As the war in Iran squeezes fertilizer and fuel supplies, there is renewed attention on the vulnerability of global food systems. But the roots of this current crisis go much deeper. In episode one of Agroecology Uprooted, we begin with a look at the systems that shape how we produce and access food, the ways that the industrial food system is pushing our planet beyond its natural boundaries, and the potential for a radically sustainable approach to food and agriculture: Agroecology.
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Enjoying the podcast? Find the full series here.
- Dr. Bonnie Keeler is the Director of the Water Resources Center at the University of Minnesota. In this role, she guides the interdisciplinary center, encourages and strengthens the links among University water resources research and extension, and promotes graduate education and training in water resources science. Dr. Keeler began her faculty career at the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs, where she shared the Charles M. Denny Endowed Chair in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy and co-directed the Center for Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy. Prior to joining the Humphrey School in 2018, Bonnie was a program director and lead scientist for the Natural Capital Project (NatCap) at the U of M Institute on the Environment. Bonnie is an expert in water resources science and management with a focus on environmental justice, community engaged scholarship, and the evaluation of water quality programs and policies.
- Pat Mooney has more than four decades experience working in international civil society, and is the author or co-author of several books on the politics of biotechnology and biodiversity. In 1977 Mooney co-founded RAFI (Rural Advancement Fund International, renamed ETC Group in 2001). He received The Right Livelihood Award (the "Alternative Nobel Prize") in the Swedish Parliament in 1985 and the Pearson Peace Prize from Canada's Governor General in 1998. He has also received the American "Giraffe Award" given to people "who stick their necks out." Pat Mooney is widely regarded as an authority on issues of global governance, corporate concentration, and intellectual property monopoly. He served on the IATP Board of Directors for many years.
- Lilly Richard hosts and produces Agroecology Uprooted. She is the digital communications manager at IATP and holds a BA in Women’s Studies from Vassar College and a Master of Public Policy degree in social and environmental policy from the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
Transcript
00:00:01 Bonnie Keeler
There's a lot about our current agricultural system that's not working. It's not working for producers, it's not working for consumers, and it's not working for the environment.
00:00:10 Pat Mooney
The food system is broken. Everyone is saying that, whether they're the head of Nestle's or the head of the FAO or the head of an NGO, we're all saying the food system is broken. The point is that the guys who broke it aren't the ones that can fix it.
00:00:34 Lilly Richard
At the beginning of March 2026, as the U.S. launched a war in Iran that closed an essential shipping channel, global fertilizer prices shot up – again. The oncoming fertilizer shortage spells disaster, not just for farmers, but for food security all over the world. And this disaster has been mounting since well before the war started, because of an industrial agriculture system that's utterly dependent on synthetic fertilizers and that doesn't pivot easily when conditions change.
In an increasingly destabilized world, farmers and food systems are in crisis. But agriculture is also contributing to this instability, driving climate change and biodiversity collapse, harming our health and polluting our water.
What if there were a better way?
What if food and farm systems weren't rigid, fragile, and destructive, but diverse, adaptable, and regenerative?
All around the globe, there are people already putting this type of solution into practice with an approach to food and agriculture that keeps people, the planet, and justice at the center. It's called agroecology, and I've spent the past several months talking to farmers, researchers, food movement leaders, and other experts about what it is and how it might offer an answer to one of the biggest challenges of our time, how to feed the planet without destroying the planet.
From the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, I'm Lilly Richard, and this is Agroecology Uprooted.
00:02:20 Lilly
So what is agroecology? On the farm, it's a type of radically sustainable agriculture that brings together traditional ecological knowledge and modern science and shares a lot in common with regenerative, organic, and permaculture farming. But there's more to it than that.
As a movement, agroecology seeks to transform food and farm systems altogether to strengthen resilience, food sovereignty, economic justice, community power, and grassroots democracy. Over the course of this series, we'll hear more about what agroecology is, how it works, and why it matters in theory and in practice.
But before that, we need to talk about why the industrial agriculture system isn't meeting the moment we're in. And before that, we need to talk about systems. It's not an easy place to start, but we're going to be covering everything from climate change to birds and bugs to water, soil, markets, fertilizer prices, international corporations, public policy, and the food we eat. And it's important to understand that those aren't separate, unrelated elements. They're all connected, and they interact in predictable and sometimes unpredictable ways.
