Berkeley Talks: Feeding the world without ‘eating the earth’

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Jeanne Merrill: My name’s Jeanne Merrill. I’m the executive director of the Berkeley Food Institute. And we are very pleased to host today’s important conversation. Today, we’ll highlight timely and urgent questions about the future of food in the face of the climate crisis, rising inequalities, and a biodiversity crisis.

Some of the questions we’ll address this evening range from, if the goal is to feed 10 billion people, shouldn’t we ask the fundamental questions about what are we going to feed them? And at what cost to their health, their communities, and the planet’s resilience? Are sustainable and healthy food systems that can conserve natural resources and support thriving communities a pipe dream or a necessary radical shift? What is the role of government in securing a healthy and sustainable food system? We will discuss the latest science and practice of agriculture, as well as the policy and politics that shape our food and farming system.

Today’s speakers and our moderator, a science writer, a scientist, a national food correspondent, will no doubt use words this evening that are now on the list of words that can no longer be included in US Department of Agriculture research and education grant proposals without risk of frozen contracts or losing funding. These words include equitable, diverse, climate science, carbon sequestration, and many more.

But tonight, we don’t discuss federal funding. Tonight, we discuss more fundamental questions. And we’re grateful for our speakers joining us for an open dialogue about our most pressing climate challenge, how to achieve a resilient, biodiverse, just, healthy, and nourishing food system.

I have just a few notes for us this evening. If you have a question you’d like to ask, we’ll be passing around, if you didn’t already grab one, we’ll have index cards where you can write down your question and then you’ll be able to hand that to a Berkeley Food Institute staff person who will be sure to get that to our moderator. We do ask if you could just take a moment and silence your cell phones, if you haven’t already done that. We are recording this evening’s conversation and that recording will be posted on the Berkeley Food Institute website following tonight’s event.

I also want to thank our sponsors, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism’s been a wonderful partner, Casa Sanchez, The Nell Newman Foundation, and the TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation.

And next, I’m very pleased to introduce our speakers. We have Mike Grunwald, who’s a bestselling author and former staff writer for the Washington Post, Time Magazine, and Politico Magazine. This summer, Simon & Schuster will publish his third book, We are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.

We also have Dr. Tim Bowles, an associate professor of agroecology and sustainable agricultural systems in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, and lead faculty director for the Berkeley Food Institute, author of over 50 peer-reviewed articles whose research focuses on how increasing reliance on biodiversity can create productive, healthy, and resilient agricultural systems, drawing on agroecology, soil ecology, and biogeochemistry.

And our moderator, Kim Severson, is a national food correspondent for the New York Times, previously the New York Times Southern Bureau chief. She has won four James Beard Awards, was part of the New York Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of sexual harassment in the Me Too movement, and received the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism for her work on childhood obesity. Please join me in welcoming our speakers and moderator.

(Applause)

Kim Severson: OK. Thank you. Thanks for the introduction. Thanks for having us. We still do use those words in the New York Times though. So far so good. I’ll let you know how that goes. Yeah, people are busy, very busy.

So I find that this is such an interesting time to be having this panel and I never thought that I would be living in a time in which the RFK-loving MAHA moms and Alice Waters shared a tiny little spot on the Venn diagram, but here we are. And you may be a MAHA mom before we know it, we don’t know, Alice.

Yeah, so it’s a very interesting time. I think it’s a really interesting time to be having this discussion. We don’t know where things are going. And in times of great disruption, good change can happen. All kinds of change can happen. So I think what you two are bringing to the table here in the discussion we have hopefully will be part of us keeping our eyes open a little bit, our minds open a little bit, and also standing up against bullshit, I would just, to use your word. So anyway, here we are.

But anyway, speaking of which, Mike, speaking … No. I know it’s like just Rumble in the Jungle here, but it’s not going to be that bad. Be polite discussion at the university is really what it’s going to be. But you’re the visiting team, so I think each of them are … Each of these gentlemen are going to kind of present a framework and then we’ll just jump into questions. So you’re up to bat my friend.

Michael Grunwald: Yeah. I’m definitely the away team. Well, no, I’m thrilled to be here in the lion’s den. Look, I get it. Industrial agriculture sucks. It abuses animals, it overuses antibiotics, it poisons our air and water. And I didn’t come across the country to defend any of that.

I’m just going to try to make a few points. And the first, I’m glad it was mentioned, you can all smash that pre-order button, but we are eating the earth. Really, agriculture is eating the earth. It now covers two of every five acres on the planet. And those are acres that used to be forest and wetlands and savannas that stored a lot of carbon and sheltered a lot of biodiversity.

And the thing is, agriculture has always eaten the earth, ever since it started 12,000 years ago, long before it had giant tractors or toxic chemicals or factory farms. And natural land is great at storing carbon. It’s great at sheltering biodiversity. It’s not so great at feeding humans. That’s why humans began converting it into farmland. They cleared a South America worth of wilderness before the Industrial Revolution even began.

So you look at the ice cores and ancient pollen samples, they show that pre-industrial, pre-pesticide, pre-feedlot agriculture and the deforestation that made room for it, it contributed to early global warming that actually helped avert an ice age. So I think maybe because Michael Pollan writes so damn beautifully, there’s a lot of nostalgia for these small bucolic farms that America had before the Green Revolution’s GMO monocultures and Haber-Bosch fertilizers, right? I think we all want to romanticize those proto-regenerative farmsteads like the ones Aldo Leopold wrote about in Sand Country Almanac.

But Leopold wrote pretty damn beautifully too. And Sand Country is an elegy for the amazingly biodiverse natural prairie that those quaint farmsteads like his replaced. It’s true, there are some environmental costs from turning those kinder and gentler and more diverse farms into big industrial farms, but they’re nothing compared to the environmental costs of converting nature into farms in the first place. Sorry.

So we’ve got to stop agriculture from eating the earth. It’s now replaced three south Americas worth of wilderness, and that’s a crisis. We can’t keep expanding agriculture’s footprint and shrinking nature’s, not if we want a stable climate and a biodiverse planet. We can’t keep tearing down a soccer field worth of rainforest every six seconds for agriculture.

