You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and we’ve got a great guest on the program. Peter Lehner who is at Earth justice, he is the managing attorney for sustainable food and farming. Peter just wrote a book farming our future, the science law policy of Climate Neutral agriculture. Peter has had blogs on the Harvard Law School blog and website as well as Yale has.

So he’s done a tremendous amount of work in this field. And I have mispronounced his name, I believe it’s Lehner. Not learner, I apologize for that. And so one of the things that I was surprised by when when reading a little bit about you, Peter, and the work that you’ve done was that in your book, you had stated that food systems are responsible for 1/3 of the global warming emissions that we need to reduce, which is a bit different than what the EPA says, which says it’s a 10%.

Either figure is rather large, given the fact that I think most of us just kind of have this opinion that farms and farm animals are are nice things and, you know, don’t don’t cause harm.

They’re not like steel factories or, or cars that are belching out emissions. So we just kind of think that it’s kind of innocuous. So the thought that up to 1/3 of our the global warming has been caused by the farming industry and the agricultural industry is is a bit shocking. So with that, Peter, great to have you on the program. And what’s what’s your thinking as to why is the EPA so wrong on this?

Well, it’s not really that they’re wrong. It’s just that they’re looking at it from a very narrow perspective. But and their perspective is, to some extent, Matt, what you were saying that we think farms are these nice family farms, and gosh, they can’t pollute, right. And that was really the the image of a farm that was in Congress’s mind in 1970, when they passed our main environmental laws that didn’t really address agriculture. But agriculture is very different now than it was in 1970.

And is very different than the image we have in our mind. It is much more of an industrial process. Since 1970, the number of farms has tended to go down. About half of the farms that are considered by US Department of Agriculture to be farms really aren’t farms, their hobby farms, retirement farms, many of them are tax farms, where we actually get our food is from a small number of enormous operations. And so it’s very different than the the nice image we have.

And then what EPA does is they look at animals emissions, and growing crops, but they have what’s called the inventory and the inventory has various sectors. Many aspects of agriculture in the food system are actually put elsewhere in the inventory. So for example, all the energy used on farm farm tractors, farm irrigation pumps are in other sectors, they’re not in agriculture, they’re an endless in this, they’re in the industry or the energy or the transportation sectors.

There’s a huge obviously agriculture is different than almost every other sector, it uses a lot of land, right. And that land has a big climate impact using land for agriculture instead of native grasslands or forests. And that’s an another section of the of the inventory. EPA also you…

Let me stop you there. Peter, can you explain that? How, how the land is contributing, just by sitting there just being farmed? You know, I have some rough understanding that just by using or tilling the soils, we may be impeding the way that the soil can actually sequester carbon. And certainly the use of fertilizer is doing that as well. Right?
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. What happens is healthy soil, say in a native grassland or even more in a forest has a lot of carbon in it. And it’s in the carbon in the soil in itself, and it’s in the roots and the plants that are there. You then convert that to agriculture. And imagine a tilled field, there’s no plants, there’s no trees, there’s no roots, and the soil itself, which used to have a lot of carbon, all that carbon has been released to the atmosphere.

So you go from something that this healthy soil, which both the soil and the plants are both holding a lot of carbon, and every year, they’re pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, they’re sort of breathing carbon, and they’re storing more carbon in the plants and in the roots and in the soil. None of that really happens in agriculture, modern agriculture, the soil is pretty close to dead. And we compensate for that by throwing on a lot of fertilizer, which by the way, synthetic fertilizer is very energy intensive. It’s made from fossil fuels.

And it takes a ton of energy and a tons of fossil fuel to create fertilizer to make synthetic fertilizer. And by the way, that’s not included. When EPA calculates it’s it’s 10% figure. But we compensate for these dead soils by throwing on a lot of fertilizer, and all the natural processes in soils. If you think of a forest, you’ve got good bugs, you’ve got other bugs going after those bugs, if you have some bugs can’t last very long because their favorite food doesn’t, isn’t there.