Dr. Bonnie Keeler is the director of the Water Resources Center at the University of Minnesota College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences, and my former professor. I talked to her about the concept of systems thinking and why it's such an important approach to understanding the issues in our food system.
00:03:56 Bonnie
Systems thinking is a way of holistically assessing very complex environmental and societal problems. So the core ideas in systems thinking include recognizing that systems are interconnected and driven by relationships and feedback loops.
You can't really understand the agricultural system that we have today without appreciating the role of feedbacks and relationships. So individual farmers and producers are connected and shaped by global economic systems, and those systems govern trade and markets. Producers are also subject to biophysical systems, soils, the availability of fresh water, the climate. Producers will choose what they grow based on systems of policies that structure incentives and the regulations that tell them what they can and can't do with their land. There are social systems that govern how consumers perceive agricultural systems and the choices they make about what food to buy.
So if you try to pick at just one small part of the agricultural system without understanding all of these supporting and interacting systems, social systems, economic systems, biophysical systems, then you're unlikely to be effective in identifying both the root causes and also opportunities to try and intervene and change those systems dynamics.
00:05:31 Lilly
Of course, one of the difficulties of systems thinking is that it takes a lot more work and a lot more information to analyze systems dynamics than to boil things down and look at one piece of the puzzle at a time. But the danger in trying to simplify complicated systems down to something easier to manage is that you might end up with a lot of unintended consequences.
One of the terms that came up in several of my conversations was planetary boundaries. because the Earth is a system too, and there are physical limits to how far you can push a system before it breaks.
00:06:07 Bonnie
The concept of planetary boundaries is based in the observation that all of Earth's key life support systems, a stable climate, abundant freshwater, productive lands and oceans, sufficient natural resources, all these systems developed during a relatively stable geologic period known as the the Holocene. And if we want to continue to rely on those life support systems, then humanity needs to avoid exceeding what we call these planetary boundaries. And these are biophysical thresholds that risk tipping our planet and all of the systems that we rely on into unsustainable states.
00:06:51 Lilly
Thank you. I like that – life support systems. That's a good term to explain why they matter.
00:06:57 Bonnie
Right. Literally, they support life.
00:07:00 Lilly
And right now, almost all of those life support systems are flashing red. Scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Center identified 9 planetary boundaries that we need to stay within to keep safely sustaining life on Earth. The categories can get a bit technical, but they include thresholds for things like climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and ocean acidification.
We've already exceeded the safe zone for all but two of them. Six of the categories are already firmly in the danger zone, and food systems are an active driver of five of those breaches.
But we should be specific here about which type of food and agriculture systems are pushing us past Earth's safe operating space. The shorthand I'll use is industrial agriculture, a system that rose to prominence following some major technological breakthroughs near the beginning of the 20th century. Industrial agriculture is characterized by large-scale, intensive production of crops and animals, often monoculture production, or the planting of a single crop over a large area of land, often the same crop year after year.
Industrial agriculture was developed and fine-tuned by big seed and chemical companies, along with global meat, grain, and farm equipment companies. They maximized the so-called efficiency of farming by simplifying it, turning farms into factories that could produce large amounts of a small number of identical commodities that could be sold to processors and turned into standardized food and other products. Even the farm field itself was simplified, as genetically modified crops and herbicides like glyphosate made it possible to eliminate all plant diversity in a given area.
But all that production comes with a price. The mass production of livestock and high use of nitrogen fertilizer produce the powerful greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, which heat the Earth's atmosphere at 30 and 300 times the intensity of carbon dioxide, respectively. Agriculture is also the primary driver of deforestation and habitat loss, freshwater overuse and pollution, and biodiversity loss. And there's widespread agreement: we're in trouble.
The common understanding of this challenge is that industrial agriculture represents A trade-off. It produces certain environmental or health harms, but we need it to support high levels of production and feed the world's population. The question is, that even true?
00:09:37 Pat
As a kid, I mean, trying to understand what was happening with hunger in the world and the crisis around that, which was true, there is that crisis, still is that crisis. I really did think it was a matter of just getting more money to people and helping them use industrial agriculture to grow more food. And it did take some time for me to catch on to the fact that system wasn't even working for us.
