Podcasts about berkeley food institute

In which we interview Anthony Flaccavento, organic farmer, author, activist, and local politician, about his sustainable practices to incorporate carbon, nitrogen, and other essential elements back into the depleted soil of his former tobacco farm in southwest Virginia. No-till agriculture not only sequesters carbon and nitrogen in the soil, it balances soil water content in both drought and flood times. Host–Felicia Etzkorn of Virginia Tech, co-host–Jamie Ferguson of Emory & Henry College, with music by Wendy Godley of The Kind. Resources Anthony Flaccavento Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real World Experience for Transformative Change (University Press of Kentucky, 2016) https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813167596/building-a-healthy-economy-from-the-bottom-up/ SCALE — Sequestering Carbon, Accelerating Local Economies https://www.anthonyflaccavento.com/scale-inc Savory Institute https://savory.global National Ecological Observatory Network https://www.neonscience.org How to Bury Carbon? Let Plants Do the Dirty Work in Nautilus http://cshl.nautil.us/article/657/how-to-bury-carbon-let-plants-do-the-dirty-work?mc_cid=5c3e66ab03&mc_eid=71fa1ec799 Crop innovations can protect yields and improve food quality in a changing climate https://cen.acs.org/food/agriculture/Protecting-harvest/98/i6 Climate Change Take 5 with Tony (S.2, Ep. 4) https://www.bottomupeconomy.org/climate-change-sustainable-farming/ Sustainable farming and social justice: Chris Newman of Sylvanaqua https://www.sylvanaqua.com Nina Ichikawa of the Berkeley Food Institute https://food.berkeley.edu Joel Salatin's Unsustainable Myth: His go-it-alone message made him a star of the food movement. Then a young Black farmer dug into what he was really saying. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/11/joel-salatin-chris-newman-farming-rotational-grazing-agriculture/  

In this episode, I'm meeting with Nina Ichikawa, Executive Director at the interdisciplinary research, action and education institute The Berkeley Food Institute. They seek to transform food systems to expand access to healthy, affordable food and promote sustainable and equitable food production. Berkeley Food Institute empowers new leaders with capacities to cultivate diverse, just, resilient, and healthy food systems. We're talking about how to work with food policy to change the public health crisis caused in part by unhealthy diets, why soil health is so important, the different food activities on the UC Berkeley campus and what every single person can do to contribute to a better food system. Host is Elise Johanson. For updates follow Elise Vega.

California's agriculture has been impacted by dwindling bee populations. In this episode of Just Food, a podcast from the Berkeley Food Institute at UC Berkeley, experts discuss what farms can do in response — not only to protect honeybees, but also to restore native pollinator species.This episode was originally published in September 2017.This episode features:Colin Muller, a beekeeper at Muller RanchClaire Kremen, professor of environmental science in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC BerkeleyPaul Muller, part owner of Full Belly FarmThis podcast was produced by the Berkeley Food Institute in partnership with the UC Berkeley Advanced Media Institute at the Graduate School of Journalism.See photos and listen to more episodes of the Just Food podcast. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nina Ichikawa is shaping the conversation about the future of California farming in many different ways. She's the Interim Executive Director at the Berkeley Food Institute, a member of the Farmer Justice Collaborative, the great grand-daughter of influential Japanese American flower growers, as well as a writer about Asian-American food histories. And she’s one of the most insightful thinkers about current issues in California food and farming. Tune in to this Cal Ag Roots episode to find out why Nina wants us all to be telling many more stories about California.

Nine short stories shared live at an evening of celebration for Berkeley Food Institute's project, Hungry for Change. Featuring stories from Leah Atwood, Sammy Gensaw, Kristyn Leach, Ruben Canedo, Adrionna Pike, Anthony Reyes, Rachel Sumekh, Breanna Hawkins and Estella Cisneros.

Food surrounds us -- and yet we can become careless about how food is transformed from the farm to something palatable on our plate. UC Berkeley public policy student, Reem Rayef, interviews Nina Ichikawa at the Berkeley Food Institute about what consumers should be thinking about in their individual consumption choices, but also what the impact the aggregation of those choices means for food overall. Considering the role of multiple actors in U.S. food policy, they also discuss how coalitions of like-minded groups can mobilize greater and more equitable access to healthy foods. Get some food for thought with this episode all about food. Wondering how to get more involved and have better conversations about food policy? Here are a few ideas from our team: Form a more mindful cohort of food consumers with a book club, reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma or Six seasons. Cook a local meal. Try shopping at the farmer’s market and learning about the sources of your food and the farmers who grew them.

