Twisted Fields on 89.3 FM: Local Revolution

Listen to the audio recording here: https://kpdo.net/local-revolution/

Aaron

This is 89.3 FM KPDO and this is Local Revolution. I'm Aaron Murphy, and on our program today we're going to discuss the local movement. What does it mean to buy local? Why are local foods and clothing better when they're made closer to home? Is it worth paying extra to buy local goods? And are they always better quality, but also more expensive than goods from China? My guest today is Daniel Theobald, the founder of Twisted Fields in San Gregorio. Thanks for joining us today.

Daniel

My pleasure. 

Aaron

The coronavirus is currently at its peak here in central California. How are you coping with the virus at home and at work right now?

Daniel

The crisis clearly has taken a great toll on society and the economy as a whole. I tend to be a silver linings kind of person and look for the benefits that it's also providing, and I think in many ways it has helped us to re-examine our connections to the people around us. It's allowed us to re-examine our connections to the Earth, and to our food in ways that perhaps were not as poignant previously. Here at the farm, it has been great for us to be in a position to live in such a beautiful landscape with plenty of social distancing by nature. We don't take that for granted. We're very grateful for the opportunity that we have to be in an agrarian society here in San Gregorio and we know not everybody has that opportunity. There will certainly be a number of lessons learned and hopefully we come out better for it.

Aaron

Yeah, that does seem to be the case. A lot of farmers, I understand, in this area and all over the country as well as the rest of the world are running out of food if they operate at the retail level, supplying food to local families and stuff. Have you been experiencing any of that because of the virus where you're just sort of cleaned out by the demand?

Daniel

Yes, we have seen incredible demand, particularly for our eggs. It was challenging right at the beginning, we were donating a significant number of eggs to some charities. Now, we've just got such incredible demand, we've been rationing our eggs across a number of different customers. We have a range of customers, each who are asking us for more eggs than we can supply them. So, instead of just going to the the person willing to pay the highest price, we've decided to take an approach of spreading them out more evenly across the customer base to try and make sure that, to the extent possible, everybody has access to the fresh eggs that we provide.

Aaron

That's great. That's really equitable of you to operate like that. I understand that basically every farm supply store in the country is running out of baby chickens because everybody now wants to grow their own farm fresh eggs. Have you experienced any problems with the supply chain for chickens?

Daniel

Well, we're fortunate that we have the space here to do a lot of that ourselves, so we incubate a significant portion of our own chickens. We try and keep our genetic pool wide and varied. So we do bring in baby chicks from a number of outside sources periodically, just to keep our genetic pool diverse. We're big fans of genetic diversity. We don't try and create just one strain of chicken that produces the absolute perfect egg and in the process introduce all other all kinds of other problems. We really believe that for food security, biodiversity is our ally. I think maybe most people don't understand that large industrial farming really operates on a monoculture type of approach. They will find one strain of wheat, or corn, or chicken, and create a very narrow gene pool, because that particular DNA produces some favorable characteristics that help them with their bottom line. The problem there is that it creates a very fragile system; or a very fragile genetic environment where if something changes and that particular DNA no longer is appropriate or suitable or competes well, you can have massive problems.

Aaron

Right. Well, that's amazing that you raise your own chickens, that probably decouples you from the distribution chain that right now is breaking down. You must feel pretty self-reliant in that way.

Daniel

That's really the goal for us, to produce essentially everything we need here locally. Local production is best when it's truly local. I applaud anybody who is working hard to grow food locally. Unfortunately, many times it's more of a marketing gimmick than it is reality because they are essentially importing much of the supply side of that from elsewhere. So, again, I think we're fortunate that we're in a position where we can have the possibility of growing almost everything we need here locally on the farm. It's challenge, but at the end of the day, that whole self-reliance thing is really powerful when you see how something like a virus can disrupt supply chains across the world.

Aaron

Yeah, absolutely. I can see how some farms may call their products local, which, in one degree they are. But if you're buying grains in bulk, organic chicken feed from Asia, then it puts into question really how local are you, doesn't it?