We weren't even growing much of the food that when you saw what was happening on the Canadian prairies or the United States or Europe, Australia, what was being grown in the field was being fed to livestock, not to people directly, or was being put into biofuels later on, or certainly not going to meet the needs of the world population or meeting their nutritional needs.
00:10:20 Lilly
That's Pat Mooney, a former IATP board member, founder of the ETC Group, and a 60-year veteran of the movement for food sovereignty and biodiversity. I had a long conversation with him about some of the consequences of the dominant industrial agriculture system, who's driving it, and why a lot of what we think we know about who feeds the world might not be correct.
00:10:44 Pat
Well, the interest of the industrial food chain is to see food as a commodity and to produce as much of it as is profitable and to simplify the production and distribution system as much as possible. I tripped over the issue of seeds and the importance of genetic diversity of food crops fairly early on in the 1970s. And it took me a while, again, to understand that we really had a crisis and the industrial food system was destroying the genetic diversity of our food supply around the world. And the 7,000 crops that farmers have been growing were being reduced down to half a dozen crops that were feeding the majority of the calories into people and doing a bad job with it.
So basically their job is to produce calories that can be adapted by food processors or its mouthfeel and its smell and taste and so on. And they don't care how they get there, whether they get there through wheat or they get there through soybeans or through maize or what it is to produce those calories that can be turned into products for the consumer. So we end up with really five food types, soybeans and maize and potatoes and wheat and rice that produce 60% of the world's calories. And that means that we end up with a very narrow food supply, very dangerously narrow food supply.
00:12:11 Lilly
Industrial agriculture is the dominant system in the United States and in most developed countries, but much of what is grown doesn't actually go toward feeding people. More than half of all farmland in the U.S. is used for two crops, corn and soybeans, and the majority of those, about 85% of soy and 88% of corn, end up as biofuels or animal feed for factory farms.
But other types of food systems still exist. Systems that are a lot more complicated, a lot more localized, and a lot less standardized, which makes them harder to measure. Internationally, these systems are called the peasant food web, which is made-up of fishers, pastoralists, foragers, and smallholder farmers who produce food on less than five acres of land.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 70% of the world's population gets the majority of their calories from the industrial food chain, while 30% are fed by smallholder farmers. But researchers at the ETC Group dug deeper into the peasant food web of producers not captured by global market statistics and found that the truth might actually be the opposite, that only 30% of the world's population are being primarily fed by the industrial system, while the majority rely on peasant production. In the U.S., the food system is heavily industrialized, but around the world, small-scale production is not only more common, but a critical resource.
00:13:42 Pat
We did some studies on exactly who was doing the feeding in the world and we tried to do a comparison between the industrial food chain on the one side and the peasant food web as we described it on the other side. Peasants meaning, of course, any smallholder producer that perceives themselves to be a peasant, perceives themselves to be someone who lives and loves the land and trying to grow food on it.
The more we dug into it, of course, we also realized that it's not just the food being produced on the soil, on the land, it's also the fishers who are harvesting the fish and marine life, seafood. They're also part of that system. Also, pastoralists are, definitely livestock keepers are. Hunting and gathering is still important for a significant part of the population.
And as we examined it by all angles and shapes and ways, it was clear that about 70% of the world's population was getting the majority of their food from peasant production, not from the industrial food system. It wasn't available through the industrial food system. They couldn't afford it. It wasn't accessible to the where they lived, and it wasn't nutritious for them.
And yet that industrial sector is using not less than 70% of the world's irrigated water and not less than 70%, so closer to 80% of the world's fertile soils, which they were destroying at the same time. So how could the system be so wasteful and still be talking about feeding the world's hungry? Made no sense.
This contrast between the 70% that's used to really feed people around the world and the 30% that uses up 70% of the resources really had to be challenged.
00:15:20 Lilly
Smallholder production is not inherently agroecological, and many subsistence farmers work under arduous conditions with low productivity. But there is a wealth of knowledge, skills, and genetic diversity being stewarded by the millions of peasant food producers in the world, and those are all under threat by the continued expansion of the industrial model.