But current monocultures you have to say like corn every year, every year. So you also, in addition to throwing on a lot of fertilizer, you have to throw in a lot of pesticide, which also comes from fossil fuels. So there’s a lot of ways that our modern agriculture system is a lot more energy intensive. And one of the other areas that it’s important to remember is animals. Cows, because of their gut, it’s different than your in my gut so they can eat grass, but they produce methane. And Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, it’s about 85 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 20 years. And every time a cow breathes out, it releases a lot of what’s called enteric methane.

And here’s something to be sort of, sort of incredible. There’s more methane produced by cows breathing out than all the methane released by the natural gas sector, you’ve heard a lot about the natural gas industry and how we have to control it, which is absolutely true, it releases a lot of this potent, natural great greenhouse gas, there’s not this gas, cows belching, release even more. And then in addition, you’ve got all the cows and the other animals manure.

And when the manure is kept, as it often is, in these big lagoons before it spread on fields, it just releases manure, you think of swamp gas, you know, you sometimes being in a lake where it’s sort of swampy into smells bad. That’s methane, from decomposition of, of organic material. Exact same thing happens with manure. So this huge amount of methane is released because of animal agriculture. That we don’t realize, right?

That’s just pretty shocking that the amount of methane emitted by cows exceeds that of the entire natural gas industry, is that including other livestock, such as pigs and other and sheep, I’ve heard that the sheep like in this massive sheep farm in like, New Zealand, and places like that emit a tremendous amount of methane as well.

Yeah, you’re right, Matt. It’s big. It’s animals that have this particular ruminant gut system, which is cows and sheep and goats. Pigs don’t have it. So pigs now pig manure, is their pigs release a lot of manure. We’ve got millions of pigs in the country and their manure lagoons release a lot of methane. But pigs themselves don’t breathe out methane. It’s really in this country. It’s largely cows and some sheep. In other countries. It’s also sheep and goats a little more. But in this country, it’s mostly cows, which are for beef or for dairy.

Right? What’s interesting, I had a guest on the program a few weeks ago and he was doing work in the area of growing kelp out in the ocean and he was saying that the kelp could be used to spray on on crops and it would reduce the amount of nitrogen type based fertilizers that were required to to fertilize those crops as well as it could be used in livestock could feed and it would reduce the amount of burping that the livestock did, which would decrease the amount of food that they would have to take in by 12% or something. And fascinated by that. Have you followed that development at all?

Yeah. And we and we talk about that in our book. This is there’s a lot of hope. Not a lot of research yet. It’s all very preliminary, but hope that these feed additives, whether it be the most likely now seems to be perhaps made up from kelp could reduce could change the essentially change the chemistry and the cows gut, and so that they would breathe out less methane.

There’s problems of course, if it actually works, it, it seems to, as you said, perhaps reduce it maybe 10%. Maybe a little bit more than that, but we still got this enormous amount of methane. And it could take an enormous amount of kelp because we got a lot of cows. So that’s something to think about. But we’re looking at all these options.

Well, you’re listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and we’ve been speaking to Peter Lehner. And we will be back after these messages.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern of United heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment, consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation, contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you, or 84465449688446544968.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal American on KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got Peter Lehner on the show. Peter with Earth Justice, and we were just talking about kelp. And and one of the things that was fascinating to me about the kelp and growing it was that it would be a good store of of CO2 because it drops its leaves to the to the floor of the ocean, and then you’re not having to they’re not disturbed for a long period of time.

So it’s actually kind of safer than even a forest which we’ve had tons of forest fires which emit tremendous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. So what are your thoughts on that front?

Well, I think the kelp is promising in that it could reduce the methane emissions from cows, which by the way, can be very good for the producer, because methane is a waste, right? And so if a cow is eating some food, and then belching out methane, that’s essentially taking energy from the food and instead of producing milk or meat with it, it’s producing a greenhouse gas.

So if this feed additive can help reduce methane emissions, it’s not only good for the climate, and for you and me, it’s actually good for the producer too, because their cows are getting essentially pulling more of what they want out of the feed. And then the question is, is this kelp? Can we produce how do we produce it?

Right now it’s, of course, really just at the experimental stage, and it probably would take, there have been some studies to say that if we were to try to feed it to all the cows, we have, it would take up most of the East Coast of the United States.