https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/daphne Ever since a high school biology teacher informed Daphne Miller that clover produces a hormone similar to human estrogen, she has been fascinated by how our external ecosystem is linked to our internal one. Miller is a practicing family physician, author and Associate Clinical Professor at the University of California San Francisco. For the past fifteen years, her leadership, advocacy, research and writing have focused on the connections between food production, ecology and health. Her writings and profiles can be found in many publications including the Washington Post, the New York Times, Vogue, Orion Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Food and Wine, The Guardian UK and Harvard Medical Magazine and JAMA. She is author of The Jungle Effect: The Healthiest Diets from Around the World, Why They Work and How to Make Them Work for You (HarperCollins 2008) and Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up (HarperCollins 2013). Farmacology appears in four languages and was the basis for the award-winning documentary In Search of Balance. Miller is an internationally recognized speaker in the emerging field of planetary health and a leader in the Healthy Parks, Healthy People initiative, an effort spearheaded by the National Parks Service to build linkages between our medical system and our park system. Her 2009 Washington Post article “Take a Hike and Call Me in the Morning” is widely credited with introducing “park prescriptions,” a concept that is rapidly gaining traction across the United States. In 2000, Miller founded WholefamilyMD, the first integrative primary care practice in San Francisco. She is a graduate of Brown University where she majored in medical anthropology. She received her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and completed a residency and NIH-funded research fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. She was a Senior Fellow at the Berkeley Food Institute and a Bravewell Fellow at the University of Arizona Program in Integrative Medicine. She serves as an advisor and/or board member to a number of non-profits, including the Institute of the Golden Gate, Education Outside, Mandela Marketplace and the Edible Schoolyard Foundation and Prevention Institute. Miller lives and gardens in Berkeley, California, where I visited her to record this fascinating podcast about her books  and During our discussion, you'll discover: -How Daphne first discovered the jungle effect...[8:10] -The meaning of a hot spot and a cold spot...[12:00] -A fascinating example of an indigenous diet that leads to a health effect, including a Mexican Taramuhara diet affecting diabetes...[14:37] -What do you do if you can't trace your ancestors to one specific indigenous diet...[19:40] -Why Daphne sometimes has wine for breakfast...[26:22] -What Daphne found about some ethnic food restaurants now using ingredient substitutions that cater to North American palates...[34:30] -What first got Daphne thinking about the "soul of soil"...[44:20] -What we can learn about social behavior of humans from social behavior of chickens...[46:40] -How Daphne learned about cancer management from a winery...[52:30] -How dangerous microbes may actually be beneficial...[56:45] -What a hydrosol is and why you can use it for "sustainable beauty"...[60:40] -And much more! Resources from this episode: - - - - Show Sponsors:  -Onnit - To save 10% off your order, visit . -TradeStation - Active military and veterans, as well as First Responders get to trade commission free. TradeStation is dedicated to helping everyone who has invested so much into this country. Learn more and sign up today at . -HealthIQ - To learn more about life insurance for physically active people and get a free quote, go to . -Human Charger - Go to and use the code BEN20 for 20% off. Do you have questions, thoughts or feedback for Daphne or me? Leave your comments at and one of us will reply!