But we also got to eat. So we’re going to need to make a lot more food without a lot more land. We’re going to need high-yield ag, even higher-yield ag than we have today. The math is really ugly. To feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050, agriculture will need to produce about 50% more calories and protein. And if current trends continue, even if yields keep growing at the same rate they’ve grown since the Green Revolution, we’re going to have to deforest another dozen Californias worth of land. If yields don’t grow at all, we’ll have to deforest three dozen Californias worth of land.

So it’s not a pretty picture. And in general, big industrial agriculture is high-yield agriculture. For all the problems with factory farms, one thing they’re really good at is manufacturing lots of food. That’s what factories do.

Now, I’ve written about how some regenerative practices can contribute to kick-ass yields, and that’s awesome. I’m all for that. But when Sri Lanka tried to go all organic, its yields crashed and its government fell. I keep reading about how the future of grain is regenerative kernza, but its yields are one-third wheat yields. So it would need three times as much land to grow the same amount of grain. It would eat three times as much of the earth.

All right, one last point. Some of you are probably thinking, “Look, we don’t need more food. We just need to distribute it better or waste less of it or eat less meat or stop using valuable land to grow biofuels.” And we should absolutely do all of those things, but we haven’t done any of them yet. And I don’t love the idea of assuming we’re going to start doing all of them to justify low-yield agriculture.

A little more math. Even if rich countries eat 50% less meat, even if the world wastes 50% less food, even if we stop using biofuels, these are pretty ambitious ifs, we’ll still need more food by 2050 and yield growth will still need to grow even faster than it’s been growing since the Green Revolution. Not if we don’t want to eat more of the earth.

So I personally suspect that we’re going to need more industrial ag to do that. My hope is that it’s a reformed industrial ag that can make even more food, but with much less mess. So with that, let me start the conversation.

Kim Severson: It’s a thought. All right. Now batting for the home team.

Tim Bowles: Well, starting out with a little poll for the audience here, has anybody ever heard of a taco beef stick before? OK, I got one, a couple over here. OK, a few people heard taco beef sticks. I had not heard of taco beef sticks before, but I was helping out in the cafeteria of my son’s first grade class a couple of years ago. And I was there with the kids, I was helping them sort out the green waste from their trash and taco beef sticks were on the menu. And back in Kentucky where I grew up, a lot of these phony food items were common on our lunch menus. But I was naive to think that maybe here in California things would be different.

So taco beef sticks better, for better or worse, have been on my mind a lot recently because I really think they represent what industrial agriculture does really, really well. It produces an overabundance of calories that have the illusion of being cheap calories. But if we look ahead to 2050 and we don’t want widespread crop failures and we don’t want soil to be so degraded that it becomes unfarmable and we don’t want to continue this crazy duality that we have when there are 2 billion people in the world that still suffer from malnutrition and hunger while at the same time we’re spending $4 trillion annually on the effects of diabetes and obesity. And if we don’t want to give a pass to multinational agribusinesses while they continue to siphon profits out of rural communities, then we can’t be doubling down on industrial agriculture. Doubling down on industrial agriculture is, in my mind, the definition of the sunk cost fallacy, right?

And there’s reasons for it. These reasons go back to policy choices that have been made time and time again. These policy choices, we could trace it back to plantation agriculture, the roots. And these policy choices really took off in the 1950s and ’60s. And these choices were bad for most of us, but a handful of companies have profited handsomely from them.

And these choices continue today because in the US alone, the food and agriculture industry spends more on federal lobbying than the oil and gas sector and the defense sector. So there’s a reason we keep making these choices. It’s using the same playbook that the tobacco industry used for years while it was killing people for profits.

Now, I do appreciate a lot about Mike’s arguments actually. I think he has correctly identified that expansion of agriculture into rainforests, into peatlands, into other natural ecosystems is devastating for the climate and that is not something that we can do if we want to tackle climate change. We also agree on a number of other things, how problematic biofuels are.

But what I want to offer is that I think where we disagree is really kind of three pillars of the argument. First, that we actually need to increase yields by 50% by 2050. Two, that industrial agriculture doesn’t currently feed the world and that we can’t expect it to in the future. And three, that the idea of land sparing or the idea that if we intensify yields with industrial agriculture here, it will spare land over there. That, at best, it’s really complicated, and at worst, sometimes it’s kind of a fallacy.

And I do understand these are complicated topics, right? And it can feel overwhelming. But I want to offer a different paradigm for how we can approach this. And agroecology is this different paradigm that can offer a pathway to climate resilient, productive agriculture that nourishes people. And it’s already happening all over the world. What hasn’t been happening is the political will to make it the foundation of our food system.

So what is agroecology? I want to offer agroecology in three examples. Agroecology is Iowa farmers, Dick and Sharon Thompson, who started Practical Farmers of Iowa a number of decades ago. And since then, they’ve been working with researchers to develop innovative cropping systems that can reduce toxic inputs by 90% while increasing yields of corn and soybean.

We can move across the world into Kenya where, also for years, farmers and researchers have been working together on how to deal with extremely challenging pests and disease problems without the use of toxic inputs. And they do this through really clever ways of companion planting in a system called push-pull. On the farms of the 350,000 farmers who have adopted this, yields have tripled.

Coming back here to California, agroecology is when 1.6 million schoolchildren are eating lunches that are not taco beef sticks, but fruits and vegetables and whole grains that are supplied by California farms that are using climate smart agricultural practices supported by state investments and building on the successes of an organic agricultural industry that is currently $11 billion. This is big.

So the question is then what would the future look like if we really doubled down on agroecology instead? And what we would find is that it would look like dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas-intensive inputs, dramatic reductions in pesticides like chlorpyrifos and methyl bromide and many others that have harmed farm workers and their families and rural communities for years. We would be supporting the biodiversity, the birds, the bees, the microbes on which we all depend, while helping rural communities flourish. And we would be able to produce the food that nourishes people on agriculture’s current land base. So that’s what I want to, hopefully we can understand what’s the pathway towards that over the next hour.

Kim Severson: All right, I’m going to just say it’s tied so far. I’m going to declare it tied. But you obviously say some provocative things in your book, that organic local grass-fed beef is usually worse for the environment than conventional beef or imported beef or feedlot beef. Do I have that right?

Michael Grunwald: For the climate, definitely.

Kim Severson: For the climate. Just dig down into that for me a little bit.