One of the hallmarks of agroecology is farmer-to-farmer learning, sharing knowledge about how to improve production and meet the food needs of their local communities. And these millions of peasant farmers may have an easier time changing and adapting than farmers stuck in the industrial system, managing huge swaths of land, dependent on external inputs, and growing one or two crops determined by a system that has very little to do with them, their environment, or even food.
Because one of the consequences of turning crops into commodities and food production into an industry is that the food system became less about food and farmers and more about business and profit.
00:16:26 Pat
One of the things I think those of us who are working on food issues as part of the food movement in the world, I think tend to forget is that the industrial food chain is part of the dominant market structure that we all suffer under. There's a tendency to think that the industrial food chain is set in stone. There's the Cargills and there used to be Monsanto, but now it's Bayer. There's the John Deere's, the Walmarts, those kinds of companies that dominate the food chain, Nestle's and stuff. And that's in some level true, but it's not, it changes all the time.
And we need to be aware that industrial food chain has shifted in the past. For example, the largest seed company in the world back 100 years ago was General Electric. And General Electric was doing plant breeding because they saw an opportunity to use their radiation technologies to radiate seeds to produce new plant varieties. So they, for a brief period of time, became the world's most important seed company. They dropped out of it. And the whole dynamics of the seed industry changed.
And the next big mover was what became Exxon, ExxonMobil, Standard Oil of New Jersey initially. And that company also moved into the seed industry because they saw that they had the retail outlets around the rural world where they sold gasoline and fixed tractors and cars and could also sell fertilizer and pesticides and seeds to everybody.
And it changed again in the 1960s when Royal Dutch Shell thought they could do the job. And then after that third disruption, we moved into the era of basically chemical and pharmaceutical companies deciding that they would take on the job of seeds and pesticides.
And so we have that era now where we have, again, really for companies that really are dominant both in seeds and pesticides in the world. So there's been a concentration throughout the decades, but it will keep on changing.
00:18:19 Lilly
As Pat explained, many companies have unceremoniously entered and exited the industrial food system over the past 100 years, including many that we don't associate with food at all. These companies may not be invested in food production for the long haul, but the changes they make to the food and farming system are lasting.
In places like the U.S., small seed companies, local meat processors, and many small farmers were squeezed out of business, decimating rural economies and creating a dependence on a small number of companies, even if those companies changed over time.
00:18:55 Pat
We need to understand that today we are in another time of change where the major companies moving into the food system, almost by accident, are companies that we associate with artificial intelligence and big data and the Microsofts and Googles and Amazons of the world. But they do that in a kind of cavalier fashion and may choose to come or go out of the food chain, out of the food system whenever they wish. If that's not profitable enough, they find some other sector if it is more profitable, they'll move. And that creates an enormous vulnerability. in the industrial food chain. We can't trust those companies to do the job that they need to do for the long period.
The idea that the private sector in any way will invest in solving the problems of climate change, solving the problems of biodiversity loss, they're not going to try to solve those problems. They're in it for the short haul, for the profits they can make in the short term, and will abandon us and abandon world hunger if it's not of interest to them. Their interest is not in feeding people, their interest is in making profits for their shareholders.
00:20:03 Lilly
One concept that is central to agroecology is food sovereignty. That's the idea that decisions about what the food system looks like, what gets produced, and how, should be made by people actually involved in the food system, including farmers, workers, and local communities, instead of being determined by market forces and corporate executives far removed from the impacts of those decisions.
A locally controlled, decentralized food and farm system is reinforced by the other elements of agroecology, like an emphasis on biodiversity, economic diversification, fairness, social participation, and land governance. These elements also make for a more flexible, adaptable, innovative system. Under the industrial system, we get the opposite.
Here's Bonnie Keeler again on the situation in the U.S.
00:20:57 Bonnie
So we have a lot of inertia in our current system that makes it quite resistant to change. And I think most commodity producers are pretty locked into a system that severely limits both what they can grow and the markets that they can access. And this is largely driven by long-term trends in agricultural consolidation in the food and agricultural sector that makes it really hard for the kind of innovation and experimentation that we used to have in our our agricultural landscape.