So we can’t really clearly can’t do it at that scale. But it’s something we should definitely be looking at. And, and who knows what other opportunities are out there. I think one of the really exciting things here is this area of sustainable climate friendly farming practices has gotten almost no attention.

There’s been there’s some people doing it, and it’s great. But and they’re doing, they they’re raising animals. They’re growing crops in ways that are really good for water quality, biodiversity and our climate. But it’s only on a little bit of our land. And there’s been no research on it. Almost all of the federal government’s research money has been going for essentially big commodity crops like corn and soy, more corn, more soy, more wheat, more rice.

And so if we started really looking at this a little more like your example of kelp, you know, we’ve just scratched the surface. It’s really exciting to think of what could be out there if we really started looking and getting our best agricultural minds. To think about growing nutritious food in a sustainable way, well, talking about the the amount of kelp that could or should be grown.

The guests that I had previously, Dr. von Herzen was talking about how along the west coast of the US we had a very large kelp bed along the coast that has been decimated by in part agricultural runoff from farms, which is kind of filled as vast swath of this kelp, which was storing a lot of carbon kind of wanted to pivot back to the poop and the manure storage. And, you know, really dive into it. And tell us a little bit more about how that affects, you know, greenhouse gas emissions.

Sure. So think about human waste, right human waste, we realize it’s bad stuff. So we treat it in either if you’re in a rural area and a septic system underground, or if you’re in an urban area, it goes to a sewage treatment plant where it gets treated, and cleaned up before the much cleaner liquid gets released back into the water.

With animal waste, most of it is just either dumped on the ground, or actually even more so put in these big lagoons, it’s sort of flushed from where the animals are kept when most animals now are kept in houses can find buildings where food is brought to them, they don’t get to graze on pasture or wander around. So food is brought into them, they produce a lot of poop. It’s washed into these big lagoons. And in those lagoons, that organic waste that manure creates, as it decomposes in the water without oxygen, it releases a tremendous amount of methane.

And so that’s a real challenge. The good news is, we can change how we manage manure, if you don’t let the manure if you don’t let it get wet. If it’s dropped on the ground, say a pasture raised cow, or even a confined cow. If it’s handled all dry, it will produce a lot less methane. So one of the challenges we have is essentially how we treat our waste.

And this waste, by the way, also, often after the lagoon gets spread on fields, and again, think how different that is than human waste, which is very carefully treated, this animal waste is just spread on fields, and very often is spread in amounts far more than the plants can take up some amount of manures, good, good nutrients, it’s good fertilizer.

But if you put too much on the field, it washes off into the rivers and into the streams, doing things like what you said, killing the kelp beds because that excess nutrient is in the wrong place. A really powerful pollutant.

So what are we doing to change that and to change the incentives so that we don’t have these large coop lagoons and so that we incentivize farmers to farm in a way that is more sustainable?

Well, that I’d say we’re not doing enough. Right now, unfortunately, these large, what are called confined animal feeding operations are growing in number, they’re growing in size. And when you put more animals together, you get a lot more waste. And by and large, we need to really address that. And the federal government, the Clean Water Act actually specifically says that EPA should try to make sure these things don’t pollute too much and have strict pollution limits.

EPA has the pollution limits that apply to these from EPA are not that strong. And most of them are actually exempt from EPA regulations. So it’s left to the states. And unfortunately, most of the states have done very little to protect their drinking water and their water from this waste they’ve been tended to be more favorable to the industry and less favorable to protecting water and drinking water.

What about what about the Biden administration? Have they shifted gears at all and tightening up these regulations, too, to make it more difficult to pollute our rivers and streams?

They haven’t yet. There they EPA I know just said they wanted to look at some some of them a little more closely. But what the administration is doing is and this can get a little complicated is different agencies, different federal agencies have different authority. So EPA has sort of this regulatory authority that was really focus To sing on trying to reduce pollution.