Michael Grunwald: The main thing is, for one thing, feedlot beef, they are fed a lot faster, so they’re alive a lot less long. So they spend less time burping and farting. So there’s a lot less methane. And again, this is, like I alluded to, I’ve seen some regenerative grazing practices that have been incorporated and you see, particularly in Brazil where you see some incredible yields. And that’s awesome. It’s usually not pure, not usually, it is not purely grass-fed. They’re fertilizing the pastures, they bring them to feedlots, but they’re doing a lot of regenerative practices and that’s been great.

But the main problem is a land problem, where they’re using more land and therefore they’re eating more of the earth. And so much of the numbers, land ends up overwhelming because forests are awesome. Wetlands are amazing, not just for the bugs and bunnies that love them, but for the carbon that they store. And if you have lower stocking rates, if you’re making less beef per acre, you’re going to need more acres to produce beef.

Kim Severson: Do you have a counter-thought to that?

Tim Bowles: Well, I do and I think we can’t talk about the efficiency of beef production without asking why are we eating so much beef? And I’m not going to sit here and say it’s going to be easy, but …

Kim Severson: It’s kind of delicious.

Tim Bowles: It is. It is. But look …

Michael Grunwald: I cut out beef for climate reasons. I did. I did.

Tim Bowles: I’ll start out by saying, and Robin, my stepmom, if you listen to this later, I would say this to you if you were here. But my stepmom is a person who’s like a charred filet and potato kind of person. It’s going to be tough, I get it.

But look, if we defend factory farms as the only way to meet demand for meat, it’s like saying, don’t we need Wendy’s and McDonald’s and Burger King because people like burgers? Cravings don’t come from nowhere, right? Demand is in many ways created through marketing, through subsidies, and through convenience.

So in many ways, I don’t think this is, it’s not about feeding people, it’s about feeding this business model. And I get it, it’s going to be hard. And I know, Mike, you’ve dove deeply into this World Resources Institute report. I know it’s been a lot. If we look in there, if folks cut 30% of beef around the world and shift to plant protein, those two Indias that you’ve mentioned, or however, 12 Californias I think, we eliminate the need to expand land in that way. So I just don’t think we can get into the nuances of the efficiency of beef production without naming I guess the cow in the room or something, whatever, right?

Kim Severson: Oh, yeah. Well done. That’s good. You should have my job. And I think you quoted a survey or a 2014 study that says that carbon farming essentially is very good for the soil and it’s complete bullshit when it comes to climate change. Excuse me, I just realized there was a kid in the room. I’m so sorry. Go back to your taco beef stick, it’ll be OK.

Audience 01: He’s heard it before.

Kim Severson: I know, I’m sorry. I just looked up. It’s really bad when you cuss, and you look up and you see a child. Anyway.

So explain that. And I’m actually interested in hearing both of you talk about numbers because for those of us who try to figure it out, we’re like, “So if we put this much carbon back in, that’ll save this percentage of greenhouse gas.” And it’s just elaborate formulas that I, frankly, feel are kind of made up maybe because I don’t understand them.

So let’s talk about that. You guys base, you’re throwing out a lot of numbers, let’s talk about carbon renewal now or carbon farming. What gives?

Michael Grunwald: Mostly bullshit I think has been my take on it. Well, look, if you see Kiss the Ground, right? Where Woody Harrelson, in his stoner voice, he’s like, “Dude, I want to kill myself. We’re all going to die.” And then he’s like, “No, but it’s great because we’re going to reverse global warming by storing all this carbon in the soil.” And literally, the argument of this movie, which was also the argument of the group 4 per 1,000, which it was endorsed by the World Bank and the UN and 40 nations, was that just by just improving the way we farm, we’re going to store all the carbon, that all the world’s fossil fuels have put into the sky. It was based on some absurd Rodale Institute science. And even the regenerative advocates have kind of backed off that.

Look, I don’t say that it’s going to be that there’s no way to store any carbon in the soil, but it’s really hard to store much. There’s been a lot of focus on that you can’t measure it. And that is true, it’s really hard to measure it. It’s like it’s different from farm to farm, from country to country, from like five feet apart on the same farm. And how do you sample it all? The measurement’s a mess.

There’s the problem of if you keep it in the soil, does it stay in the soil? There’s the problem of if you’re moving cows to poop over here, and so there’s more carbon in that soil, but then what happens to the carbon over there? And this guy’s getting paid because there’s more carbon, but that guy doesn’t have to give up the money because there’s less carbon.

And then the main problem is there’s these studies done out of Australia that basically show that the only way to store more carbon in the soil is to put more nitrogen in the soil. And it’s basic stoichiometry, which I say as if I knew what stoichiometry was before I started reporting on this book. But it’s a thing and there’s a kind of fixed ratio of carbon to nitrogen in soils, and you can put more nitrogen in the soil, but that’s a problem. Remember that’s fertilizer, that’s nitrous oxide emissions. That’s the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s the algal blooms in Florida Bay. It’s a lot of bad stuff.

So yeah, I think there’s been a lot of crazy hype. There’s been a lot of really sloppy science. And there’s really good ways to store carbon that we can see, it’s above ground. They’re called trees. Wetlands also do it really well. Soil carbon remains a kind of unicorn.

Kim Severson: Professor?

Tim Bowles: I’m so excited to talk about stoichiometry.

Kim Severson: I was hoping someone would bring it up, personally. Yeah,

Tim Bowles: No, I actually want to start …

Michael Grunwald: I’m amazing at parties.

Kim Severson: And they’re like, “I got to go get another drink,” yeah.

Tim Bowles: I actually want to start by saying I think this is, at least on some points, this is an area where Mike and I were talking beforehand, and I think we have some points of agreement here, particularly in I think some of the overhype that has actually harmed the real potential. That Rodale Institute study was extremely problematic. There’s been a number of other studies that haven’t looked at key constraints, whether it’s nitrogen, whether it’s just the sociopolitical potential. That being said, so let me just say we have to get real about the potential for soil carbon sequestration as a climate change tool, as a climate change mitigation tool.