Daniel

Yeah, all of these things are on a spectrum, obviously, and raising the chickens here versus shipping the eggs across the planet, that's probably a net positive. The more you can do locally, the better it is for the environment, and the better it is for the consumer. You've probably covered this in the past, but there's a tremendous amount of credible research that shows the nutritional content of food starts to degrade from the moment it's picked. Broccoli, for example, has particularly impressive vitamin content that's lost very quickly once disconnected from the ground.

Aaron

Wow.

Daniel

So the idea of actually growing food that's optimized for its genetic diversity and its taste, its flavor, its vitamin content, these are things that you can do if you're growing locally. If you are planning on shipping, then you really have to optimize your crops to ship. This is why at the grocery store we tend to find tomatoes that feel more like plastic than they do like food, and unfortunately they taste more like plastic than they do like food as well.

Aaron

Sure. 

Daniel

And that's simply because good tomatoes don't keep well. Tomatoes with good flavor, with the nice texture that aren't mealy, that really have that robust taste, those don't enjoy traveling on trucks. So by the time they get to the grocery store, they're done and nobody's going to buy them. So if you can if you can get the heirloom vegetables that are superior flavor, superior size, often times superior nutritional value, and get it locally, it's a win-win-win.

Aaron

Yeah, that's great. Do you do you grow tomatoes in addition to chickens? Actually, tell me about some of the things you grow there. 

Daniel

Yes, we are a research farm. Now, one of the things we realized early on is that we weren't going to be a particularly effective research farm if we weren't providing real goods and services to real people, because then the research becomes disconnected from reality. Our research goal is to understand and to help to solve the problem of how local organic farmers can operate profitably and produce a wide variety of crops for their constituents. We are operating in a community supported agriculture model, which means that people sign up for a farm share. They're essentially buying rights to part of the farm's output for a season. And that comes with some risk because there's no guarantees that the farm will be successful in any particular season. But it comes with tremendous amount of reward as well. What you're going to get is incredibly healthy food that's not covered in pesticides, actually tastes great, and is healthy for a lot lower cost than you would get it at a place like Wholefoods or Safeway. Those are good stores, but they have a very different business model. 

Aaron

Sure. 

Daniel

In addition to that, it also really helps people to understand where their food comes from and have an appreciation for the reality of farming, food, and nutrition. When you just go to the grocery store and pull things off a shelf, it's really kind of a travesty that there's a complete lack of understanding of our food supply and how that whole system works. So to get back to your original question, our thesis here is that we can use technology to effectively produce a wide range of crops, fruits, vegetables, and eggs in a way that's economically feasible. And on the technology side, we use a broad range of different approaches. On the one side, the sort of fanciest side, we're building a number of agricultural robots to help with some of the massive labor shortage problems that we're experiencing in the agriculture sector. On the other side, more practical farming automation projects such as RFID tracking on the chickens. Now, our chickens are completely pasture-raised. They are free to come and go as they please. They go out on to 127-acres and live a wonderful life and scratch for bugs, seeds, grass, and all the things that real chickens like to do. They're very happy. And we find that happy chickens really lay the best eggs and that makes a big difference. But how do you manage that effectively? It's not as cost effective to raise chickens that aren't in cages. That's just the unfortunate reality. So part of our research is how do you do this in a way that you can have it be economically feasible while being humane and producing a superior product?

Aaron

That's great. Do the RFID tags provide information to the consumers about the sort of daily activities of the chicken or any other thing that consumers might like?

Daniel

You know, that's a really great question. I hadn't really thought about that, but it's very possible that we could get to a point where we could essentially, on the carton of eggs, put which chickens laid those eggs in the future. We're not there yet.

Aaron

Yeah, that would be fun as a consumer. 