The US Department of Agriculture, on the other hand really has this huge pot of money, which is divvied up by the Farm Bill, which is a bill that Congress passes every five years. And gives to US Department of Agriculture to support farmers to an A lot of it comes in as a subsidized crop insurance. Some of it comes in as what are called conservation programs.

So USDA will pay farmers, sometimes 70% of doing something sometimes 90%, sometimes even more, for practices that might help clean up the environment. And that is an area where I think to be honest, those conservation programs under the Farm Bill implemented by US Department of Agriculture, have been okay, but not as well implemented as they could be.

And I think the Biden administration is trying very hard to say, hey, look, we’ve got these programs, we’ve got this big amount of money that Congress has allocated, let’s try to use it as effectively as possible.

Let’s try to get a little more information about what works, what doesn’t work, make sure we’re not paying for practices that actually don’t clean up the water, don’t clean up the air don’t help the climate. We don’t want to be paying for those we want to be paying for ones that help the farmer produce the food in a good way.

And how have they done that in the last couple in the last like 15 months?

Well, it’s a lot of through things that are not very, don’t don’t get front page news. It’s really how you implement the program. It’s how the 1000s of outreach specialists talk to people, it’s how they provide grants. And I think for the most part, they’ve been doing this with a lot of support from from farmers, because a lot of folks want to try to I don’t think anybody wants to pollute.

It’s it’s it’s really a question of how do you produce the product, the either the grain or the fruits or the vegetables are the meats that you are to try to do it in a way that isn’t too polluting, and also keep you in business. And so I think the Biden administration is trying to both help the producers and help the environment. But it’s not it’s not big, flashy stuff. It’s a lot of small changes.

Well, I kind of see, at least in my micro life here is that a lot of times, it’s the little things that add up. So you just keep trying to do little things, right? And, and all of a sudden, you look back and say, Oh, something big happened because I was working on this for a period of years doing all the little things that I could. And so that’s, I think what all of us need to focus on sometimes just doing a little thing.

So you’ve been listening to Unite and HEal America on KABC 790, my guest, Peter Lehner. And we’re gonna be right back to talk more about how agriculture affects the environment. And pretty shockingly, up to 1/3 of our greenhouse gases are coming from agriculture. So stay tuned, we’ll be right back.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. This Matt Matern, your host, I’ve got Peter Lehner on the program from Earth justice. And Peter. specialty is in agriculture. And Peter, we’re talking about cropland and nitrous oxide, and, you know, the amount of farm land that is, is farmed by others in in the US, and how are these issues, things that we can work on going forward to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the next 20 years?

Sure, well, one of the things that, first is to get some basics, cropland, and we’ve got about 400 million acres of cropland in this country, over half of which is actually used to grow feed for animals that we were talking about before less than half is used to actually grow food for that humans will consume directly. But much of that, we cropland needs a lot of fertilizer. As I said earlier, the cropland has been the land, the soil has really been almost killed or devoid of its natural nutrients.

So we put on a lot of fertilizer. Farmers in this country and really around the world for a variety of reasons, tend to put on a lot more fertilizer than the plants actually take up. And they may do this because it’s easier to apply in the fall or because you can’t apply it too often or whatever. But studies have shown that that farmers apply close to twice as much fertilizer as the plant actually needs. So All of that extra fertilizers gotta go somewhere, right? It doesn’t just vanish. Where does it go?

It either runs off in the water. And that causes that type of nutrient pollution that maybe affects the kelp beds on California, people may have heard of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, people may know about our algae blooms and lakes all around the country. So a lot of it runs off into the water, some of it runs off into the groundwater, people may have heard of the Blue Baby Syndrome, which is when it gets into drinking water. And some of that actually goes into the atmosphere. And it goes into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

So the short answer is this extra fertilizer that we apply to farmland, much of it becomes this very powerful greenhouse gas. And by the way, nitrous oxide is also a really potent deplete or of the ozone level ozone layer. Remember the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet light. So better application of fertilizer can make a big difference, essentially using less fertilizer using, for example, crop rotations, that so one crop essentially feeds next year’s crop because it has different different nutrients in the soil, not digging the soil up so often.