I want to just provide one more bit of context, which is that the IPCC has made it very clear that reducing emissions is not enough right now. We actually have to have what are called negative emissions. We have to be removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in order to not make climate change go just way beyond what we can deal with, and it’s already at that stage. So these natural climate solutions, whether it’s forests or soils, peatlands, wetlands, they have to play a role and we have to know how much. So I’m not going to get into every single point, but I want to get into a couple. On the …

Kim Severson: Wait a minute. Do you want us to get that? OK.

Tim Bowles: Let’s just take, I’m going to make, let’s see, maybe two or three points here. On the nitrogen question, because this is an important one, let’s do some math. I know you’ve said you’re a math guy. I like math. The ratio of carbon to nitrogen in soil is about 10 to one, on average. Let’s just say this for simplicity. Every 10 atoms of carbon, there’s about one of nitrogen. On average, and I’m rounding some numbers here, but we apply about 0.1 gigatons of nitrogen annually in agricultural systems. It’s a little more than that, but let’s just say 0.1.

About 2/3 of that is lost to the environment. It ends up as N2 emissions, it ends up as nitrate leaching that fouls waterways, etc. So we have a tremendous amount of nitrogen that actually is just leaving. So if these agricultural practices can soak up that excess nitrogen, which is what a lot of them do really, really well, like cover crops, for instance, then even if, let’s say we captured half of that, we’re capturing about 1/3 of the nitrogen that’s lost. Let’s say this gets us to about 0.3, 0.4 gigatons of carbon annually. And emissions this year are, I’m rounding again, about 15 gigatons.

Michael Grunwald: [inaudible].

Tim Bowles: No, total. Gigatons of carbon, not gigatons of CO2. Sorry. Yeah.

Kim Severson: Thank God, I was …

Tim Bowles: Yeah, I know, right? Everybody was on the edge of their seats. Right? It’s about 55 gigatons CO2, right?

Kim Severson: [inaudible]

Tim Bowles: I know, the math here is … The point is, I’m getting to it, I promise, point is it is not a negligible amount. Even with the nitrogen problem, it’s not a negligible amount.

The one more point that I’ll make is that there’s a synergy between increasing soil carbon and dealing with some of the challenges of climate change, weather extremes like droughts and floods. In my own lab’s research, what we showed is that increasing carbon with cover crops actually also leads to yield increases when soil carbon is low, which often happens on degraded agricultural land. So there’s also this synergy between increasing soil carbon and dealing with this yield problem. So we do have to get real about it, but there is potential.

Kim Severson: Let’s switch for a minute from our math lesson to our civics lesson. So let’s talk about the government’s role in some of this, right? And policy because we obviously are in a time of great change when it comes to the direction of the government and these kinds of issues. And I think the Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities program, which is about a 3-billion-dollar program, just got slashed. And I think the idea was that would have removed maybe 60 million metric tons. It’d help 60,000 farms.

Michael Grunwald: Of unicorns.

Kim Severson: Well, again, the green new scam, right? So is this your position? Was that a good move to remove that money?

Michael Grunwald: It’s funny, when I was working on this book, of course I didn’t know who was going to be the next president, and I’m writing about some of this Climate-Smart ag stuff. And to answer your question quickly, there’s actually some really good stuff and some that, yeah, I think is mostly bullshit. Mostly the soil carbon stuff that’s, by the way, mostly being run by Archers Daniels Midland and JBS and Tyson. And then they’re putting their happy Seal of Good Housekeeping from the USDA, like we’re climate smart beef and things like that. Yeah, I think a lot of that is bogus.

I should say, there’s a lot of really good stuff in there, including, by the way, measurement, a lot of money for measurement that we desperately need because so much of this is just people talking out of their butts. But also, there’s good stuff in there for reducing nitrogen and methane emissions.

I talked to a rice farmer who got the grant, did the practices of basically changing the water management on his land and has reduced his methane emissions by half. And there are like 400 million acres of rice fields in the world, and that’s 10% of agricultural emissions. That would be a really big deal, but of course …

So that’s the sort of thing you want. We want to be climate smart. So I don’t like the idea of somebody coming out and saying, “This is a scam. Why would we care about agriculture being climate smart?” That said, I think Tom Vilsack was obsessed with this idea of soil carbon. And I write in the book about how there were actually some people in the Biden White House who were like, “Hey, we know how to do nitrogen and methane. Focus on that instead.” They didn’t really win that fight.

Kim Severson: You want to jump in there too? He was quite a hero to the movement and to farmers, in a way, Tom Vilsack was, for a old white bureaucrat. But I think it moved the needle. So obviously you think government, our government now can actually help or hurt what’s happening out there, right? So before we get to you, so you’re the new Ag secretary, where are you going to spend $3 billion? What would you do?

Michael Grunwald: Of that particular money, I think the idea-

Kim Severson: Any 3 billion, I’m just saying where would you spend that?

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, no, but the idea, if you’re just, I think focusing on methane, it’s a lot of unsexy stuff where you’d want to do a ton of research into better manure management, biological nitrification inhibition. I’m really the coolest dude around. There’s just all this … Can we turn crop residues into usable animal feed so that we don’t have to use as many acres to grow? And these are things that can really move the needle.

But instead, I think too much of it was going into soil carbon, anaerobic digesters that I talked about how there are like 20 different ways to manage manure that can really, in pretty cost-effective ways, reduce your emissions. And one that is pretty clearly not, and that’s the digesters. And of course, that’s the one that’s getting all the funding.

So I think there really is a … It’s not like this is all crap. Why should the government be involved? We kind of know how to … I’d like to see Brazil do even more for more intensive pastures. They have degraded pastures where you cut down huge swaths of the Amazon and then you just hardly have any cows on them. If you have four times as many cows, you need one fourth as many land. I think those are the kind of things that, with not that much money, you can really move the needle.

Kim Severson: OK, so now you’re the Ag secretary. How do you feel about the way money is getting … They just, I think, paid $10 million to bail out the farmers who are getting screwed on the trade deal. That’s a lot of money. And they cut I think a million for the local food initiative that was happening with a lot of farm to school.

Tim Bowles: Billion, it was a billion.

Kim Severson: I meant billion. Thank you very much. I’ve got this. I really, trust me. I did mean billion. So now you’re the Ag secretary. What are we supposed to spend our money on?

Tim Bowles: I’m going to flip it around a little bit and say what we need to not be spending our money on. The biggest subsidy for industrial agriculture is crop insurance. And it’s crop insurance for commodity crops, by and large. It is the biggest giveaway. It has grown in size 500% in cost since the early 2000s, about $20 billion in subsidies.

