Hello and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Tom Rvichanek.

I'm Christiana Fierrez. And I'm Paul Dickinson.

This week we asked what lessons agriculture needs to learn for the future. And Paul and Cristiana

traveled to Umbria in Italy to meet twin brothers Nicola and Alessandro, who left behind

city careers to reinvent the way we grow food. Thanks for being here. So friends, we're going to hear about a very exciting trip that you took recently to Italy and learned a great deal about the future of food production and what it might look like. But I wonder if we should just take a minute or two at the front end to talk about what's wrong with how we produce our food. Now, this will not be an alien topic to many listeners,

and indeed, we've covered it before on the podcast. But to just kick off, this is something I discuss a lot with my good friend George Mombio down here in Devon, who I see who's made

his life's career to focus on this. He essentially says that modern farming creates the majority

of our challenges in the world. If you look at the emissions

associated with it, the terrible use of land and all of the pollutions that come from that,

so many of our challenges have come from the way we produce our food. So, of course, industrial

agriculture contributes to around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, and it may be more

than that, depending on how

we calculate it. Monocultures and chemical inputs degrade soil and pollute waterways, and of course,

as we know, have a devastating impact on biodiversity. And what's more, our reliance on fossil fuel

in the form of fertilizers and global supply chains increases our climate vulnerability. Now, that's only the

environmental issues. If you expand that out and look at it socially, farm work tends to be

underpaid, seasonal, and sometimes it can even be exploitative in certain instances. And in many

places, farming is no longer seen as viable or attractive career, especially for younger generations.

And in many cases, it is just the government subsidies that keep this moving forward.

Not only that, but an over-reliance on a few varieties of crops makes food systems vulnerable to disease and climate shocks.

And global food supply chains now tend to break down under pressure.

Perhaps, though, the biggest impact that our food systems face is the soil.

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