DeepSummary
Lauren Cardeli shares his personal journey that led him to founding the nonprofit organization A Growing Culture, which aims to support smallholder farmers around the world. He recounts experiences of living with indigenous communities in Belize and witnessing firsthand the devastating impacts of industrial agriculture and cultural erosion. These formative experiences made him realize the need to celebrate and promote farmer autonomy and agroecological knowledge.
Cardeli emphasizes that the majority of the world's food is produced by smallholder, indigenous, and peasant food producers, who face immense adversity and injustice. He argues that addressing power dynamics and hierarchies is crucial for achieving a truly sustainable food system. Cardeli criticizes organizations and conferences that focus solely on technical solutions like composting and food waste while ignoring issues of inequity and privilege.
A Growing Culture partners with grassroots communities worldwide, providing funding, facilitating knowledge-sharing, and advocating for their rights. Cardeli stresses the importance of listening to and centering the voices of these communities, who possess invaluable wisdom and innovations born from their lived experiences. He calls for recognizing the ingenuity of smallholder farmers and challenging the dominance of industrial agriculture.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Smallholder, indigenous, and peasant farmers produce the majority of the world's food, yet face significant adversity and injustice.
- Addressing power dynamics and inequities in the food system is crucial for achieving true sustainability.
- The knowledge and innovations of smallholder farmers should be centered and celebrated, rather than imposing top-down solutions.
- Organizations and conferences often focus too narrowly on technical solutions, ignoring deeper systemic issues of power and privilege.
- A Growing Culture partners with grassroots communities worldwide, providing funding, facilitating knowledge-sharing, and advocating for their rights.
- Indigenous worldviews and ways of relating to the natural world offer valuable lessons for a sustainable future.
- Supporting smallholder farmers and promoting agroecological practices are key to farmer autonomy and a truly regenerative food system.
- Collective action and solidarity among diverse communities are essential for transforming the food system.
Top Episodes Quotes
- βSmallholder, indigenous and peasant food producers only control 19% of agricultural land, yet produce over 70% of the world's food supply, protecting over 90% of agricultural biodiversity. They do that faced with unimaginable adversity.β by Lauren Cardelli
- βYou're not going to find those solutions in Silicon Valley, Iowa State, or Cornell. You're not going to find them in Wall street. You're going to find them in the communities that have already been dealing with these issues, that have created unbelievable models for growing food. Those are the true disruptive technologies needed.β by Lauren Cardelli
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Episode Information
Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
Kamea Chayne
11/9/22
βFor every $1 of aid Africa gets, $24 is taken out. We have to address something deeper, something more systemic, but we donβt want to talk about that. We want to talk about food waste, composting. Those are treating the symptoms of the disease, not the root.Β β
In this episode, we revisit our past conversation with Loren Cardeli, the co-founder and Executive Director of A Growing Culture, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, advancing a culture of farmer autonomy and agroecological innovation. A Growing Culture is a farmer-centric organization that believes the key to sustainability lies in returning small-scale farmers back to the forefront of agriculture. As part of this growing movement, Loren and his colleagues promote farmer-led research, extension, and outreach, helping to create sustainable, self-driving futures.
(The musical offering featured in this episode Only the Truth by Johanna Warren.)
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