Without crop insurance for commodities like corn, soybean, this industry would not be able to farm the way that they do. In many years, they depend on these subsidies. We are going to have increasingly stressful weather. We can point, 2012 was the enormous drought. Yields declined by, on average, 25 to 30%, that’s a 60-billion-dollar economic impact. 2019, massive floods. These are the types of things that are going to get more and more common.

In my own work, we’ve done modeling to show what’s the claims rates. And in the future, what are they going to look like? The insurance claims rates are going to go up substantially. This is going to continue to be a taxpayer burden.

And for me, it’s the tool, of wonky tools that’s going to be a big leverage point. And the industry will have to take measures to reduce risk in other ways. And those ways of reducing risk are, what they can bet their money on the best is things like tried and true things that you and I know about because we know that we shouldn’t invest all of our money in one thing. Maybe you bought Tesla stock last fall and you did really, really well for a while. Now you’re not doing so well, right? So agroecology-

Michael Grunwald: Nobody here bought it last fall.

Kim Severson: Know your audience, brother.

Tim Bowles: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. You’re right. Yeah. Yeah.

Agroecology emphasizes a diversity of crops so that when something happens, you can spread that risk. We know that agroecology can build soil health. That’s a sure way to reduce impacts of droughts and floods. Even some of the practices that we’re talking about, recent research that’s just coming out, showing that cover crops prevented a lot of economic damage during the 2019 floods. I could go on and on, right? But if we remove the subsidy for basically taking all the risk away from these extremely risky systems, we’re going to have a big change.

Kim Severson: Do you want to …

Michael Grunwald: It’s funny, so … That’s great. So we are so in touch on… I just wrote an op-ed in the New York Times not that long ago about how basically Elon should go rip up USDA, and crop insurance was my exhibit A. It’s like a total boondoggle. Where we really do though disagree is that I think if they got rid of crop insurance tomorrow, a lot of farmers, they wouldn’t get to buy a new F-150 every year. And a lot of really rich farmers would be made less rich on an annual basis.

And I do think there would be some marginal land that they would not farm as much, knowing that they’re going to get, when the river floods again and they’re just going to collect their money, that I think would change. But I don’t think it would really change practices that much. I think the middle of the country is still going to be amber waves of grain and it would look pretty similar.

Kim Severson: Do you want to jump in here? You talked about technology and technological changes helping a lot. Talk about vertical farming, and I’m actually interested in this. This is, I’m just going to indulge me in a side note. So hydroponic farming, vertical farming, they’re growing plants in this water full of nutrients, right? Do you think it can be labeled as organic?

It’s just my personal thing.

Michael Grunwald: Sure.

Kim Severson: Just give me a minute. We’ll get back to the program, but I’m just curious.

Michael Grunwald: Bankrupt organic companies, yes. I think that they are organic.

Kim Severson: You think that organic is not … The soil is not inherent in the phrase organic? Well, what do you think?

Tim Bowles: Yeah, I don’t think so. I think it can be called pesticide free, right? And I think that …

Kim Severson: You could not call it organic because it doesn’t have soil.

Tim Bowles: No. Yeah, exactly. I think it’s counter to both the philosophy and the practice of organic agriculture to which the continuation of soil and its regeneration is really at the core.

Michael Grunwald: I’ll defer.

Tim Bowles: So pesticide free is …

Michael Grunwald: I’m with you then.

OK, so they agree. Do you think that technology and things like vertical farming, CRISPR gene editing technology, I’ve seen some great examples of some gene-editing technology that makes blackberry bushes without thorns so they can grow taller, they don’t take as much space. You can get more apples that have some sort of built in kind of sunscreen for Washington apple growers who are dealing with climate change, having to put tarps over all their …

So is technology a way out of this? How we grow food, can we stay ahead of it if we’re going to … And we see that it’s obviously coming, it’s changing how we farm. How important is trying to stay out in front of all of this through technology? Either how we farm and also the actual gene editing?

Tim Bowles: Technology can play a role, but it has to be the right technology. Agroecology is not anti-technology. CRISPR is the nuclear fusion of technology. It’s always got it, it promises the world and it is always 10 or 20 years in the future, especially for complex traits like drought resistance. Also, the return on investment is very, very uncertain. It’s a tremendous amount of private capital that goes into it. Why? Because these are patentable. Right? It’s patentable.

Kim Severson: Like cellular meat, same sort of issue, right?

Tim Bowles: Yeah, in a different way. We have to look at this, the economics for a farmer. And right now, I understand some farmers might be getting rich, but look, the median income of farmers from on-farm income in this country is $0. And yeah, there’s a long tail, some folks are getting rich, but we can’t divorce the technology from the economic impacts it has on farmers. So why pursue something that is going to cost them more and that actually decreases biodiversity?

We have tried and true ways that have great return on investment for producing crop genotypes, crop varieties that are the ones that we need in the future. We can do this through technology assisted breeding, through participatory breeding with farmers. So I could go on, but I want to just make the point that it has to be appropriate technology. It has to be technology that actually enhances a farmer’s autonomy from input suppliers so that they can make more money. And we could go into examples of that, but I’ll pause there.

Michael Grunwald: Certainly, I think it depends on the technology. I was cropping on vertical farming back when they had these billion-dollar valuations and JD Vance was on the board with Martha Stewart.

Kim Severson: And Martha Stewart. Yeah.

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, exactly. I was just like, “This is absurd.” It might be good for lettuce, but it’s not going to solve the food problem.

And I think vertical farming is interesting in that it’s a solution that illustrates the problem. You want to do it indoors because the outdoors is such a mess. It’s so hard to farm outside. There’s night, there’s weather, the birds poop on the crops. It’s like you can see this is why farming is really hard, but vertical farming is not the answer.

CRISPR, I think that’s really exciting. I think you look at what they’re doing at the University of Illinois where they’re trying to reinvent photosynthesis. And they’ve got a superconductor that has recreated the 170 steps of the photosynthetic process. And I remember they were telling me that a NASA contractor was trying to debug their model and said it was literally much more complicated than rocket science.

Kim Severson: Well, doesn’t photosynthesis already exist? I don’t mean to be, but like-

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, but it sucks. It sucks.

