of that system.

So, I don't think that there is a risk of this becoming unfashionable. Not too worried about that. I think that ultimately people want to eat good food and people want to see healthy landscapes. And if I am able to demonstrate that that's what's happening, then I think, I think we're okay.

[00:21:06] Adam Calo: That's a perfect segue because I think the business model that you talked about, it's not just about food production at the point of sale. You're developing a relationship with your customers through in direct local markets. Maybe you can tell me a little bit more. Are you directly selling these techniques or are you just essentially delivering that landscape?

[00:21:25] Nikki Yoxall: Yeah, so we have various agreements for one of the organizations that we work with, Highlands Rewilding. They are very much focused on and committed to experimental design and process and using their estates as kind of open laboratories, open air laboratories. So we're really, really lucky to be able to have found someone to work in partnership with who we can say, “we wanted graze like this. We've seen fantastic outcomes elsewhere, we don't currently have the capacity  to measure that and to understand actually what's going on. So can we work with you to do that?”

So at the moment, I think for us, being part of very much a kind of experimental team is great because it's allowing us to kind of do the stuff that we want to do to better understand the impacts of the approach that we're taking.

[00:22:11] Adam Calo: Can you describe that operation a little bit more in detail? So, this is at the Beldorney estate, right? And so how did, what's the story behind how that relationship formed and what do you do there?

[00:22:21] Nikki Yoxall: We live opposite the Beldorney estate on the other side of the river. And it had previously been owned by, a mostly absent land landlord here in the UK and then she'd moved abroad, I think she's actually from Switzerland and had gone backwards and forwards.

And it got to the point where I think she just wasn't here enough and decided to sell the estate at which point Highlands Rewilding,  which I don't think was called Highlands Rewilding at that point, bought the estate as their second estate. So they own one, further North in Scotland and then bought this. I contacted the owner of the company and said, oh, I understand that you have bought this estate. We are a local grazier company who worked with different landowners. At that time we'd been working with a couple of different landowners already on a small scale and said, we would be really keen to explore ways of working with you because I'm pretty sure that if you are rewilding you're going to want some large herbivores in your landscape.

And we'd be keen to explore what that could look like. So we met with the owner. We kind of had a backwards and forwards. He, in other conversations with a number of other people had been told about us. So he'd, you know, sort of told people that he was moving into the area with … well, he'd bought the estate. People were saying things like, “Oh, Nikki and James Yoxall are very local to you. You should have a chat with them. They're kind of, you know, really pushing this stuff. They're really interested in this, agri wilding concept,” I guess.

So we were very fortunate that other people had kind of sung our praises to some extent, which was really, really kind and generous of them. And so what then happened was we worked with the Scottish Land Matching Service, which offer a free service to help, landowners and graziers, for example, come together to find an agreement or some sort of contractual arrangement that suits all parties. And we basically ended up with a contract that says at the top, this is not a tenancy. Because we needed to make sure that we weren't in any way, expecting it to be a sort of tenancy agreement. You know, we want to be very clear that this is not a tenancy, that the capital will be used across the estate. To graze for these particular outcomes. There were some other kind of defining aspects around where they could go, the length of period for if we, if either party needed to pull out from that contract, the kind of notice period, all and. Then we started, we moved the cattle there in March, 2022. Yeah, since then, actually the estate now employs my husband. So he is estate manager. And I do a bit of consultancy around kind of broader regenerative ag systems and monitoring and some kind of building that scientific basis for what we're doing.

But the cattle are there and are moved every day and we use electric fences to move them around the estate. And we're working with the science team and ecologists to measure the impacts of that and monitor that and to understand as well some of the more innovative wintering strategies that we're using.

So the animals are outside all year round., that was something that we felt was really important. So we're using bale grazing and deferred grazing strategies, and we're trying to understand those a lot more because there's been hardly any research or no research in the UK really about the impact bale grazing has on soil health, for example, or on forage quality. So I'm coordinating a field lab that's supported by the Innovative Farmers group to compare before and after, essentially over a five year period. And that's with seven different farmers across the UK.

And I think that what's really exciting is that we're sort of blurring these terms now. And actually we're saying it's not about saying that that's farming or that's rewilding, or agri wilding. What we're doing is creating healthier soils and healthier ecosystems and working towards optimal system processes and functioning rather than kind of having these very clear, concise outcomes that we want to achieve, which is either food production or more trees or species rich grassland. It's kind of all being brought together, which I think is a far more healthy way to consider our landscapes.

[00:26:01] Adam Calo: Highlands Rewilding, they need you because they need your knowledge of how to work with these animals and your experience in these landscapes, but you need them for the land. In order for them to continue their story of bringing biodiversity back to these Scottish landscapes, your methods need to demonstrate these outcomes. Is there any kind of tension between the kind of sustainability claims that Highlands Rewilding makes and the kind of the limits of regenerative grazing? Or is this something that you go together on?

[00:26:32] Nikki Yoxall: It's a kind of partnership approach and I think, as I said, we don't have all of that information yet. We don't know. There are lots of assumptions made about carbon. Soil carbon in particular. And the James Hutton Institute have done some great work around trying to map all of the soil carbon stocks in Scotland, but it's not accurate. We've had the entire estate, baselined so we know what the carbon stocks look like down to a meter across the estate. And so that's given us a really good starting point so that we're able to actually start monitoring and measuring this stuff. And that's the key thing. We've kind of put in the financial risk of owning livestock and they have taken on the kind of financial burden of the estate and together we are working in partnership to try and understand and monitor and measure this stuff because it really just isn't being done at scale and it definitely isn't really being done on individual estates that are able to kind of take the time to do that and to do that monitoring and to do that monitoring with a commitment from an in-house scientific team. What we find is that many of the places that have an in-house scientific team are research platforms owned by universities and for various reasons, they often are not quite pushing their system in the way that we are, for example.