A preview of Delicious Revolution's conversation with journalist and researcher Maywa Montenegro of the Berkeley Food Institute on GMOs, agrobiodiversity, and the politics of scientific consensus. You can hear the full interview on Delicious Revolution on December 7, 2015. Visit deliciousrevolutionshow.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Explains the founding and mission of the interdisciplinary Berkeley Food InstituteTRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:You're listening to KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM. And this is method to the madness coming at you from the Public Affairs Department here at Calex celebrating the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host Ali Nasar and today we have Anne threat with us. Hi Anne. How are you? I'm great, thank you. And she is the executive director of the Berkeley Food Institute. A really interesting organization here on campus or really happy to have your insight, have her here with us in studio. Um, so again, you know, we have a lot of, uh, founders and new organizations [00:00:30] on to talk about, um, their, um, problem that we're trying to solve. So that's the first question I always ask is why was this organization created and what's the problem statement of you're trying to solve? Well, thank you very much for having me. And yes, I'm, the Berkeley Food Institute was formed purposefully with the intention of addressing some of the very large challenges in society that have to do with food and agriculture systems. Speaker 1:So it's not purely foods specific, but also the way our food is produced all the way from farm [00:01:00] to fork. And you're probably aware that there are a lot of environmental concerns as well as social concerns about the current food system that are really contributing to some major problems for society. Um, those include, um, issues of climate change, uh, toxic chemical exposure and the environmental side on things like soil erosion, uh, water depletion. So those are really large environmental challengers. And there's also, there are also very large challenges in terms of the social issues. Um, both, [00:01:30] uh, food insecurity. And um, also on the flip side, obesity are major public health issues. Um, and very often actually food security insecurity goes hand in hand with obesity curiously enough. So those are just some of the major problems. Um, we also have major problems with farm worker exposure to pesticides, um, and inequitable systems of payment of wages in, in the food system, which is very clearly illustrated both in the farm work in agriculture, but also in restaurants. Speaker 1:[00:02:00] So those are just some of the many, uh, array of problems that we're facing in society that really cross cut a hole. Um, you know, just many different topics. And the, the fortunate thing is that at Berkeley we had many different people working on these issues, but they're often in different departments in different disciplines and not always collaborating together. So the Berkeley Food Institute was founded about three years ago with the idea of bringing many people together to solve these very difficult [00:02:30] questions and to come up with innovative solutions, which brings this issue of innovation and finding entrepreneurial and unique policy ways to, you know, and also, um, scientific elements together to solve complex problems so that, um, yeah, the, the institute was brought together about three years ago with the involvement of the College of natural resources as well as the Goldman School of public policy. And then we also got on board the School of journalism with Pollan who was very [00:03:00] involved from the beginning and the school of law and school public health, which has become increasingly involved and very actively involved. Speaker 1:So they're really, we have the fortune of getting people from multiple disciplines. There's also the college of environmental design has many people working on food and agriculture issues. We also have people in, in letters and sciences. So it really brings together people. It's food has really become a catalyst to generate lots of, lots of concern. And there are many, many students as well as faculty members [00:03:30] interested in the topic. Oh, how amazing. I mean, there's so many different people involved. And to create an umbrella organization in, in a, um, on a campus that's so high caliber with so many different really smart people must be a really fun position for you to be and to really harness this power and attack this huge problem set that you're talking about. Exactly. Yeah. It's very exciting because we're really being able to bring together serving as a hub to have this interaction amongst so many [00:04:00] people who care about this issue deeply. Speaker 1:Um, and you know, we're fortunate again at Berkeley because Berkeley is an epicenter of innovation in this field, in both in the natural sciences and the social sciences. And a lot of people don't know that. I mean Berkeley is known for what are his actually at land grant college where the classic universities that has a connection to agricultural production and you know, being a land grant colleges has leadership in agriculture, but people don't think of it that way because we're not in a rural setting [00:04:30] yet. There's so much work going on here that has to do with food and agriculture. So I think the Berkeley Food Institute is not like we're reinventing anything that's happening at Berkeley, but just bringing people together to create greater visibility and also to help facilitate cross disciplinary interaction. So I can talk a little more about that, but I should mention that we right now have 110 affiliated faculty members from across the university and we welcome more, we're