Kim Severson: So what are they, when they’re reinventing photosynthesis-

Michael Grunwald: Photosynthesis is amazing at doing stuff like supporting all life on Earth. It’s good at that. 

Kim Severson: No one likes a smart ass, my friend.

Michael Grunwald: No, it’s really good. It is really good, but it’s incredibly inefficient.

Kim Severson: And what are they going to do with It though? What’s-

Michael Grunwald: An example is when a cloud comes overhead, photosynthesis kind of shuts down and it’s very slow to start up again. It’s kind of like when you’re in the bright lights and you come out of the dark and your eyes are slow to adjust. And they’ve found the genes that kind of get it to basically get going again faster, and that’s very exciting.

The best example is that RuBisCO, which it’s the protein that’s in photosynthesis, it’s the most common protein on the planet, but it’s kind of hapless. It sort of grabs carbon from the air, but about like one in every five times it messes up and grabs oxygen by mistake. Not so good. So they’re trying to make it so … They haven’t been able to get it to stop doing that, but they’ve gotten it to recover from that mistake quicker.

Kim Severson: So this is …

Michael Grunwald: These are things that they can make … And then you can get crops to grow better. And again, you’re … it’s like 10 years away, right?

Kim Severson: Yeah. OK.

Michael Grunwald: But those are the kinds of things where if you can do it, you can grow a lot more food in a lot less land. And I do think, I know I end up sounding like the bad guy. I’m not talking about rural communities, I’m not talking about a just transition. Remember, climate change sucks for the poor. It’s a disaster and it’s not going to be felt as much in Berkeley as it’s going to be felt in the floodplains of Bangladesh. So I think these are really important, this question of how we can feed the world, feed 10 billion people without expanding agriculture’s footprint are like these are questions of equity and justice that matter at Berkeley.

Tim Bowles: They do matter. And that’s why I think on these questions, and maybe if I have a minute I’ll circle back to photosynthesis, which, by the way, has been subject to 500 million years of evolutionary pressure. It is hubris to think that we will re-engineer these plants in ways that there aren’t profound trade-offs. And these are very smart folks. I know Steve Long and I know others at the University of Illinois. Very smart folks. And I would just love to see us investing in things that we already know work. Right?

Now, on this question of just transitions and feeding the world, I want to listen … It’s something to be a white guy sitting up here in Berkeley talking about how to feed the world. I think we can probably agree on that. So let’s listen to the 200 million farmers around the world who are part of the biggest social movement that exists, La Via Campesina. These are farmers who are farming in some of the toughest environments, some of the most marginalized people on the planet. And they have identified, they coined the term food sovereignty, which is the right to decide how your community’s food is produced. And they have identified agroecology as the pathway to achieving food sovereignty. They have used their political organizing and their social organizing to gain a seat at the highest levels of the FAO to get agroecology on the map of international ag development.

So I want to listen to them. What do they think is the way to feed the world? When we’re talking about feeding the world, it’s not just the overconsumption in high-income countries, right? It’s also the 850 million people who actually are suffering from energy deficiency and hunger, not to mention another billion that suffer from malnutrition.

Kim Severson:

Thanks. I know that there are question cards out around, have you been passing them in? Where are they? Should we start asking some? There’s so many. But I’ll try to just hit the highlights in … Is this OK? You sure?

Oh, we’re going to be edited, so that’s OK. See, censorship, man, on this very campus. Are you fucking kidding me? I should be able to read whatever question I want to read. Thank you. See.

Thank God. I could do this show at Harvard. OK. All right.

Michael Grunwald: Better hurry.

Kim Severson: (Laughs) That’s right. No stipends there. OK. If you guys could be any animal, what … No. (Audience laughs) Thank you.

See, now I’m sorry. OK. There’s fiction in the agroecology community about the use of digital technology. What would appropriate digital technology … Oh, I think we already just answered that … I’m sorry, Hannah. It was a good question, we already answered it. We all agreed, consensus? OK. Hannah’s like, “But I like my …” It was a good question.

So biodiversity, where does biodiversity fit into this picture, particularly with regard to certifications like the Rainforest Alliance? Are those, you think that’s just dancing on the grave here or do certifications matter? They didn’t sign it.

Tim Bowles: I think good governance matters when it comes to the expansion of agriculture. We can, regardless of if we accept Mike’s position that land sparing is a thing, it depends on good governance. It depends on governance in the rainforest, in these areas where, to actually prevent agriculture from expanding. And much of this expansion, some of it is smallholder farmers, often after they’ve … A lot of it is land grabs. And a lot of this is actually fueled by the very system that they’re in. So yes, I think certifications when it comes to if it has good governance associated with it, I think that’s important. Yeah, I-

Michael Grunwald: Yeah. One thing I will say is that these are complicated, it’s a wicked problem. You increase yields for a Brazilian farmer and his first instinct is like, “Great, now I can go tear down more rainforest and then make Grunwald look like an idiot because he’s saying we need higher yields to save the rainforest.”

But what I will say is that, so yes, governance is really important, but this is, in the global scale, there is a huge demand and supply issue. And I don’t have great faith in government. If there’s going to be demand for land, the forests are going to come down. We saw it in, I remember the first time I went to Brazil in 2008 after the US passed its crazy biofuel rules, and everybody was like, “Awesome.” Grain prices went up and they were just tearing down the forest. Limiting the demand, on the demand side, is a prerequisite to protecting that biodiversity.

And then the other thing I would say about biodiversity is that there’s kind of on-farm biodiversity, which is important. And a lot of the things people say about pesticides, the kind of indiscriminate use, they’re wiping out the microbiome and you’re hurting on-farm biodiversity. But I do come back to again and again, the thing that really screws biodiversity is that initial change from nature to great Michael Pollan farms. That’s when most of the diversity is lost. And I do think that’s where we need to focus on protecting biodiversity, is in nature, not just on farms.

Kim Severson: And I think a couple of questions here were about this. Maybe we need to, like a lot of local food gets grown and sent to school … We have systems that kind of work. I can get, and this was not going to be true 20 years ago, but I can get local Georgia-grown satsumas at my Publix, which I think when all this, we were reporting here in 2025, I couldn’t have imagined that that could happen, and it’s thriving.