So they're still kind of quite agriculturally production focused rather than in this kind of more liminal space between wilder landscapes and food production. So I don't think probably that there's many other people out there in the UK who are exploring this space of we can have diverse species, rich landscapes that are moving and changing and shifting all the time.

And we are okay with that. And we can produce food in these same places and contribute to community prosperity by working in partnership, not just, the estate owning the animals and the estate owning the land, but actually kind of de-risking that to some extent by sharing that risk whilst at the same time sharing the rewards as well.

[00:28:23] Adam Calo: I have to ask this question of every person who's embedded in some kind of inspiring and alternative food production model, which is, if you could have it where you were just a proprietor owner, would you do it that way? If you did have the security or the financial means, would you prefer to just be doing these experiments within your own kingdom?

[00:28:41] Nikki Yoxall: I would. My husband would say the opposite. I probably would because I do get stressed about tenure and access to land. I guess I'm in a hugely privileged position where I have other skills that allow me to make, an income from not just cattle. If the worst came to the worst and we had to sell almost all of the cattle, then, you know, I … we would still be able to make an income and we would still be able to pay our mortgage and all of those sorts of things.

So, we don’t entirely rely on that aspect financially. If we won the lottery, I would probably be keen to buy a farm. I think my husband would maybe be less interested in that land ownership model. And for him, it's about stewardship.

He's deeply, deeply committed to this idea of stewardship, not necessarily having to be tied in with ownership, which I have so much respect for. And I really admire that position that he takes. I think maybe my, my own psyche is kind of too deeply embedded in being brought up in quite a conservative world where expectations around land ownership were very normal.

[00:29:47] Adam Calo: So the principle you admire, but that power and security of land ownership is always there?

[00:29:52] Nikki Yoxall: It's attractive, right? And I think it's about being able to make decisions and not have to … Collaboration's hard work. It's really, really hard to work in collaboration and work in partnership with other people. It's so difficult because it's not just practically, but just the kind of relationship management stuff. And actually the easy lazy way out of that is just to say, well, let's remove the collaborative bit and let's work on our own in isolation. And I think that's often why we're kind of politically in some of the challenges that we're experiencing at the moment in the UK, because it's easier to be, sitting in opposition and to silo yourself than it is to engage in difficult conversations.

Yeah, I'm quite tired at the moment. I've done a lot of traveling this year. So it's probably, if I was a bit more, if I had a bit more energy just now, I'd probably say, yeah, I wouldn't want to own land either. I'm quite happy to work in partnership and have those difficult conversations and ride that rocky, rocky road.

But, yeah, maybe my own energy levels are indicative of what I would probably find an easier way out, which would be just owning the land and managing the land.

[00:30:53] Adam Calo: I think that's profound actually. That if we lived in an environment where we had more free time, we weren't so bound to our wage labor, perhaps if there wasn't such precarity, then collaboration becomes something that we have time for or we have energy for. But otherwise, how can I get my little peace and retreat is kind of the only thing that's left for us.

[00:31:12] Nikki Yoxall: Totally. And like universal basic income would be a game changer. Like, how much would that just change the entire way that we think about how we use time, what we need to do, how at risk we feel the decisions that we make. We would be so freed up to make the best possible decisions for broader outcomes rather than just trying to claim our piece of the pie. And yeah, I think some of those ideas around much more equitable access to resources, without the kind of risk and much more equity about who carries risk and how people are supported to make decisions and the time that we have to make those decisions would … it would make a huge difference to how we all live our lives.

[00:31:53] Adam Calo: Let's try and ground ourselves again a little bit. It's an old idea, but it seems to be a resurgent argument that says, Hey Nikki, you know, whatever you can accomplish with your regenerative practices and all your principles which have lovely names, because you're prioritizing beef production, this land would be better for biodiversity and carbon sequestration by taking grazing animals off the land.

How do you see these types of arguments that are kind of black and white guides for our land use?

[00:32:17] Nikki Yoxall: Well, I'm not prioritizing beef production. What we're doing is prioritizing healthy ecosystems. So we prioritize taking a holistic view. So that's the first thing. Secondly, grasslands species, rich grasslands are in significant decline across the UK. They're hugely at risk, and that's through both policy drivers that have really pushed for agricultural intensification. And now in England as well, they're kind of supporting for farmers to pretty much get rid of species rich grassland and replace it with equally species diverse but not permanent pastures through things like herbal lays. So they're hugely at risk and they co-evolved with herbivores.

It's really interesting. There's a, there's a hillside that we grazed a year ago. We could only graze our cattle on there for 13 days and they were moving every day across this hill. But because the quality of the grass there, the quality of the pasture, the quality and the health of the plants, because it had been rested for over a year and a half at that point when we brought the animals onto the estate, because it had been rested for so long, it was really kind of rank and the plants were just not healthy. So we were only able to graze our cattle on that for 13 days. Because they just weren't content. They weren't getting the forage that they needed. We can think of our animals as a proxy for other wild animals, right?