happy to have more faculty members join us. Speaker 1:And we also have many, many students [00:05:00] who are engaged and interested in this. And we've had the fortune of being able to upload employee, a number of students as well as provide some fellowships for students. So I understand and we're talking to anthrop, the executive director of the Berkeley Food Institute here on method to the madness on k, Alex Berkeley. And um, I'd like to understand first, you know, the founding of this organization. It sounds like it sounds so complicated, so many organizations you just walk us through. How does something like that happen on such a made big campus like this and [00:05:30] first from kind of the genesis of the idea to actually kind of getting it implemented in, in off the ground has to have to get its own slice of funding or how, how does this whole thing work? Well, great question. There are a number of, you probably know many institutes and centers on the university campus and some of them are within specific disciplines. Speaker 1:Um, but as I mentioned, the Berkeley Food Institute is highly interdisciplinary. And what happened actually initially, one of the sparks that made this happen was that there's a person is an alum from Berkeley, um, and he [00:06:00] was a, he's a philanthropist and very interested in environmental issues. Um, his name is Bob Epstein and Bob, um, was very interested in, in the idea of, of developing an institute, um, uh, three years ago that really Dell went beyond environmental issues that he was very interested in previously. I mean, it's still obviously food systems relate to environment, but he developed an interest that went beyond that. And um, Bob has a phd from, [00:06:30] uh, from cow in engineering and he came to the College of natural resources, Dean, um, named Keith Gillis and the dean of the Goldman school public policy. And Bob was actually on the advisory board for the Goldman school and expressed his interest. Speaker 1:He also got Michael and, and involved early on to talk about this idea of bringing people together at, at cal to really help make a difference in food systems. Um, Bob, as many of us share the, the notion that it, that food [00:07:00] systems really is an crucial issue that intersects with some of the very critical issues of our time. So, you know, again, these social environmental, economic marketing policy issues across the board. So he felt that there was a great prospect of bringing together many people to leverage the research that's going on here collectively to effect policy change and to affect practical change. So that's what Berkeley Food Institute was founded on the basis of really wanting to [00:07:30] leverage research and bring researchers together with practitioners and policymakers to affect change. So it has a very outward facing mission, which is to support transformative change and food systems and to promote diversity, justice, resilience and health and food systems. Speaker 1:Is there anything else like this in the world? You know, there are other institutes, um, at other campuses and in fact, food systems has gained great attention, uh, throughout the [00:08:00] nation and in fact the world. But I think on the Berkeley Food Institute is, is somewhat unique and, or is unique in the sense that there we have so many disciplines involved. We have done sort of an analysis of, of different institutes that have some similarities and um, some of them are interdisciplinary indeed, but they don't necessarily involve the policy elements and the cultural and the sort of journalism. So we have, you know, the assets of having multiple dimensions that aren't quite covered as much [00:08:30] as other institutes. So I think we have a great promise in that way of really effecting change. Like, you know, you had a great momentum in the founding story of having someone with a vision and having some, some introduce disciplinary leaders involved. Speaker 1:Right. So how, tell us a little bit about your background and they had this idea and then they needed someone to actually run it. So how did you get involved? Well, I should also say before I've personally got involved, um, the deans involved, um, [00:09:00] decided to, uh, appoints faculty co-directors to get it going. And so we have two faculty co-directors, um, named Claire Kremen and Allister Isles, both from the College of natural resources. And they had already been very active in developing what we call the diversified farming systems center. So that also had to do with sort of diverse and ecologically sound agroecology methods that are used mostly in organic production systems. So that was something that they were already doing research on. And, um, the Dean and [00:09:30] others felt that they were be good co-directors, Dick Chair to get the ideas going and they formed a committee to help get that going as well from multiple disciplines. Speaker 1:Um, and then held a, a sort of a founding symposium to get ideas from external stake holders as well. So all that, that first sort of year was really focused on kind of getting ideas and figuring out where it was going to go. And then they announced the executive director position. I applied for that and I was unfortunate enough to receive the position after [00:10:00] many interviews and discussions with the group. So yeah, it was a no loss and practically, yeah. Well I have a background, it's very interdisciplinary, which is appropriate for this job. Um, I, um, it actually was years ago, a postdoc here at Berkeley, so I know Berkeley quite well and have had interaction for many years with, um, with people who work at Berkeley. Um, but I have a background in both the natural sciences and the social science is mainly in sustainable agriculture. Speaker 1:And, um, [00:10:30] I did work