Daniel

Yeah. Here's the mommy of your eggs. One of the things that people really love about our eggs is that they're Easter eggs in the sense that we have brown, green, blue, orange, white, and speckled. You open up our dozen eggs and it looks like somebody dyed them. And that's part of what comes along with the genetic diversity side of things. But it's also just a lot of fun. And the whole idea with the RFID tags is when a chicken is out in the field doing what they do, they feel an egg coming on and they need to go in and lay their eggs, they basically go in and choose a nest to lay their eggs in and there will be an RFID antenna in each one of those nests. As that chicken enters the nest, it will register which chicken entered the nest. And then as the eggs are collected, we know which chickens have laid eggs. This does a number of things for us that can help us to identify problem areas. If there are chickens that are not laying eggs in the nests, it could be that they have found a creative place to leave their eggs out in the fields. And obviously we'd like to know that and be able to resolve that situation. If there's a chicken that is sick or having other problems, that helps us to identify it and resolve it. And then it also can help us to identify those chickens that are laying the best eggs and give special attention to those when we are incubating the next generation of layers.

Aaron

Oh, great. That's super interesting. I really I'm excited to hear more about your research. That sounds like it could offer a lot of benefit, for your operational efficiency, but also for consumers. So I would like it if you could explain to maybe listeners who don't know what an RFID is, because both of us have been talking about this and we both know what those are. But in a really simple terms, how would you describe the the collar that they're wearing?

Daniel

RFID actually stands for Radio Frequency Identification. It's actually a small tag on one of their legs, it's put on with a zip tie very loosely, they don't even seem to notice it at all and it's just like a little keychain, a little piece of plastic. It's got a small circuit board inside. It has no power source. And what happens is when it comes within range of an RFID antenna, it energizes that RFID tag and then there's a wireless exchange of information. So for anyone who uses a key FOB or a badge at work to open the door, those type of things, those are generally RFID systems. So you hold your card up to the door, it goes beep. The door opens. That's the exact same technology.

Aaron

Well, I definitely see how, in a way, you're distinguishing yourself also from a consumer standpoint by really maintaining quality. I think the argument, when we bring it back to the local discussion, is about not only the energy inputs and where did the grains come from to feed your chickens, but also especially for people that are concerned about the quality of the life of the chicken. I think what you're doing really offers a distinction to maybe not only justify what may currently be a higher price, but simultaneously you're also possibly using technology that can actually lower the price for consumers. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Daniel

You know, we recognize that if it's the best product in the world, but no one can afford it, that's not really going to make a difference. And it's also important to us to have high quality local food that is affordable to a wide range of consumers. This shouldn't be just for the Palo Alto elite, it should be something that local families can afford, and eat healthy as well. I don't know if you've heard of the term food deserts, but in some of the research that we've done with the USDA, food deserts are a real issue. What a food desert is, is when there is an area that really only offers convenience store food to the local families who don't have cars or other forms of transportation to go to a more conventional grocery store. And so those families will end up growing up on Coca-Cola and potato chips, right? No surprise. Diabetes is one of the biggest killers in our country right now. So using technology to reduce costs of healthy food is what it's all about for us, and and those costs generally come down to labor. There have been a lot of concerns, particularly in the media for the past few years about technology taking jobs and the whole human versus robots thing that is popular to talk about. The reality is that there is not a shortage of jobs in agriculture, but there is a massive shortage of workers. There are just not enough workers to even harvest the food. So you've got perfectly good food rotting in the field simply because they can't find workers to do it. Now, it's a twofold problem. One is that people don't want to do that work. It's often not easy work. The current economics of food have been driven by massive industrial conglomerates with large monocultures where they have figured out how to get the cost of producing that egg down to the absolute rock bottom bare minimum. And so it's a little bit of a catch 22 for the consumer, because you want to stretch your dollar as far as you can. That's what anybody who's trying to raise a family does. But on the flip side, in the longer term we're creating a problem for ourselves, that we can't get healthy food for a decent price.

Aaron

Well, that's where I think the virus is really maybe shaking up that whole catch 22 a little bit, don't you think? I mean, we won't know until the economy starts to improve.

Daniel

Yeah, is it going to stick or not.

Aaron

Yeah, that is definitely right, because I've even seen memes on Facebook. People are like, oh, this crisis came around and now I'm cooking homemade dishes for my family that I've never seen more, my kids are at home and playing outside and we're spending time together.