So there are these food systems that are working, that kind of ag in the middle sort of thing. There are people growing, maybe they’re using some pesticides, maybe they’re not, they’re truck … But they’re growing pretty good watermelons in Florida and then they move up and grow them in Indiana as the weather changes. And that some of this is working pretty well.

So it seems to me that we’re talking about big system changes and looking at this, but isn’t it really, like we were talking about, a little bit more like blockchain? Don’t we need to look at lots of different food systems? And some of these are working. Why can’t the system that gets me local satsumas at my Publix work all over the place? Why can’t local food just work? Why not take that model and just make it work in communities everywhere?

Michael Grunwald: Well, because we’re going to need 21 quadrillion calories in 2050. And I get it that it’s sort of like we just need to do a better job distributing it. We need to waste less. But those are sort of like, it’s sort of like, oh, we don’t need to stop smoking, we just need to get more exercise. It’s like we got to do all the things and part of that is we’re going to need more food.

It’s a little bit like the nitrogen thing. It’s like, yeah, we know that half of it is wasted every year, but it’s like advertising, right? We just don’t know which half. It’s not easy to, it’s like that underpants gnome thing where it’s like dot dot dot profit. We don’t know how to get to the dot dot dot.

Kim Severson: I can’t even go with the underpants gnome, but OK.

Michael Grunwald: It’s like …

Kim Severson: You keep talking about underpants, we’re going to have to go to human resources, young man.

Michael Grunwald: Well, no, I’m just saying it’s great. It’s like first of all, no, I don’t think … If you can get local food to produce incredible yields, then awesome. But it’s sort of like, we got to do that, right?

Kim Severson: Yeah.

Michael Grunwald: And it’s true, it’s like if you can do it without fertilizer, fantastic. But Michael Pollan has, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is amazing, in his whole kind of screed about corn, he has this kind of little paragraph, a kind of to be sure paragraph where it’s like, “Well, to be sure, these nasty chemical fertilizers are the reason that half of us on Earth are alive.” And it’s like that’s a pretty big deal. If 4 billion lives, it’s like we kind of want them fed.

So I just think you can’t just hand wave it away. I’m excited when I hear Tim talk about some of these programs where you’re seeing basically better soil health producing better yields, but that’s not true on a global basis. In general, there’s a yield drag for most organic farms and I hope we can fix it because-

Tim Bowles: Yeah. Let me, I want to respond to that part in particular.

Kim Severson: Yeah, go ahead.

Tim Bowles: I think to get to your point just very briefly, I think what you’re noticing in these little, I’ll say, I’ll call them seeds of success, seeds to build on, right? And the evidence for the yield lag in organic is complicated, right? Let’s first recognize that that yield gap, when it’s been documented, it’s actually quite remarkable it’s not bigger.

And here’s why. There have been hundreds of billions of dollars of research and development in these conventional systems to make the genotypes, to make the chemicals, to optimize these systems for incredible yield. You know how much support organic agriculture has gotten? Virtually none.

I have a story. We were working with organic farmers in the Central Coast here in California. I was trying to get them involved in a project, one to one, very large organic grower, one of the biggest grower-shippers in the Central Coast, extremely successful farmer. And he said to me, “Why the hell would I work with the UC system? You all have not done shit to support organic agriculture and that has not …” This was his experience over decades, right? This has been true globally. So we can’t say that organic has an inevitable yield lag with conventional when there’s been virtually no research to go into it.

Secondly, when we look carefully at the studies that have compared organic and conventional yields, what we find is that that yield gap goes from about 20% to about 5% when we look at the actual practices that are being used. When those organic farms are using more complex crop rotations, are using polycultures, et cetera, that yield gap declines substantially, right? If you compare monoculture to monoculture, conventional and input substitution organic, yeah, there’s a yield drag. That does not exist when we use principles of agroecology in these organic systems.

Kim Severson: Couple of more, let’s just get. This one, to ask on behalf of Marion Nestle. Has Mr. Grunwald received any support, financial or otherwise, from any agribusiness or petrochemical companies or associated think tanks representing the perspectives he expresses in his writing?

Michael Grunwald: I wish. No.

Kim Severson: Good question though, and always a good question to be asking in all these conversations.

Tim Bowles: For the record, I haven’t either.

Kim Severson: I was going to say, where’s your funding coming from, friend?

Michael Grunwald: The organic guys aren’t taking care of you?

Kim Severson: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Bowles: Well, it used to be the USDA, but they’ve …

Kim Severson: Yeah, no more. Seriously, so you don’t get funding from the USDA or any … Do you get government funding?

Tim Bowles: Well, I do get government. I do get USDA funding.

Kim Severson: What government funding do you get?

Tim Bowles: In my lab, we get funding from the USDA AFRI program, which is Applied Food and Research Initiative, and it’s a flagship USDA research program. And you know what? If I applied for those grants now, they would get sorted out because they have climate and they have diversity, etc.

Kim Severson: Right. Let me just do my work for a minute. Have you gotten any indication that they’re going to take your funding?

Tim Bowles: Not in my own lab. However, at the Berkeley Food Institute, we were part of a large Transitions to Organic Partnership Program, a grant that has been frozen.

Kim Severson: How big was that grant?

Tim Bowles: It was, Jeanne, maybe 30 million to the whole consortium?

Jeanne Merrill: 300 million nationally.

Tim Bowles: 300 million nationally. We’re a small slice, but we’re also basically a nonprofit that operates in a university, so it impacts us quite a bit. Right?

Kim Severson: Yeah, of course.

Tim Bowles: Yeah. I could keep talking about grant …

Kim Severson: Yeah, no, I just was curious. OK, I’m going to switch back to an international perspective here. Somebody asked about Sri Lanka, you used that as an example of a terrible failed experiment. What do you think are lessons to be learned? Was there something to be learned from what happened in Sri Lanka? How did that advance the cause?

Tim Bowles: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about Sri Lanka and I’ve been thinking about it in a way, what came up for me is chemical dependency, right? One of my best friends from childhood, like probably many of us in the room, has an opiate addiction. And he has struggled on and off to quit that. He’s currently sober and has been sober for a long time. But when he would try to go cold turkey, it didn’t work. And I think that’s been the problem for a lot of folks.