internationally in Latin America on the intersection of environment development and food systems. So I was very interested and did a lot of work on, uh, social issues having to do with the impacts of, of unsustainable farming in developing countries, uh, and in the United States, but mostly in Latin America. And then I worked for some years in research, but then I worked in a policy institute called the World Resources Institute as the director of sustainable agriculture for many years. Um, and [00:11:00] then I worked for a short time and the government actually to, um, providing a grant program to sustainable agriculture programs. Um, and then I was in the private sector. I actually was a sustainability director at a, at a organic vineyards up in Sonoma county for many years. And I worked very closely with growers and with cooperative extension. Um, but my, my background really touches on a lot of areas for quite a while. Speaker 1:Actually my early work in my dissertation for my phd was, um, on farm worker issues, um, and exposure [00:11:30] to pesticides and the banana industry. So that was in Costa Rica. So I, yeah, I really have addressed a lot of different issues, but my passions are really about justice and, uh, sustainability in, in food systems and broadly. So I was really excited about this because I think that BFI brings together so many different, um, interesting people topics and it just seems like a great fit too to create help to create this building of partnerships. I, my own background [00:12:00] has really always been cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral. So even though I have worked in a number of different jobs, it's been similar themes that help to bring together multiple parties to the table to help to make significant changes in society. Okay. We're talking to anthrop today. She's the executive director of the Berkeley Food Institute, a new ish organization here on campus, interdisciplinary. Speaker 1:We're talking about, and this is methods to the madness on KL expertly. I'm your host. Tallinn Huizar and um, [00:12:30] so, and you, you were given this like, uh, after a year's worth of idea generation by the, the, the faculty co-chairs, um, your committee members, the committee members, you were, uh, handed over this kind of, you know, grand idea with lots of different ways it could probably go. So I'm interested to understand how it's been a couple of years now. How did you decide what the initial projects or where you're going to invest the [00:13:00] institutes time initially? Because the problem statement that you started off the show with is huge and you could go a million different ways. So how did you decide where to, cause I'm, I'm assuming you want to move the needle on a few different things and really make an impact. Definitely. Well, so even before I joined the group involvement, the, our faculty co-directors and others involved in the initial executive committee, um, had identified a few areas where they felt, you know, important work needed to be done and in particular, um, people were interested [00:13:30] and I was very interested in, in greater utilizing the existing research on campus and to be able to leverage that more effectively, communicate that more effectively to policymakers and also to engage in public education that can help raise awareness of not only the strengths of the university professors and researchers, but also connect with community people. Speaker 1:As you know, again, Berkeley is known for some of the leading work, like um, leading innovations and not from Alice Waters and Chez Panisse and all that, but [00:14:00] also food justice activism is very strong in this area. So we really was an interest in connecting the work of the university with that broader community. And some of that was definitely already happening. Absolutely. But the idea was to give greater visibility and strength and support to those efforts. I mean, another example would be a lot of education was going on by a motivated by students and initiated by students like the student organic gardening association. And again, we just wanted to be able to give greater strength and visibility to those kinds of opportunities. So [00:14:30] when I came on board, um, we realized that one of the first things that we could do is develop, uh, a small seed grant program, uh, for projects that were innovative, cross disciplinary and aim to effect change. Speaker 1:So we put out a request for proposals to all faculty members on campus, um, to uh, come with projects that were cross disciplinary in nature and aim to address some of the major issues that were of concern in food systems. What is the seed [00:15:00] grant proposal? Well, a proposal. What basically what it meant is that they put together project ideas that were about different issues, um, ranging from urban farming issues to nutrition and health challenges and then their small projects. And we had small amounts of funding and like $25,000 for each grant. Um, but they were going to be doing research on these topics. It proposed research to us that, um, were going to affect these, these, you know, help provide information that [00:15:30] could solve these issues or come up with new innovations. So we had 24 applications in the first round, which involved literally dozens of people across the campus cause they weren't just alone applicants. Speaker 1:They were working in partnership. Um, so we only could pick five out of those 24 are, we're expecting maybe 12 or dozen or so, but we're really excited. So I have to say this was, the development of this program was done in collaboration. Of course [00:16:00] with our faculty co-directors, it wasn't just me, but we came up with the search committee and, and we were just really delighted at the quality, um, and the