Daniel

That's what I call the silver linings. I think it's really interesting, to take a little bit of a diversion here for a second for the history of the human race, children and parents have previously spent their days together and you've gone out and you've grown or picked or hunted your own food. We have become not only disconnected from our food, but we've become disconnected from our families. For most of us in the human race right now, that's just the way it's always been as far as we're concerned, but we don't realize that this idea of parents and children being apart is brand new and we have not yet fully even comprehended the effects, good or bad, probably mostly bad, that are going to result from that over time. So it's really interesting to hear people reconnect with their families and start to understand what we've been missing out on because the Industrial Revolution said parents should go to factories and kids should go to school.

Aaron

Yeah, yeah. I've heard that. You know, statistically they're saying I think I've read that in the 1930's, or maybe the 40s, over like 30 percent of the American population was participating in farming in some degree or another. Now I think it's less than three percent of Americans and growing and growing. 

Daniel

That's right. Yeah, the statistic, as I understood it, was one hundred years ago, it was actually 70 percent, seven zero of people had a job in the agriculture industry and today it's less than three percent. I think it's less than two percent now, which is a good thing in that it has allowed us to pursue a broader range of activities, such as science, exploring the universe, arts, and education. Those are all good things, but there is a cost and I think we're just really starting to understand the long term implications of those costs. For example, in the United States, these are not exact numbers, but it's something like healthcare accounts for one third of the gross domestic product, meaning very roughly that one third of every dollar or one out of every three dollars spent in the United States is spent on something healthcare related. Now, that's crazy. It's absolutely crazy that we spend more money on healthcare than we do on food. I had a friend who was a little bit quirky, but he would always say to me, hey, I'd rather pay the grocer than the doctor. And, at the time, I kind of chuckled a little bit at that. But there's a lot of wisdom in that.

Aaron

You know, I want to actually get back to your farm, and I am interested in the use of technology. You talked a little bit about your use of the research robot and the technology with the chickens and everything. And I guess I did want to conquer that question. Like, what do you say to someone who is unsure about your farm? I'm curious to know what you'll say, that you're using a robot that could very well be taking jobs away from someone. What's your typical answer to to that situation?

Daniel

Yeah, yeah. Let me let me talk about that a little bit. And then afterwards I'd be happy to go through a list of all the different technology projects we've got going on, because I think you'd find that interesting. But yeah, the technology versus human labor question is something that has been at the forefront of human thought really ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution. But the actual case study goes all the way back to to prehistoric times, Homosapiens versus Neanderthals. Why did Neanderthals die out while Homo sapiens eventually dominated and thrived? There was about a five thousand year period where Homosapiens and Neanderthals coexisted on the European continent. But you saw this gradual shift of Homosapiens winning out. And, you know, this is all speculative. So nobody shoot me if there's more recent research. But, the old theory was that there were a lot of wars going on and Homosapiens were killing Neanderthals. But it appears that was probably not the dominant factor. It was that the Homosapiens were able to create technology that helped them to be more resilient. What do I mean by that? For example, Homosapiens invented the sewing needle and were able to start sewing clothing. Clothing allowed them to be more resilient to weather changes and a wider variety of climates. And it's also interesting to understand that these technology advances almost always benefit the weakest in society disproportionately, because the  strong people, well, they didn't need clothes. They were fine. It was the weaker and the sick that really benefited from having clothing and shelter and those type of things. Another Homosapien advantage was they had better communication. And when you are able to communicate more effectively, you're better able to trade, you're better able to understand the needs of those in society. Now, I think the most skeptical among us would generally say, well, yes, but technology generally benefits the rich and the poor just kind of get screwed. You know, that can happen. But these are things that you have to look at on a macroscopic level over the centuries, a lot of times. And technology always ends up benefiting society as a whole as as it becomes accessible and affordable. Just think about the Internet. The Internet is a great example. Are there bad things about the Internet? Yeah, I'd say there's lots of bad things about the Internet. But when you think about the positive impacts it has had on us in terms of education, in terms of freedom around the world, in terms of helping people get access to economic resources, that they need microloans and that kind of thing, the benefits are far reaching. So the whole technology versus jobs thing is a really