So natural health can can regain in the soil, covering up the soil in the winter with cover crops. So instead of leaving the soil bare all winter long, all of these are ways that can help us use less fertilizer in ways that still produce plenty of crop all the crop we need. But less extra fertilizer means less pollution.

Right? Well, that seems to make sense. So why why do you think that’s not happening? On the farms around the country, and and particularly in managed farms, which take up? What 50% or more of the farmland in the country?

Yeah, about, I think studies show that about half of farmland in this country is rented. So the person farming, it is not the land owner. And most of that is on year to year contracts. And so what a lot of these practices that I mentioned, say a multi year rotation or cover crops or switching to less tillage, all of those can benefit. But they take time, soil doesn’t, you know, it’s not like turn a dial and all of a sudden, it’s different. It takes time for the soil to regain its health.

And so simply by for example, having a longer term agreement between the landowner and the farmer, where they can both agree, let’s do these practices, let’s both invest in this and let’s both benefit from it could make a big difference. And then there’s other things people apply fertilizer, sometimes in the fall or in the winter, because fertilizer prices are cheaper than but plants, of course, don’t take up nutrients in the fall in the winter, they don’t grow, and again in this country, really until the spring. So how we manage that.

Some states, for example, have forbidden application of fertilizer in the fall in the winter, just as a straight pollution prevention measure. So either through some what you might call a nudge in some incentives, try to get people, the farmers to apply fertilizer as best as possible. You know, it’s going to be interesting, the price of fertilizer skyrocketed, it was actually going up even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And that, and it has gone up even more because of that.

And so the high price of fertilizer, which is several times what it used to be, is making people look much more carefully about how can I apply it super carefully and not have all this extra, and fertilizer for many farmers can be a quarter or a third of their costs. So when that goes up by two or three times, it’s a big hit to a farmer. So it’s a great it’s, you know what they say never miss a crisis. Hopefully, they high price of fertilizer will accelerate efforts to use fertilizer more carefully.

Certainly, that would be great. One of the things we were talking about off air was methane being 80 times more powerful in 20 years than CO2. And that that is part of the reason why looking at 100 year timeline mething is maybe less important, but if we’re looking at the kind of side shorter term, which isn’t really short term, 20 years is not short term, particularly given the disasters we’re seeing in the amount of wildfires and degree.

You know, days of 100 plus temperatures and, and all the other climate disasters that we’re seeing on a day to day basis. It seems as though methane is something we should be looking at cutting as fast as we can.

Absolutely. And that’s actually goes back to your very first question, Matt, why our number is different from the EPA number, the EPA inventory uses standard approach really, from a while ago, thinking of everything on this 100 year timescale. And there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. But right now, we’re really looking at policies, how are we going to achieve major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in 20 years, many states are having targets of 2035, 2040, 2050.

And so that’s much sooner than 100 years. And on that shorter timeframe, that sort of policy, relevant timescale. Methane is much, much more important if you want to reduce greenhouse gases and have a big impact in the short term. Methane is a really important place to look, because it’s very, very potent greenhouse gas, but it does degrade in the atmosphere. So over 20 years, as you just said, it’s about 85 times stronger, and more and has more global warming impact over 20 years, about 85 times than carbon dioxide.

So that’s why there’s a lot of effort in the Biden administration. Now, to reduce methane from the oil and gas sector, which is great, they really do need to there’s a lot of leakage from gas wells and gas pipelines and all the other gas infrastructure, and we got to stop those leaks. And we got to stop the methane being released from our agricultural system, which is largely these cows and all this manure.

What is what’s the focus of your work at Earth justice on a day to day basis? And what are your some of your short term, long term, mid term goals that you’re pursuing there?

Well, we’ve been for a long time trying to essentially work on promoting an agricultural system that is more sustainable in the sense of less impact on error on water and on communities. So one aspect of our work we haven’t talked much about, has been on pesticides, there’s obviously in industrial agriculture, a lot of pesticides are used, and not an organic agriculture, which is small and growing, and we hope will grow even more.