And when you cut off those different models of innovation in a more diverse set of systems working at different scales, producing different kinds of products in different ways, then you lose a lot of learning and you lose a lot of opportunity to adapt to changing circumstances. And so right now we have a system that's pretty locked in and we continue to pile on additional policies and incentives that further lock in those systems. And that makes it really challenging to adapt to a changing either biophysical circumstances or social preferences or new economic circumstances.
And that doesn't make it easy to disrupt even when we can come to a shared understanding that there's a lot about our current agricultural system that's not working. It's not working for producers, it's not working for consumers, and it's not working for the environment.
00:22:22 Lilly
Right now, the planet and everything living on it is in trouble. Seven of nine known planetary boundaries have been breached, and the destructive systems that got us here, including the industrial food and agriculture system, don't show any sign of changing course. The violent international conflicts and trade disruptions that come along with a destabilized world are also threatening food security, breaking open the vulnerabilities of this system that we've known about for decades.
00:22:53 Pat
The food system is broken. Everyone is saying that, whether they're the head of Nestle's or the head of the FAO or the head of an NGO, we're all saying the food system is broken. The point is that the guys who broke it, which are the major corporations and some of the governments behind them, aren't the ones that can fix it. They broke it. Someone else is going to have to fix it.
That's going to be us not being railroaded by them. Companies are saying that the only way out of this is for us to use artificial intelligence, put all of our sensors and satellites and drones on our tractors to monitor everything, feed that information up into the cloud so that companies can analyze it, come back down to the farmers and say, you've got to plant this crop in these conditions at these times, put on these pesticides, use these fertilizers, and so on. I would not ever trust the companies to do that job correctly or in any way with the interest of farmers. They can't do it.
Thinking about, well, what do we need to have to have a good food system in a time of climate change and biodiversity loss? And the answer to that is, well, we need as many options as possible. We need to have a highly diverse food system that lets us adjust quickly to different conditions. It's like, do you want to have three labs around the world trying to produce everything, or do you want to have, in the case of peasant production and peasant fields, do you want to have a couple of 100 million research labs around the world that are constantly experimenting?
That creative flexibility, which is available through agroecology. is enormous and exactly what we need to get through the climatic and biodiversity conditions that we're faced with today. And that's exactly what the industrial food chain cannot produce. They can't do the job. They've proven they can't do the job.
So give agroecology the opportunity and the space it needs to really do the job, really, really make the changes that have to be done. And I think in terms of the cost of it, in terms of the scope and of the capacity for research, In terms of the feasibility of developing culturally appropriate, nutritious foods for everybody, that can only be done through agroecology.
00:25:05 Lilly
The potential of agroecology is not just hypothetical. Despite policy barriers and deeply limited resources, agroecological transitions are making inroads in communities all over the world, even in places where industrial agriculture is the norm.
00:25:22 Pat
The scope and the scale of the transformation now through agroecology and food sovereignty is really stunning. I'm living in a rural area in Quebec, and I'm surrounded by small family farms that are doing fantastically good research and really meeting the local market needs with nutritious food.
I mean, there's a huge amount going on everywhere you look. Whether it's southern India or it's in Mexico or it's the United States or it's in Germany or it's in China and Zambia, there's endless examples of where changes are taking place rapidly, where the scale is huge and effective, and the productivity and the nutritional value is absolutely amazingly better. And the environmental value is absolutely amazingly better, but it's still meeting the needs, the nutritional needs and scale of the folks who are buying the food.
And around the world, wherever I go, and I've traveled just about everywhere over 60 years of this work, I see changes that I couldn't have even imagined a few years ago. It is happening now.
00:26:25 Lilly
So what does agroecology look like in practice? We started off big, looking at problems the size of the entire planet. On the next episode, we'll learn more about the definition of agroecology and how it works. And we'll zoom in on the farm level to see what it looks like on the ground, from farmers going against the grain in the U.S. to 1 1/2 acres in Thika, Kenya, where lives are being transformed from the soil up.
That's next time on Agroecology Uprooted.
00:27:12 Lilly
Agroecology Uprooted is produced by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform and share the show with a friend. IATP works at the intersection of policy and practice to advance just, sustainable food systems. You can support our work at iatp.org/donate.
