🎧 A Call to Farms with Jennifer Grayson
Join us as Jennifer Grayson takes us on her inspiring journey from LA to a farm in Oregon. Learn about the power of regenerative agriculture in our latest episode of Foodie Pharmacology.
Can small farms make a difference for our climate and our health? This week we take a deeper look at the principles of regenerative and sustainable farming, the challenges small farmers face, and the critical role of soil health. Our guest is an award-winning journalist, Jennifer Grayson. We discuss Jennifer’s new book, A CALL TO FARMS: Reconnecting to Nature, Food, and Community in a Modern World – for which she undertook a regenerative farmer training program at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more at https://www.jennifergrayson.com/
About Jennifer
Jennifer Grayson is an award-winning journalist and the author of UNLATCHED: The Evolution of Breastfeeding and the Making of a Controversy, which won the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rachel Carson Environment Book Award and a Nautilus Book Award. Her mix of incisive investigative reporting and captivating personal writing has been praised by luminaries including environmentalist Paul Hawken, food activist Marion Nestle, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Michael Moss, and scientist David R. Montgomery. She has been featured on more than three dozen media outlets, including MSNBC, NPR, and WGN-TV, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Huffington Post, where she wrote the long-running “Innovation Earth” and “Eco Etiquette” columns. Jennifer’s new book, A CALL TO FARMS: Reconnecting to Nature, Food, and Community in a Modern World – for which she undertook a regenerative farmer training program at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – was published by W. W. Norton in July.
About the book
“In this deeply inspiring book, Jennifer Grayson examines the motives, practices, problems, and successes of a diverse collection of young, small-scale farmers growing food sustainably and achieving enormous satisfaction and joy in the process. The farmers provide abundant reasons for hope in the future of food that’s healthier for producers, people, and the planet. If you’re looking for hope, here it is.”
—MARION NESTLE, PHD, MPH, professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics
Hope for the future lies with a new generation of regenerative farmers.
The rising movement of regenerative agriculture holds great promise for transforming our food system while reclaiming planetary and human health. Yet there is a little-known fact that could amplify the call for change: Within a decade, nearly half of all farmland in America will change hands as the older generation of farmers steps aside. Meanwhile, the groundswell of new growers eager to steward that land are up against seemingly every obstacle: rising land costs, insufficient income, a Goliath industrial food system, and the billionaires and corporations grabbing farmland at a staggering pace.
So, how can we mobilize a “greatest generation” of sustainable small farmers at this crucial tipping point? How could resilient local agriculture transform our country, heal the earth, and ensure healthy, fresh food is accessible to all? To answer those questions, award-winning journalist Jennifer Grayson embedded herself in a groundbreaking beginning farmer training program, then embarked on this investigative travelogue about the new, diverse farmers, graziers, and food activists working toward a stirring vision of the future. From a one-acre “market garden” in Oregon to the activists reviving food sovereignty in South Carolina — A CALL TO FARMS is the captivating story of these new adventurous farmers finding hope and purpose in an uncertain and imperiled age.
Listen to the interview
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Watch the video
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Yours in health, Dr. Quave
Cassandra L. Quave, Ph.D. is a Guggenheim Fellow, CNN Champion for Change, Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, recipient of The National Academies Award for Excellence in Science Communication, and award-winning author of The Plant Hunter. Her day job is as professor and herbarium curator at Emory University School of Medicine, where she leads a group of research scientists studying medicinal plants to find new life-saving drugs from nature. She hosts the Foodie Pharmacology podcast and writes the Nature’s Pharmacy newsletter to share the science behind natural medicines. To support her effort, consider a paid or founding subscription to Nature’s Pharmacy or donation to her lab research.
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