But in industrial agriculture, a lot of pesticides are used, they’re often sprayed on the crops, to aid in ways that really can harm the farmworkers, the people who live next door, it gets into water, it gets into our food. So trying to take a closer look at the pesticides and indeed trying to get EPA to follow the rules. And some of the pesticides that have been allowed. Science now shows really just can’t be used safely.

And so we’re trying to make sure that those pesticides are essentially phased out. There’s a whole group of pesticides that have a tremendous impact on our pollinators are bees and butterflies and other insects. And you know, you may think pollinating all that sort of cute A B is sort of cute. Bees are fundamental and pollinators are fundamental to our food supply.

Without pollinating plants, they often don’t produce the food that we want. And so if you’re killing the pollinators, you’re basically chopping your own food supply. So we’ll look at that. And then we’ll also look at some of these other ways to try to encourage or or require stricter pollution limits air and water pollution limits.

Okay, well, you’re listening to KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host of Unite and Heal America. And, again, Peter Lehner’s, on the program with us from Earth justice and talking with us. So all about agricultural issues and the environment and the work that they’re doing. And we’re gonna be right back in just a few minutes to talk to him more about the work that justice is doing to help our environment

You’re listening to KABC 790. And this is Matt Matern, your host of Unite and Heal America, and I’ve got Peter Lehner on the program from Earth justice. And Peter, kind of rounding out the show I wanted to talk about a number of different things. One is kind of Organic food and, and if we’re moving in that direction in any significant way, which is not using pesticides, I certainly try to eat organic food as I don’t like the thought of eating a lot of pesticides in my food.

And I hope that it comes down in price so that other, you know, people in middle America can afford this because it shouldn’t be a luxury, good, it should be something that everybody can afford, because quite frankly, the health care cost of treating people who are eating pesticides, pesticide ridden food, it’s no wonder why our cancer centers are filled up. And we’re spending bill know trillions of dollars on cancer and the like, because we’re eating poison.

That coupled with possibly eating less meat, which I also have tried to do a few days a week not eating meat. And it’s it’s really not as bad as one might think, you know, you can’t give it up. But, and that would reduce the amount of greenhouse gases if we all just had a little bit less meat, and probably is a healthier dietary choice too. Because eating you know, big stakes as a has a detrimental factor in heart disease is the number one killer in America. So it’s kind of a win win situation.

Yeah, I agree with you on all of that. I think I was talking before about pesticides. And and I’ll, you know, in theory, EPA should set levels so that pesticide residues on food are safe. The more I’ve worked in the area, the more I think yeah, you know, I’m happy to if I can try to eat organic because those pesticide residue levels are often not, in my view at safe levels.

So you’re right i It’s a lot healthier to eat organic. And the good news is organic is growing, the bad news is not growing fast enough. And there should be more support. And I think that’s one of the things that could Congress could do next year. I mentioned earlier, the Farm Bill, the farm bill is is in some ways, the it’s like the most important environmental law you’ve never heard of.

And unlike other environmental laws, which haven’t been touched by Congress for for decades, literally many decades, Congress has to reauthorize the farm bill every five years, it was last passed by the Congress in 2018, it’s going to come up again in 2023. And so there’s a great opportunity for Congress to provide more support for organic, what happens now is there’s sort of an imbalance, organic doesn’t get much support.

And conventional gets a lot of support. And we could shift that so that we are benefiting our our organic farmers more and helping them transition. As you know, with organic, you have to have practices for a certain number of years before you can be certified as organic. And we want to help farmers shift so they can get to organic, or other perhaps other climate friendly practices more quickly, and really accelerate adoption of all these practices I’ve been talking about.

So that’s definitely one big opportunity. And you mentioned changing your diet, that’s Look, that’s something that is in everybody’s control, they can choose to try to eat in a way that is a little better for the climate. And for most people, the two things that will make the biggest impact on the climate is your diet. And that’s largely the meat and dairy you you eat, and how much you fly applying is very carbon intensive. But for most people, you can change a little bit of your diet, it’ll probably be as you say, be healthier.

And frankly, it’s not just you it’s government’s can do that governments buy lots of food for schools and for prisons, and for service centers and for the military and all these other places. And so governments can do that. And there’s a couple of them. There’s something called the good food purchasing program. And actually it started in LA. And they realized, hey, la buys a lot of food.