So other wild animals also the deer that live there, the voles that live there, all the other animals that eat plants that live on that estate also weren't having access to good quality, healthy plants. This year, because of the grazing last year and the way that we've rested it and then come back to graze it this year, we were able to graze our cattle on that same hillside for 26 days. So we doubled the amount of time. We were able to graze them on there still on daily moves. We were able to give them slightly smaller paddocks. And that is all because the quality of the forage and the quality of the plants and the health of the plants increased. It doesn't mean that they became more agriculturally relevant.

They didn't at all. It wasn't that we kind of had perennial rye grass growing where it shouldn't be. These were nativized natural plants that exist in the, wild space if you like. But they were just much healthier because they had had that graze and rest.

That is a very natural thing to happen, a graze and then a rest. And our entire kind of grazing system is built on that. So at any one time, over 95% of the estate, if you like, or the grazing platform, so the area that we are grazing, over 95% of it doesn't have animals on it. So this idea that, you know, that if you just remove animals, it's going to be better. Well, 95% of the the land that we're grazing doesn't have animals on it on any given day. And actually, what we are able to do is move them strategically around that landscape in a way that creates as much rest as possible, whilst also enabling that very key pulse of grazing and disruption.

Because let's remember when we put an animal somewhere, it's not just grazing. There's trampling. It's their saliva, it's their dung, it's their urine. They're able to move seeds about through their coats. All these other factors that are happening at the same time. So if we remove animals, we suddenly remove the ability to move seeds around the estate.

We remove the ability to have dung, which is really, really important for dung beetles. we also completely remove the opportunity for, on a slightly wet day, for a little depression to be made in the ground, which actually holds water and is something that a frog could come and lay its frogs spawn in, or that a bird could drink from. All of this disruption that we optimize with our animals creates much more complex, structurally diverse species, diverse ecosystem across that landscape rather than if we just took the animals away and let all the grass grow, which would then mostly just kind of go into rushes and Molinia and actually would become quite, it would significantly reduce its diversity.

[00:36:02] Adam Calo: What you describe is a real puzzle for some of the landscape modeling efforts that leads to some of these conclusions. Where, how would I characterize the land and where you operate? Is it grazed land? Is it, grassland? And so these kinds of single cell top-down views, can't necessarily capture that temporal or spatial diversity that you're implementing.

[00:36:24] Nikki Yoxall: Yeah, exactly that. I do some work with an organization called Pasture for Life. We work within two research projects, big European research projects to look at exactly kind of you know, future livestock modeling across Europe. And the biggest issue we come across is that the models just are not able to model the complexity of the reality that we find in our landscapes. So there's an assumption between like, this is grassland and this is arable. And never the never the two shall meat. You only put your livestock on grassland and you only grow food crops on arable. And there's no ability within these model models to actually integrate those.

So to bring livestock into arable systems, for example, in the same year that a crop is grown, like it just isn't possible in these modeling systems. So science is being driven by models that aren't able to reflect reality. Furthermore, we know things like this kind of adaptive multi paddock grazing, mob grazing increase the forage availability.

I mean, that example I gave of 13 days versus 26 days. It's just one example, but there's been quite a lot of research that has said if you move from kind of just putting animals in a field and leaving them there to moving them around a bit, you get a 20% increase in the forage availability. And then if you go into kind of a more mob grazing system where you're moving them more frequently and creating more rest, you can actually increase the forage, production by up to, compared to set stocking kind of 50, 60, 70%. So there's significant increase in the amount of forage that we are able to grow, which means an increase in active roots, active root networks, active soil root interactions, increase in the amount of solar panel leaves that you've got on the surface. So all of these things are not able to be modeled. So if we said, okay, well this is what all of  the grassland in Europe looks like, we're making an assumption there that it's set stocked, that the animals graze it and graze it and graze it, and that there's no rest. Actually if we were able to model these kind of graze and rest systems, actually we'd probably need more livestock to be able to eat all the forage, for example.

The modeling systems that are driving policy just don't reflect reality, and that's becoming more and more apparent with more innovations in agriculture, with different ways of managing landscapes. And also in these much more, as you say, kind of combined landscapes where we're looking at diversity, nature restoration, and food production in the same space.

[00:38:36] Adam Calo:

From a science and technology studies perspective, the models that, as you say, are not based in reality drive policy, which then creates reality, right? That's the next step in the, in the unfortunate puzzle.

I want to ask you one more adversarial question, then I promise we're going to move on as co thinkers. Can you or have you ever had to make the case from an individual cow's perspective that you know, this is one of the best possible options for those individuals?

[00:39:00] Nikki Yoxall: Yeah, totally. And I know all of my cows individually, they've all got names. So I'm able to, you know, I can take someone on the journey. George's journey or Betty's journey and talk through, their experience of what's happening. We recognize that when we take animals to slaughter, it's a really important day for them and for us, obviously. And we try and do that with as much respect as we possibly can and recognize that there is this one bad day in their life where they do end up having to go into slaughter. We would love that we were able to slaughter on farm. Currently isn't an option that's open to us. In Scotland, that's not something we can do. We would really, really appreciate the opportunity to do that.  But as I said, unless we were going to eat that animal for ourselves, rather than put it into the food chain, it just isn't, isn't an option for us.

Yeah, I can absolutely talk through kind of the benefits for our animals. They are in these diverse landscapes where they get to rub up against trees and they get to enjoy a really diverse diet. When it's hot weather, there's plenty of places for them to find shade when it's cold, they get plenty of opportunity for shelter. Through the individual experience of that animal when you're seeing them every single day and you're watching every single one of them walk past you every day because you're moving them on a daily basis, you really do get to understand and get to know those animals. Yeah, I have made that case and I think a lot of people really struggle with that idea that I can know these animals so, so well. And then, that they inevitably go off to slaughter at some point, but that's the cycle, right? I talk about cycles all the time, energy cycles, and that's one part of it.