array of things that were proposed. Um, great projects. And unfortunately we can only choose five. Um, but then we did a second round of those, those research projects, um, are the requests for proposals in the second year too. And we'll do the first one was in 2014 as one of the first things that I was involved in doing when I came on board. And of course that, that great for me to [00:16:30] learn more about all of what's going on on campus. Speaker 1:I already knew some of what was happening here, but part of my initial orientation was just to meet lots and lots and lots of people to learn about what's going on here. And then people applied to this program, which advanced my learning too. So can you tell us what are some of the grants that were awarded? Well in the first, yeah, so in the first round we have one that's very, very unique. We received a lot of attention. It's unique. It's on, um, urban foraging that is basically hunting around for interesting. [00:17:00] Um, you know, uh, plants that are edible that are underrepresented and people don't realize that these kinds of plants are actually edible, but they actually can provide good nutrition. Um, when you go to the farmer's market or to a grocery store, now you can buy Dandelion Greens that are grown, but it actually, there'll be available in your own backyard for many people in their own backyard. Speaker 1:But they're also located often in kind of urban lots. And so this project did an analysis, kind of a mapping analysis of all of these places where they could find so-called [00:17:30] weeds, but which actually could be foraged plants. Um, so that was one of the interesting projects and it actually morphed into a more complex project that involves also identifying in farms in rural areas, these types of weed. Um, you know, weeds that have always been considered weeds on farms are marketed very small quantities, but they're trying to explore the opportunity for further market potential by getting upscale restaurants involved in others. So I mean, there was a concern about how these weeds could [00:18:00] be used in so-called food deserts. You know, in areas where there's a lack of nutritious food. Um, and certainly there are some prospects for, for these weeds in those areas, but there also are opportunities in other areas to greater utilize these. Speaker 1:So that's one area. Another one of them was on, um, on, uh, urban agroecology. So similar urban farming areas. We have one that has to do with um, farm workers and farm small farmers in Salinas Valley [00:18:30] that are interested in land access to develop their own farms and still another one on nutritious and healthy making, um, snap this food stamp recipients, um, considering, uh, healthy beverage purchases as part of a package of Ben or opportunities and potential restrictions on unhealthy beverages for snap recipients. So those are just some of the kinds of things that we're, that we're supporting. Um, and in this we also have one on on, on labor conditions. [00:19:00] So that's another area and it's really important in the restaurant workers industry. So it really spans quite a range of issues. Um, and we also continue that program this year. We are continuing the program this year. Speaker 1:Um, so yeah, that's a really interesting, a lot of great ideas. So, um, exhilarating to mind this, you know, very fertile ground for ideas. It is. Yeah. And it's also been interesting cause the scope ranges from very local [00:19:30] to global. Um, I think people have had the impression that most of our work is focused on California and local, but we are very interested in many faculty are doing international work and we've even had a chance to delve into that. So basically research is one of our main areas of work, but linking that to policy into practice. So if you notice most of the topics I mentioned do have a link to affect change. So we're really trying to encourage these kinds of projects that really have prospect to communicate results that can help lead to change. [00:20:00] And we're speaking with anthrop here. She's the executive director of the Berkeley Food Institute here on campus. Speaker 1:And this is KLX Berkeley 90.7 FM method to the madness. I'm your host Ali in his are. And so we were talking about the seed grant program, but you guys also do a lot of other things. We do, yes. So tell us a little bit about a lot. There's a lot of educational things there are. Yeah, we sound like they're both for the community and at large on campus. Tell us a little bit about that. Well. Um, we've been really doing a lot of public education events. Um, we have had [00:20:30] for the past, uh, two years, um, of forums, monthly forms that we call the food exchange forum, but also hosted every other public education events. And that brings together, it's usually a forum that involves internal speakers or Berkeley speakers, but also people from other sectors of society like, like Ninjas, nongovernment organizations or um, government agency representatives and or, um, farmers in some cases who come [00:21:00] to speak on critical issues. Speaker 1:And we've covered a huge array of topics in that ranging from climate change and agriculture to livestock issues and animal agriculture. Um, also issues of farm, you know, farm worker issues. Um, and let's see a number, oh, we also did a really interesting forum on innovative businesses that are exploring innovative business models. So there really has been a whole array of different topics. We also did a really great forum that attracted more than 300 people [00:21:30] or about 300 people last spring on justice and food systems that had some really excellent speakers. Um, talk, talk about that very important issue on all different levels. So, um, yes, those public education events are free and