Why don’t we buy food that’s actually good and consistent with our values to have nutritious food, environmentally sustainable food food that is produced by a valued workforce and as local and so they started this idea of of using the city’s purchasing power and created for good healthy food.

And now a number of other cities New York City where I am just adopted this good food purchasing program. And a lot of more cities can take that overstates can do that. Companies can do the same. So essentially, we can vote not only with our votes, but with our dollars.

Yeah, it’s certainly a step in the right direction. And I do see a lot of restaurants these days of advertising, all the family farms that they are getting their produce from, which I believe are organic farms and things of that nature, which is, which is encouraging that those farms are doing well. Though I am discouraged at the prices that are being charged sometimes for for this type of higher quality food.

And I believe that our country really needs to make an effort to encourage farmers to produce this healthier food so that not only people with the higher end of the income food chain are getting this but everybody I mean, ya know, that’s super important. And it’s really important to understand that conventional food is looks cheap, and it’s cheap at the supermarket.

It’s actually really expensive. It just has all these hidden costs. And so there have been some recent studies that have showed that with conventional food, the real cost, if you include the health care costs, the fact of the degradation of the land and the pollution, when agriculture pollutes drinking water, say, then the downstream folks have to spend a ton of money to clean up their drinking water, right? New York City spends hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its drinking water clean, every other city around spends huge amounts to protect drinking water.

So we can serve clean drinking water that’s often polluted from agriculture. When you add up all these hidden costs, agriculture’s true cost is about three times what it looks like at the supermarket. So it looks cheap.

But it’s actually for society really expensive. So this is a real opportunity, instead of spending money in these hidden ways to support conventional agriculture, let’s support healthy agriculture directly and stop supporting with all these hidden ways, conventional agriculture, and then indeed, as you say, we’ll get to a point where the healthier food, the more sustainably produced food, the more climate friendly food is what’s going to be available to everybody as it should be. I mean, this is going to be for the most part more nutritious and healthier.

Right, the example that I use is sometimes a hidden cost of a hamburger. You know, if you’re eating at McDonald’s, and they’re and they’re paying their employee less than the minimum, at the minimum wage, and that person is having to get government subsidies in order to survive, well, you’re not really paying the true cost of the burger, because the government is subsidizing that burger, because the person isn’t getting paid a reasonable wage.

And kind of a similar situation with the farmer is that we’re we’re subsidizing the farmers to pollute, versus actually incentivizing them to grow cleaner organic crops, which would not pollute downstream, which would not cause all these problems that we’ve been talking about for the last hour. So it just we need to readjust our priorities and incentivize good behavior, and disincentivize pollution.

Right? How is their justice doing that? How what are your what do you think are the things that you can do most are to, to change these incentives.

But we’re just as like our allies, we work with a lot of say sustainable farming groups and try to shoot to help them elevate their voice and help them get the policies in place. This is what you just said is a perfect example that a McDonald’s hamburger is not really is cheap only because of all these hidden subsidies to the workers to the pollution to the farmers that are paid huge amounts of money, about half or a third by the third most years of farm income is government payments.

And that’s mostly for unhealthy and climate friendly food. And instead, we could be using those government payments to be supporting farmers who are producing healthy food in a climate friendly way. And that’s what we’re trying to do. So we work on it. We work at Earth justice.

On the legislative level, we work with USDA and other agencies, to and at the state level, to try to change essentially these incentives these policies, a lot of what a farmer does is driven not by the weather, but it’s driven by policy. So we change policy, we can change what’s what’s going on in the ground.

Well, that’s important work and I really appreciate the work that you’re doing Peter and keep up the keep up the fight, because Lord knows we need it. You’re listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790.

This is Matt Matern, your host, and I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to Peter Lehner, Earth Justice I certainly have and look forward to maybe checking back with you at some time in the future and and see how what progress has been made on these fronts which, you know, cause up to 1/3 of our greenhouse gas emissions.

I look forward to talking again. Thanks a lot for having me, Matt.

Thanks for being on the show. Peter.