It's an aspect of how our world works. And I think that we've … for many people, they've really become disconnected from that.

[00:40:35] Adam Calo: I wanted to make sure to give your other life as an academic a little space here. I mean, obviously it's clear in your thinking it's influenced you, but you're embedded in a PhD project, right? And what's that about? Can you give me the, the top line?

[00:40:46] Nikki Yoxall: I'm interested in the agroecological transition. And the bit I'm particularly interested in on that is the role that nature connection has in decision making on farm. Geographers would refer to that as connection with the more-than-human, but when I talk to farmers about that, they kind of look at me a bit puzzled and think that I'm talking about tarot cards or like connecting with spirit.

So I talk about nature connection. That deep, intrinsic connection to nature that farmers have and how that is shaping their decision making on farm. We know that financial levers do have an impact. I've been exploring this really interesting, I guess stacking of the decision. So, often what I've found is that often farmers will, in response to financial challenge, for example an increase in fertilizer price, will find ways to shift their, system. So, for example, slowing down the grazing rotation so there's more rest, the plants get more opportunity to rest. As a result of that, suddenly see orchids popping up in places they'd never seen before or seeing other flowers appear. Suddenly there's this kind of connection between them and what's happening on their land, which kind of flicks a switch or does something just to slightly kind of alter their thinking because they've been surprised like, oh, okay, I didn't know this was possible here. I've not seen this before.

Or, you know, I've not seen barn owls here before, or I've not had experience these plants or these animals and that kind of opens a door to an awareness of this kind of feeling in their chest or in their stomach that kind of connects them with the land in a different way from just seeing it as a platform from which they extract goods.

[00:42:17] Adam Calo: Well, Nikki, I think we've learned a little bit about how you think about food systems, and so I'm really interested in following these high level and sometime vitriolic debates about the food system. And so to hear from someone who's embedded in the food system, who studies it.

There was a moment that localized production, direct to market, know-your-farmer, farm-to-table was kind of an unchallenged joint social and environmental solution. But the complex issues of what it meant to do local food production … how it actually happens has been really well critiqued in the academic literature.

You know, whose localism and who really benefits? But I feel like there's been some recent strident voices that have taken localism as kind of an unserious environmental solution at all. That it's just not a process to improve or puzzle, but something to do away with entirely in the quest for sustainability.

One of the avatars, perhaps, of this type of sustainability thinking, this kind of 30,000 foot view of sustainability, might be Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data, who seems to specialize in making authoritative claims about food system sustainability. She's got a new book coming out that's called Not The End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build Sustainable Planet.

In an introduction to her book, Ritchie says,

“maybe you think the best way to reduce your carbon footprint is to eat local food, or the way to end deforestation is to boycott palm oil production completely. These are statements that many people believe to be true, but they are wrong.”

In my limited familiarity with Richie's work, it is an authoritative sustainability claim through a rhetoric of, “we just need to look at the data.” That we're blinded by personal values or limited ability to see averages or big picture trends. Through that, if we do that, look at the data, we can make sustainability policy. Have I characterized this line of thinking correctly in your mind?

[00:43:57] Nikki Yoxall: I think it's very much about efficiency and it's the kind of thing that I touched on a little bit earlier in our conversation was this idea about emissions being the sole focus, but then also considering that in terms of footprint in relation to the output as opposed to actual emissions.

And I think this is where a haziness around how we understand or define emissions intensity or an emissions footprint. I think that, yeah, that's something that is, lacks clarity, particularly in Ritchie and her team at Our World in Data’s presentation of the data. Hannah is a phenomenal thinker. Bright, incredibly capable, but it feels like there's this kind of intransience to think in other ways, from an outside perspective.

I know one of her PhD supervisors and through him I've been trying to get her to come up and visit and have a walk around the farm. But I would love to meet her and have a conversation about this stuff.

[00:44:45] Adam Calo: Not to single out, Hannah, but as a kind of an avatar for this type of thinking, among others. And, there is one essay that she wrote, which I found really interesting. And  my students, some of them really resonated with it. I'd like to actually read a few of the paragraphs and just see how you react to the thinking coming through in this style of argumentation. It was an essay that was really kind of a personal reflection of one's own sustainability vision, which I really, appreciate. But also a call for others to maybe replicate that style.

And of course, it has to do with food. Ritchie writes,

“I almost exclusively use the microwave. I don’t take time to savour the process: a meal that takes longer than ten minutes is one that’s not worth having. It nearly always comes from a packet. My avocados are shipped over from Mexico, and bananas transported from Angola. It’s rare that my food is produced locally. Or if it is, I don’t check the label enough to notice.

This is the opposite of what seems sustainable. The image we have in our head of the ‘environmentally-friendly meal’ is one that’s sourced from the local market; produced on an organic farm without nasty chemicals; and brought home in a paper bag, not a plastic wrapper. Forget the processed junk: it’s meat and vegetables, as fresh as they come. We set aside time to cook them properly, in the oven.

I know that my way of eating is low-carbon. I’ve spent years poring over the data. Microwaves are the most efficient way to cook. Local food is often no better than food shipped from continents away. Organic food often has a higher carbon footprint. And packaging is a tiny fraction of a food’s environmental footprint, and often lengthens its shelf-life.”

What's the argument that's being made here and what do you make of it?