So in Sri Lanka, the story is more complicated. Sri Lanka was facing a huge trade deficit. They were facing an economic crisis before this happened. The president stopped imports of fertilizer to reduce the trade deficit, not from a philosophical commitment to organic agriculture. So farmers had no off-ramp, they would quit cold turkey from fertilizer. Any organic farmer will tell you, any organic certifier will tell you it’s a three-year transition period minimum, right? You have to transition these systems.

So to me, the Sri Lanka example doesn’t say much at all. As an example that does say something to me is I think one of the most very fascinating and admittedly complicated movement in India right now called the Zero Budget Natural Farming, happening mainly in Andhra Pradesh. Indian farmers since the 1990s have faced 300,000 suicides. It’s devastating. And these suicides are based on cycles of debt. As these farmers are forced to purchase inputs to grow commodity crops, in which case they’re subject to global economic demands, they get in these cycles of debt and they can’t pay.

So what the Zero Budget Natural Farming movement was about was let’s not purchase these inputs anymore. If we use locally available resources and principles of agroecology, we can have a zero budget farming, we’re not purchasing inputs. 600,000 farmers have adopted this system and it’s growing. The state is committed to it.

So this is an example that I would point to around this is what happens when there’s a movement in place, when there’s institutional support, when it grows over time, when there’s farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing, when it’s locally adapted. So we can’t be using straw men to talk about what is the potential here.

Kim Severson: Do you want to rebut the Sri Lanka …

Michael Grunwald: Yeah. Look, I think there’s a little bit of a communism hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried to some of this. And also, it’s also true, right? I can pull out examples like Zambia, they did a conservation farming effort that the farmers just didn’t like and abandoned. But I’ve heard that they didn’t do that particularly right either. This stuff is hard.

One thing that we haven’t talked about in the big picture, there’s an underlying current, and you talked about it with the dependency, that kind of the Green Revolution was a mistake. That the GMO seeds, first the hybrid seed, the fertilizers, the chemicals, that it was a mistake. But we do know that it did triple yields. It tripled the crop and livestock yields. So we do know that before it, people were predicting that there was just going to be perpetual famine, and it didn’t happen in the way that it was predicted. There were bets made and the bets were lost.

Look, and it hasn’t solved anything and agriculture and industrial agriculture makes a huge mess. And it’s like a water pollution mess and a water shortage mess. So we’ve gone through a lot of the messes. And there’s still deforestation, despite all these yield advances. But I do think if we hadn’t had the yield advances, we would’ve had three times as much land that we’ve used since the beginning of the Green Revolution and we would’ve had a lot more hunger.

So I do think the Sri Lanka, and I’m perfectly willing to believe that this was done in a haphazard way. And I’ve seen regenerative practices that are as part of a system that, not a purely regenerative system, but that absolutely were part of a very robust yield, very productive farms. But since I’m really focused on how are we going to stop this eating the Earth problem, how are we going to feed the world? I’m really nervous about like, well, we’re going to start by something that does historically have yield drag and-

Kim Severson: OK. All right, you get it.

Tim Bowles: Can I respond?

Kim Severson: And I have one last question, but jump in there for a minute and then we’re …

Tim Bowles: There’s so much to say.

Kim Severson: Right, all right. Just pick one thing and say it, yeah.

Tim Bowles: Look, we cannot accept that the only inevitable course of history was the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution happened because of choices. It happened because we did the Green Revolution in this way because we were coming out of World War II and chemical companies needed somewhere to sell their products. Munitions companies needed to make, instead of making bombs, they needed to make fertilizer. War machine companies needed to make tractors. There was a reason we intensified in this way. We could have had a different path that would also have led to yield gains, but in a very, very different way. So we cannot accept the historical trajectory as the only inevitable one.

Kim Severson: All right. So this is a little bit of a bigger shifting gear question to end on here. And I think a lot, you talk about the intensifying farming in Africa, for example, and it becomes very much extractive. It becomes kind of a new colonial sort of thing. They’re extracting, they’re getting, at the expense of local food and local farmers. And I guess what I’m trying to say is the idea that if we just farm more to make more calories does not necessarily mean all that product is going to feed people. This is an inherently unbalanced system.

So the question to both of you, is there a moral imperative here to do this differently? Maybe culturally there is, but certainly, are we obligated to look at agriculture and look at the impacts of all the things you’re talking about from what is right and what is just? How much does that play into this equation? We’re talking about food, right? There’s nothing more sort of spiritual than feeding ourselves and feeding each other. So where does that bigger question fit in?

Tim Bowles: I think it’s clear. How could we not make a moral choice? It’s going to be hard. There’s no doubt about that. I think that’s something we can probably all agree on is the future of agriculture and food is tough.

But the notion that we accept that the clean coal of agriculture is our future, that we can make this system a little bit less bad, while we know that it’s still going to be doing what it always has. It’s going to be fouling our air and our waterways, it’s going to be impoverishing rural communities. So to me, agriculture, the word agriculture, it has culture embedded in it. Agriculture is a mirror to us. What do we want to look in the mirror and see?

Kim Severson: And I know that usually the home team bats last, but since you’re the guest. And then I think this will be our last comment, I think we need to wrap up, but tell us …

Michael Grunwald: Everybody’s been very nice, I should say, by the way. I saw all the “Berkeley against …”

Audience 01: [inaudible].

Michael Grunwald: That’s fair. That’s fair. I saw all the “Berkeley against hate” signs outside and I was like, “Oh, thank God.”

For me, this is moral too, right? In Africa is currently on a path where if yields don’t increase in Africa, they’re on a path to have enough deforestation just there to push us past two degrees. And I talk about feeding the world without frying the world, but they’re both moral imperatives.

And honestly, I have more confidence in our ability to feed the world than I have in our ability to do it without frying the world. So yeah, I think I wish there was a way to snap my fingers and say, like, “OK, you’re going to have your feedlots and you’re also not going to dump the poop in the river.” And that is also, just like everything we’ve been talking about, that will be hard.

But I think we need more food, we need to feed people, and we need to do it in a way that doesn’t just expand the footprint. And I just haven’t seen a better way to do it. I hope we find it.

Kim Severson: All right, let’s give it up for these gentlemen.

(Applause)

And that’s it. It’s a wrap. Thanks everyone for coming.

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)