Jason Bradford: "A Hybrid Path to the Future of Farming"
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 555 Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2022
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode, Jason Bradford, who is an author, activist, farmer, and teacher, talks about the energy intensity of our modern industrial agriculture system.
How do we feed billions of people with depleting energy systems? How do we also protect existing biodiversity and ecosystem health? We also discuss what makes for healthy soil, why we're losing it, and how small farms can help get it back - while creating higher yields of healthier foods for fewer inputs.
About Jason Bradford:
Jason Bradford has been affiliated with Post Carbon Institute since 2004, first as a Fellow and then as Board President. He grew up in the Bay Area of California and graduated from U.C. Davis with a B.S. in biology before earning his doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis, where he also taught ecology for a few years. After graduate school he worked for the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at the Missouri Botanical Garden, was a Visiting Scholar at U.C. Davis, and during that period co-founded the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG). He decided to shift from academia to learn more about and practice sustainable agriculture, and in the process, completed six months of training with Ecology Action (aka GrowBiointensive) in Willits, California, and then founded Brookside School Farm.
For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/24-jason-bradford
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. |
| 0:06.0 | That's me. |
| 0:07.0 | On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. |
| 0:17.0 | Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. |
| 0:33.8 | Today's guest, Jason Bradford, has been a friend of mine for almost 20 years. |
| 0:38.8 | Jason is a conservation biologist turned organic farmer. |
| 0:43.8 | He's been involved with a post-carbon institute from the start, co-founded Farmland LP, |
| 0:49.8 | and has run various CSAs, including one currently in Corvallis, Oregon. |
| 0:55.6 | Jason and I dive into the relationship between energy and agriculture and the various trade-offs |
| 1:01.8 | between monetary efficiency and food yields. |
| 1:05.9 | We discuss how the future living arrangements are likely much more rural with a higher fraction of our population |
| 1:13.4 | working on the land. This was a wide-ranging and at times emotional discussion. I hope you |
| 1:19.3 | learn some things about how the future of agriculture will likely be different, perhaps very |
| 1:24.8 | different than our recent past. Here's my good friend, Jason Bradford. |
| 1:42.6 | So, Jason, you and I have been doing conversations for a long time. |
| 1:49.3 | I tried to find online. |
| 1:50.9 | I was on your podcast like 15, 17, 20 years ago when I was starting my PhD. |
| 1:57.5 | It wasn't a podcast. |
| 1:59.1 | What was it? |
| 1:59.8 | It was a radio show. Well, it was actually a live radio show that |
| 2:03.7 | ended up getting, you know, put on MP3 and you could go download it if you wanted to or listen. |
| 2:09.5 | But it was never in a podcast format. But you were interviewing me. We talked a lot about all these |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nate Hagens, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Nate Hagens and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.