[00:46:13] Nikki Yoxall: Well, I have to go to my actual gut reaction, which is hollow. And it actually makes me feel a little queasy, that someone feels so little joy from food. My entire life is spent thinking about my next meal. So the idea that someone kind of just doesn't even look at labels and doesn't, you know, doesn't spend time cooking is, for me, so alien. Food for me is life. It isn't just a case of putting calories into my body. It's about connection with other people. It's about cooking for people. My love language is cooking for people and creating a space, a warm welcoming place for people to come. And food is intrinsically tied up in that.

So I find it … I get quite emotional thinking about how someone couldnNot even think that way about food. I mean, it's so completely different. Not even going to the, to the kind of the space of food production, but just to the simple way of, you know, how do you conceptualize food within your life and what role does it have?

I don't think Hannah and I, from what she writes in that article, could be more different. And I don't think it's particularly kind of indicative of everybody. I think that, there are people for whom they don't look at the label and they're not really interested in where their food comes from, but still feel that food is an important part of family or social or bringing people together.

So I think that we can't create this binary between people who care about food and care about people and not always the same it's trying to create binary opposition where it probably doesn't exist. And there are many, many shades of gray. So I think there is something there just as a gut reaction, as a bit of a foodie that just makes me shudder when I think about only ever cooking in a … I don't own a microwave, so I can't imagine only cooking in a microwave, but there we go.

And I think there were two points there that Hannah raises that I just wanna touch on. One is that local food is often no better. And I think that was a really interesting comment. Actually she's sort of saying, because it's no better, we shouldn't necessarily prioritize it, which seems like a bit of an odd thing to say, particularly when we think about contributing to our local economy.

And I would much rather give my hard earned cash to a local business than I would go into a corporate, like a supermarket for example. So for me there is something about, it might not be better environmentally, I would challenge that, but even so, there are other kind of economic and social reasons why you would want to shop locally as opposed to contributing to a globalized food system.  How can you make sure that a higher proportion of the money that you're spending is getting to the person producing the food? And for me, if I can go directly to the person that's produced it and give them 30 pounds, rather than giving 30 pounds to a supermarket who has to take a cut, the processor has to take a cut, the transport company has to take a cut.

It just means that the person growing that food is getting less of that money. So for me, there's a challenge there around, economics and social justice. And then the other part is this kind of idea that organic has a higher footprint.

And this perfectly exemplifies this issue that I've been trying to identify, which is that we make assumptions based on that organic food produces less food per acre, so therefore it has a higher emissions footprint because the way that Hannah and others think about emissions is per kilo of food produced. And it's entirely wrapped up in ideas of efficiency in how we're able to get as much calorie out as we possibly can. So it's a highly extractive way of thinking. It's very much about how can we get the most we possibly can out of this bit of land. And if that takes us putting a load of chemicals on it, then that's fine, because actually we can dilute the impact of those chemicals by the higher yield, which isn't how nature works. So we have applied a very human accounting structure to try and put numbers against ecological systems and processes that cannot be curtailed by or captured by accounting processes. And so we've kind of basically sidelined the realities of what actually happens in the soil, our plants and in the roots and in our animals so that we can try and put some pretty numbers that, then match up against some kind of color coded a, b, c, d of environmental sustainability on a label. And I think that that's really problematic, this idea that we only consider emissions per kilo of output as being the gold standard emissions metric is just going to drive us to try and improve efficiency, which is going to have significant unintended consequences. And the dairy industry is a perfect example of that, right?

So we have been trying to push for higher milk yields for decades. And we end up with low fertility and poor health rates and cows that can only manage four lactations. So that aim for efficiency and higher yield has actually significantly undermined some of the other issues around that animal health and welfare. And has really created challenges around land use because we're having to grow maize crops, for example, to feed those animals to try and reduce that efficiency. There was a Nuffield conference on at the moment, there was a snapshot of one of the presentations who said one of the most carbon efficient food production systems in the world is maize production in Arizona, but they're likely to run out of water in 25 years.

But because of the metric and the way that we measure carbon efficiency, huge amounts of support and money is going into these maize grown growers in Arizona without any consideration for the fact that they're going to run out  of water in 25 years. That means they're having to ship water in, which means there's a huge amount of emissions associated with that, and they're having to use a pile of different chemicals in order to produce that crop. If we only take that emissions, that carbon lens, and we only think about it within terms of efficiency, we are significantly undermining and almost ignoring the unintended consequences and going to end up in this very weird place where we continue to industrialize food and commodify food, which is for someone like me, who's at heart, a foodie, a problematic and challenging situation to end up in.

[00:52:04] Adam Calo: Well, I think maybe that's, part of  the argument here is that, well, you are a foodie and so these kind of values might be blinding you to the real data, what's going on and you know, stepping outside beyond Ritchie, The essay was really well regarded by some and it also repulsed some others. What do you think is going on between types of environmental thinkers who would embrace this argument and others who see it as a weird way to crack the sustainability problem.

[00:52:29] Nikki Yoxall: It really makes me think about what I was talking about earlier in terms of collaboration and effort and time. So if you are concerned about palm oil in your food, which I am. It takes me a long time if I go into a supermarket, which I inevitably have to do because of where I live, and lack of access to local food is a problem. I spend a hell of a lot of time looking at labels and so, and it takes effort, right? It takes time, it takes effort.

So actually being told that you don't need to worry and you just follow the, you know, Ritchie recipe for low emissions food, then wow, you don't have to worry about this stuff anymore. And we are being further disconnected and disengaged from our food, and we're becoming less conscious about what we're doing and we are not having to use our brains very often and we're, we're just, it just feels really lazy, right? It feels lazy that you don't have to look at the label because actually somebody over here is telling you it's fine. And it’s broadening that gulf between who we areas an organism and where what we are nourished by, which is the land and food.