they've been available to the public. Um, and we've continued them this year we were doing, um, fewer just because of, we don't have the capacity to do too many, but we're doing an event that's going to feature Marianne Nessel who's a very well known speaker and [00:22:00] writer, um, talking about her new book on Soda Politics and it's actually going to be focused. Speaker 1:That book is focused or one of the main issues is focused on the Berkeley soda tax. So that will be on November 4th. Um, and we also have a speaker who is the secretary of the California Department of Food and agriculture who's coming on November 9th. And we're very excited about that too. She's going to be featured in it in a public, in a public forum. So those kinds of events have just raised attention to these, to [00:22:30] these issues. And also again, enable this kind of cross-fertilization between different people who are working on these issues from different perspectives. And for people who want to really see the full calendar where they go to food. Dopper Clinton Edu. Yes, that's our website. Yep. food.berkeley.edu and the events, um, section has, has our calendar and also information on these featured events. We also publicize events for other people. So there are many other events that are happening on campus that have to do [00:23:00] with food and agriculture. Speaker 1:So we are happy to post those events on our calendar and that goes right into the cal calendar. So, um, and also community events in the bay area, we sometimes publish publicize those as well. So it's a great place for people to go who just want to learn about what's going on with food systems. Okay, great. So I'm going to say in addition to doing those public education events, we've been very involved in facilitating a committee that has developed a minor in food systems. And some [00:23:30] people, especially from the community might want to know what does that mean. So basically, um, as you know, when you're, when you're in college you can get a major in something. Well you can also get a minor in a topic and many, many people are interested in food as a minor. So they may have a major in like in like ecology or in pest management or in um, let's say, um, anthropology, but they might want to minor in food systems because they have a particular interest in let's say food and culture. Speaker 1:So they might have a major in anthropology and a minor [00:24:00] in food systems and then focus on that same thing with like nutrition. They may focus as their major in nutrition sciences, but they won't want to do food systems more broadly as a minor. So we're really excited that, um, that Berkeley has now, UC Berkeley has now launched a new food systems minor and the Berkeley Food Institute played a role in enabling that to happen by facilitate facilitating a committee that helped to put together the curriculum. So now any student, any undergraduate can minor in food systems, which is a [00:24:30] needed topic. Definitely. That's my next question for you is as we come towards the end of the interview is, um, one of the fundamental issues we have as a race now is just the explosion of the populations. We've got the same earth, but we've got a lot more people that we've got to feed. Speaker 1:Right? So as that, you know, supply and demand equation and starts to change fundamentally. What do you, from your seat and someone who studied this your whole career and is now at the nexus of all this innovation, what do you think is the biggest [00:25:00] kind of levers that we need to push to really create a, uh, a system that is just, and, and healthy and like where, where are the really big bets that have to be placed? I mean, I know my big super progressive friends are always like anti Monsanto. Like either if we get rid of them, we'll have everything solved, but I'm sure it's much more complex on that. What's your opinion on that? Well, it's very complicated of course, and it'd be very difficult and just a short interview to kind of characterize the complexities. [00:25:30] But I do think one thing we really need to stress is that often the problem or the issues of food access and food security internationally are posed as one of just a technology question of feeding the planet by increasing yields, increasing productivity. Speaker 1:But in fact, so much of the challenge has to do with distribution and access. I'm not saying that there's not a production problem because there isn't many places, but in some parts of the world, including the United States, there's actually overproduction of some [00:26:00] goods and products. So I think part of the challenge is to reframe the question of feeding the world as one of, you know, how do we enable access to healthy and nutritious foods, affordable foods for everybody in the on the planet, and to overcome these great discrepancies in inequities that we have and where people do have incredible abundance and over abundance of food and in other places where they have great scarcity of food or scarcity of good food. So it has to do with income issues. [00:26:30] It has to do with poverty, it has to do with policy, it has to do with control of food systems. Speaker 1:So it's very complex issue, but we're trying to address those issues in a holistic way. This really, we believe at the Brooklyn Food Institute that solving these issues and coming up with innovations really requires a multi-sectoral, you know, systems approach. And we've focused in on a few key key topics or themes. Um, and we're trying to hone in on more of those. And, um, I'm actually say focus even more of our efforts [00:27:00] in those areas. But one of the areas is, does have to do with, um, ensuring that all people have access to, um, nutritious and affordable food. And another area that we think is really