Show Notes
Hi everyone - Emma here. We're deep in prep for our new miniseries on Agrarian Futures where we will be exploring the potential for a better food system rooted in cooperative principles.
In the meantime, we've got a special announcement: Agrarian Futures is joining the World Within Studios Podcast Network [https://www.worldwithin.org/]!
World Within is a non-profit that invests in solutions and stories that are building an economy that's owned by the many, not just the few. We are delighted to be adding Agrarian Futures to that effort!
Today, we're cross-posting an episode of our fellow World Within Studios show: the How to Change the World Podcast.
In this episode, my friend Rostam Zafari sits down with Cooper Hibbert, co-founder of Old Salt Co-Op - a cooperative of Montana ranchers pushing back against big beef. His co-founder Cole Mannix was on a previous episode of Agrarian Futures and I think this conversation today adds even more to the picture of what it will take to build a better food system.
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Agrarian Futures and the How to Change the World Podcast is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Eve Weston and Martin McGreevy.
More from Agrarian Futures
This week we go to Germany to learn about a cooperative called Kulturland who has been working on solving the farming land access problem for over a decade. Kulturland raises money from everyday people and uses that capital to buy farms, take them off the speculative market, and provides farmers with a secure lease. In return, the farmer commits to farming organically and keeping the farm open to the community.
If we're serious about building a better food system, we have to start with land.
We often talk about how the food system is broken, but what would it look like to build one that is better?
Our guest today Will Potter's new book, Little Red Barns [https://www.willpotter.com/littleredbarns], started as a tale about censorship in journalism around industrial agriculture, but became something much bigger: a 10 year investigation look at how factory farming, an ages old mythos of family farms, and the rise of authoritarian politics have all worked in tandem to produce social, economic, and ecological disaster.
Enjoy Part 2 of Emma and Austin's reflections on 2.5 years of Agrarian Futures. In this episode, they highlight the commonalities they see in the big success stories of the regenerative movement, including cooperative economics, finding the right niche in the food system, learning to tell your story, and much much more.