It just, it becomes attractive to people because it continues to say, do you know what? You can just take the easy option out and someone else will do the worrying for you. And I, I just, I just think it's kind of lazy. I do think that there's something about urbanization and if you're living in and on the lands every single day. I'm looking at plants, I'm seeing animals, I'm looking at plants growing. I'm deeply connected with the seasons. I notice the seasons changing. I notice changes year to year as anyone that's growing food will. I mean, we are all obsessed with the weather. We're all obsessed with the soil condition, the plants, our animals. It's something that connects us. All of us as farmers and ranchers and crofters and food producers, wherever we are across the world and whatever our system is, we are all kind of obsessed with monitoring and looking at and seeing what's changing. And the thing that kind of then defines us within our camps, if you like, as regenerative or not, or organic or not, is how we address those issues or how we respond and react to the things that we see. But we're all obsessed with kind of looking at it. If you don't ever have any connection with that, just as I don't understand, someone who would use Just Eats or Deliveroo every night. Because it's not available here, so I just don't get it.

It completely blows my mind that there are robots going around taking people their food. To me,  it just seems so alien. I guess my world of watching grass grow and, mucking about in a cow pat to see if there's any dung beetles there is entirely alien to people like Hannah. I guess the argument totally typifies our different experiences of the world. And maybe that's okay. But I think it's when, this tribalism is just becoming kind of a bit tedious, I guess.

[00:55:04] Adam Calo: Unfortunately, I have another question about this tribalism. Which is an essay that came off the back of Geroge Monbiot’s book, Regenesis, which was really focused on, I think, a great question: how to resolve ecological values, ecological sustainability with food production at its core.

Monbiot recently published this essay, called The Cruel Fantasies of, Well-Fed People. Have you read this essay? Did you feel like your vision of production was, was challenged by it?

[00:55:27] Nikki Yoxall: I just find it really interesting that George Monbiot both in that essay and in Regenesis touches on agroecology and then kind of just skips off away from it. And he did a very similar thing when he spoke at Groundswell. He came to Groundswell, which for anyone who doesn't know is a regenerative agriculture conference slash festival that's held every June near London. And he came and talked in a very well attended session about his book and about his thinking. And he spent 10 minutes telling a bunch of regenerative agriculture enthusiasts, the importance of soil, which I thought was not ideal. I mean, we kind of know that's why we're there. But anyway, he gave us lecture on soil telling us all what we already knew.

But actually, I kind of think we all came on board with that and we were like, yeah, okay, we're on the same page here, George. And then he just zoomed off on this odd tangent about making food in vats. And so we were all kind of nodding along, nodding along, and then you could kind of see the confusion on people's faces of like, “What? how did we go from that to that?” And I think that the same thing happens in the essay. He talks about high yield agroecological farming systems, and then just kind of doesn't talk anymore about it. And zooms off on this tangent about how we need to, again, this idea of efficiency and producing as much as we possibly can from as little as we can, which is a highly extractive approach, which doesn't feel like it aligns with other things that he's talking about. I just find him incredibly confusing.

[00:56:44] Adam Calo: I share this confusion and maybe we can think about it together. So I want to read this quote where he talks about agroecology, because the key puzzle for him is how do we produce enough food without damaging the planet because of the potentially deleterious effects of agriculture.

And so writes in this essay,

"We need, among others, small local producers, ideally using new forms of high-yield agroecology. But it’s not for the faint-hearted. They are running up the down escalator, and it accelerates every year. Land prices, house rents, low farmgate prices, easier and more rewarding opportunities elsewhere all militate against survival in the new-old economy, let alone success. And you are always in danger (a danger, admittedly, that some embrace) of becoming your own trope, the re-created peasant self-marketed to the gluttonous Spectacle."

What do you think is going on here? Are you someone who's become your own trope?

[00:57:30] Nikki Yoxall: I think he would probably say I am. He talks about land prices, the house rents, low farm gate price, like none of those are the, problem of agroecology. They're all a wider societal problem.

And that's what I think is kind of important here is that he's saying the problem of agroecology is how shitty our society is at the moment.

And it's like, well, hey,  why don't we fix that rather the agroecology?

[00:57:50] Adam Calo: Is the argument here that sure, small holder, high yielding agroecology, is a solution to that challenge he sets out to solve, but that it's just too hard to do? Why do you think that Monbiot looks squarely at agroecology, but then seems to brush it off and embrace more techno optimistic visions of producing food with low impact?

[00:58:06] Nikki Yoxall: I don’t know why he does that, but I do find it a challenge. As you've just set out, he identifies this solution, which is agroecology. He says it's not for the faint hearted, which I don't, I don't quite understand. I mean, if the only agroecological farmers he knows to are ones that are not profitable, then, you know, I would recommend he goes to some that are, and there are many. And the challenges for agroecology that he sets out aren't actually anything to do with agroecology.

He talks about land price, house rents, low farm gate prices, rewarding opportunities elsewhere. All of that it relates to our current socioeconomic, context as opposed to agroecology. If we only think about agroecology as up to the farm gate, like on-farm practices, there is nothing stopping you doing that within a broader context of capitalist, extractive food systems. You can still kind of be agroecological up to the farm gate if you want to. The challenge that we have is that broader, post-farm gate system is forcing farmers through contracts and through other bullying tactics, is forcing farmers to actually move their practices away from agroecology into other forms of production. It's not agroecology that's the problem. The problem is the wider system, that wider context. And surely, all of us on the left want to challenge that. We want to address that. We want to make that better. And I, it just reminds me of this ongoing issue within political dimension where the left is so busy infighting about how to support progress and which is the best version of a kind of progressive, socially conscious politics that actually, the right wins out because  the rest of us are kind of running around trying to argue with each other.

So, as I said, I don’t know why he does that, but it just feels like the issue isn't agroecology, the issue is the dominant regime, but he doesn't want to go up against the dominant regime, whichI don't understand. There are various theories around, who George Monbiot is being supported by, which I don't necessarily align with, but there have been some theories that have been kind of put forward that explain that leap from agroecology to the something completely separate.

[01:00:09] Adam Calo: I guess I am interested in the leap. So let's assume that Monbiot is an authentic, good-willed thinker in this issue. I'm wondering if the nub of the issue has to do with what we've talked about, this yield and hunger equation, that he seems and many others seem to be convinced by.

In the essay, he goes beyond criticizing the fantasies of localism to suggest that this wistful longing for,a bucolic agrarian lifestyle is, quote, “a formula for mass death.” He e quotes Hannah Ritchie and Our World in Data to argue that really it's these productivity gains through industrial agriculture … that's what's brought so many out of hunger. To try and champion localized production would be foolish and an arrogant rejection of all this humanitarian progress. The relevant quote here is,

“What lies behind these extraordinary trends? There are several reasons, but let me dwell on two of the crucial ones. One is the much greater availability of food per person. This is also a remarkable phenomenon. Our World in Data, which collates such global figures, shows that between 1961 and 2014 the world’s production of cereals rose by 280%. This is twice the increase in the global population during that period (136%). It was achieved almost entirely through higher crop yields per hectare.”

Isn't Monbiot correct that intensifying production has led to hunger reduction and therefore a return to a localism that has other priorities besides yields is kind of “anti-hungry,” just by a feature of the pure accounting logics here?

[01:01:32] Nikki Yoxall: One of the challenges that we have is that still have, over a billion people who are not accessing the food that they need to access. They're undernourished and that challenges around that are related to logistics, but also to economics and to power structures and to capitalism and colonialism. Again, there's like this much more complex picture back there. Yeah. Okay. So cereal production is increased by 280%. I would be surprised that all of that is going directly to humans. Much of that will be going to livestock, which means that we're putting livestock into systems, and this is his kind of basis for his thinking  that actually this land is being used to feed animals rather than people. And so there's a conflation there between an argument that he's kind of saying, we're growing so many more cereals, look at how much more productive we are. And yet at the same time, he would say elsewhere, well, all of this cereal production is going into animals, and that's a complete waste of land. So he's gonna choose that, if he's gonna choose particular data sets, then he probably needs to stay consistent with his messages.

But we have seen increased efficiency, most of which has been thanks to the to use of nitrogen fertilizer. And there are always costs. So every time that we use fertilizer, we create lazy soils, we create clover, legumes that aren't doing the job that they need to. So the inability to accept and to account for, I guess, the unintended consequences or the broader whole system costs that can be attributed to more intensified agriculture production it just seems to be bizarre to me that we are only focusing on like this one metric of carbon efficiency as opposed to a much broader challenge that is actually the environmental issue, which is, you know about water, it's about soil health, it's about loss of nutrients, it's about social justice, it's also about food access.

All of these things are just being discounted with a narrative that we could be more efficient if we focus on this particular approach.

And we know that agriculture agricultural efficiency has increased. We also know that that has had a significant environmental cost. We are not operating within planetary boundaries. We also know from some work that was done in the US that the highest soil carbon and the healthiest soils, if you like, in the US, particularly in the state of New York, are under pasture and the second are under market gardens. So we know that one really clear way to address all of these kind of additional challenges around environmental issues could be market gardens on every single farm.

So if there was a mandated policy that says every single farm holding has to have a two acre market garden, why don't we just model that and try that and test that, rather than just writing off agroecology for some other kind of ideal of creating food in vats that doesn't bring people like me, joy. I mean if you wanna eat food that comes out of a vat, fine. Go and do that. If that just doesn't reflect the diversity that we would all hope to see.

[01:04:16] Adam Calo: What you just said makes me think about is of a personal concern I have where the very real and either scientifically derived or personally felt fears of ecological disruption and climate collapse really pushes people who have genuine concerns for environmental and landscape health to reach for those seductive solutions. How do we contest that? How can we create a new understanding of landscape decision making?

[01:04:41] Nikki Yoxall: My worry is that we will get to a point where societal collapse happens and that we won't even have an option because our current food supply chain will just fall apart. You know, we saw during Covid that actually suddenly the absolute fragility of our food system as it stands in the UK at the moment, just in time food supply as opposed to actually meeting the needs of local communities being able to create kind of seasonal healthy food options. Really I am scared of a future where all of this cease system matter because we just aren't able to grow food. We have hit tipping points and I think sometimes that this debate and the question is kind of pointless because it's all gonna hit us very quickly. Maybe in my lifetime and in your lifetime, Adam. Maybe, in the next generation or the generation after that, I don't know.

I do sometimes feel like these debates are wholly pointless because we are just going to get to a place where we don't have enough food and we aren't able to access resources and we're struggling to get clean water and whole societal collapse happens around us. And at that point, people will suddenly start eating beef if there are cows in the field and people will start eating locally reduced food because it's all they can access. I know that that's a bit of a kind of negative dystopian outlook on things, but I just see that it's coming. It's absolutely terrifying to me that that's coming and that we spend our time having these debates about should I microwave my food or should I cook it in an oven when, you know, we are just on the edge of collapse.

Which is why we need to get better at collaboration now. The more that we can practice collaboration. The more that we can practice cooperation now, when things generally are pretty easy, the easier it's going to be when things get really difficult for us.

[01:06:22] Adam Calo: That might be an important lens to evaluate these many, and I think welcome, food system solutions is: Which of them have the capacity to build new, strengthened social relations and which ones might have a tendency to even further hollow them out.

[01:06:37] Nikki Yoxall: Yeah.

[01:06:38] Adam Calo: I'm someone who has been swayed by a lot of the arguments against localism of it being kind of an imperfect solution, especially in terms of, social justice and class and race disparities. If you want, would you give a more full throat defense of localism?

[01:06:53] Nikki Yoxall: Local food systems and opportunities are so, so important and meet so many optimal outcomes for a range of metrics. And the reason, as I've kind of already talked about, that they fail generally is because of the dominant regime outside of those, or outwith that network. I think being able to produce food and sell it to people who live within a 10 mile radius of where you live and then them bump into you in the local town or an event and say, my gosh, that mince is the best beef mince I've ever had. It just is so delicious and it's so lovely to know that my money coming to you has helped you to farm in a way that I know is good for the environment.

Because I went for a walk near your cattle the other day and I saw them and they all just looked so content and there were so many flowers and it was wonderful. And I saw a, hen harrier, and I haven't ever seen one of those before. All that connection with land and people starts coming out in those conversations and it's in those conversations that you suddenly realize as a food producer engaged in a local food system that people care about this stuff. Giving people the opportunity to access food and giving them the mechanisms through which they can buy into that system is so important. And that's something that we need to get better at, whether that's cooperatives or group buying arrangements. These go against the structures that are stopping us from being better farmers. I personally think it is not farming that is the challenge. It's the rest of the supply chain that needs to have a serious shakeup so that even if we are selling ultimately into a commodified market, that everything is done as locally as it possibly can be. If we can decentralize our food systems and we can add value locally, which means that money, economic systems are able to be maintained more strongly locally, then all of those things, if you aggregate them up, deliver more prosperity.

And I think maybe people like George Monbiot would reflect on that kind of being this, glamorization of peasant farming. But actually we can take some aspects of peasant farming and combine it with new ways of processing or new ways of thinking or new ways of producing and actually get the best possible outcome. I like to think of agroecology as being on a spiral so that you are always moving forward, but you are able to always look back as well and learn from past experiences and learn from ways of doing things that have been done historically. We discount localism. We discount agroecology because of the status quo elsewhere. And actually that's the bit that we need to address. That's the bit that we need to fix. And I think that we just keep coming back to that, that actually local food systems are brilliant. They offer so many benefits. There is a lot of research that suggests this. Every time they fall down, every time again and again, is because of the broader economic and market structures that exist as opposed to what's going on actually within that smaller scale system.

[01:09:35] Adam Calo: I am going to give one last chance to this type of environmental thinking and then try and think of how we move away from it, perhaps. So if we could deduce the optimal land use based on the best possible science, shouldn't we follow these instructions? And if that's not the right way of going about landscape decision making, then how do we contest this view, or how do we create new understandings that reflect your position?

[01:09:58] Nikki Yoxall: Well, what is the best possible science? Because at the moment, we've already identified that the science isn't able to model the realities of what's going on on the ground. So we have a disconnect between what we know and what we see as practitioners, which is really important within the agroecological space is prioritizing that experiential understanding of food producers and making sure that that informs the governance of those systems. And so we know that the science isn't able to accurately model the reality of what we're doing yet. We're basing future policy and the direction of our food system on this science. And what really frustrates me is that the scientists who are doing the science will say, this is only a part of the picture. We are not able to model that thing that you're doing. We don't really know. The academic community are really keen to explore, to understand, to broaden their knowledge, to engage with each other, to kind of test out hypotheses and move things forward and contribute to this body of knowledge. And yet, politicians and journalists like George Monbiot want to just take a particular piece of research as truth, and that that has to be a static truth and that there is no scope for that being part of a body of literature. And, you know, we keep coming back to this issue that the evidence doesn't exist for the type of farming that I'm engaged in or the type of food production that I'm engaged in because nobody has researched it. Then therefore, if I present that, for example, to George Monbiot and he says, well, you know, an absence of that evidence doesn't mean that the opposite isn't true, which I totally accept, but we can't make decisions about future land use if we don't truly understand all of the land uses that are in play at the moment.

Right. So we have to get better at understanding the nuance of academic research. And this is something all the time that happens. In this kind of black and white world that we live in is, where binaries are being forced all the time. We are constantly seeking out the truth. But the truth is complex and reality is dependent on our context and everybody's perception is their reality. And we keep trying to discount that and come to what is real without understanding the diversity of thinking that contributes to reality. I'm getting too philosophical, but I just feel like there's an expectation or an assumption by many that we know the science and we have the truth. But I know as a researcher working in this space, there are many, many systems that I work with that have not been tested and have not been modeled. So we cannot possibly know which is the best system because we're actually not able to model them all accurately. And until we start getting better at that, we are not going to be able to make well-informed, holistic, holistically planned and supported future policy frameworks.

[01:12:32] Adam Calo: I think that's a great place to end. Thank you Nikki. It's really been a real pleasure having you think through food systems and debates in the food system.

[01:12:39] Nikki Yoxall: Brilliant