crucial when there's a great gap of work has to do with ensuring healthy and fair, uh, labor conditions, which is often something that's not addressed that much in food systems. Um, but as key to sustainability of food, food provision and food access. Speaker 1:And then the third areas is accelerating [00:27:30] the adoption of what we refer to as agroecology, which is the integration of agriculture, antiques or ecological principles in agriculture, but also addressing the social issues in agriculture. So people refer to that sometimes as sustainable agriculture. But agroecology has a particular meaning that has been actually really, there's a lot of innovation and pioneers in agroecology here at the University of California at Berkeley. And we really feel that that, you know, accelerating the adoption of agroecology is crucial, um, at a [00:28:00] global scale. So those are some of the key areas, but there's a lot more to be done. Of course, market issues, consolidation in the food system, you know, there really are a multiplicity of, of challenges but also opportunities. And I think the excitement that has been generated at Berkeley in this area is just one reflection of promise actually. Speaker 1:And um, you know, real potential to bring about change. And we're, I mean to me it's exciting at this point in my career. I've been working on this for many years, always in partnership [00:28:30] with lots of people. But I think right now I've just feeling an accelerated element of, of, of interest in and enthusiasm on the part of many, many people from multiple sides. So that's great. So I always like to end the interview with asking you, um, if everything was to go exactly right, what would happen five years from now, what would you think? What would be, if I Berkeley Food Institute, you check it out everybody, whole lot of food.berkeley.edu what kind of impact, what would the organization look like five years from now? [00:29:00] Well, I do think that our, our vision is really to, to achieve, you know, some elements of transformative change in food systems. Speaker 1:And it's hard to know exactly how that will be characterized, but I think we can put ourselves on the map by achieving, you know, really greater equity in access to nutritious and healthy food. And that has to come about through policy change. I didn't get a chance to talk too much about our policy program, but really we need people on board from, you know, the government, [00:29:30] all government agencies to really place this on the forefront of healthcare. Um, you know, really food is can be an entry point to health. Um, and also for assuring, um, the wise use of natural resources and mitigation of climate change can happen through effective agriculture practices. So I think we really want to put ourselves on the map and you know, really, um, uh, develop this organization so that we can leverage the research and really effect these changes through policy and through practical changes. Speaker 1:[00:30:00] So I think the, the possibility is in reach and we just need to focus in on a few key issues. So. Okay, great. Well there you have it. That's an through up the executive director of the Berkeley Food Institute and Interdisciplinary Institute here on campus. Go check them out of food.berkeley.edu. They got a lot of great events coming up this fall. You should get involved if this speaks to you, if you're a student, consider getting a food systems minor. It sounds like a really interesting topic. You can check out our programs and our events to, yeah, there you go. [00:30:30] So thanks a lot for listening everybody. Uh, this has been method to the madness on KLX Berkeley 90.7 FM. I'm your host selling his art. Thanks for joining and have a great Friday. Everybody. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a [00:00:30] l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Hi, and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we present part one of two interviews with Steve Blank, a lecturer at the Haas School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s [00:01:00] see if you recognize any of these companies. He was involved with Xylog convergent technologies, MIPS, computer, ardent, super Mack, rocket science games and epiphany. In 1999 Steve Retired from day to day involvement in running a company since 2002 he has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. By 2011 he was said to have devised [00:01:30] the scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the Lean launch pad. In part one Steve Talks about his beginnings, the culture of Silicon Valley, the intersection of science, technology, finance, and business. Steve Blank, welcome to spectrum. Oh, thanks for having me. I wanted to find out from you how it is you got started as an entrepreneur. What attracted you to that? Speaker 5: He's probably the military. I, uh, spent four years in the air [00:02:00] force during Vietnam and a year and a half in Southeast Asia. And then when I came back to the United States, I worked on a B, 52 bombers in the strategic air command. And I finally years later understood the difference between working in a crisis organization, which was in a war zone where almost anything was acceptable to get the job done versus an execution organization that was dealing with mistakes. Men dropping a 20 megaton nuclear weapon where you process and procedure was actually imperative. And it turned [00:02:30] out I was much better in the organizations that required creativity and agility and tenacity and resilience. And I never understood that I was getting the world's best training for entrepreneurship. I went back to school in Ann Arbor and managed to get thrown out the second time in my life out of University of Michigan. Speaker 5: I call that the best school I was ever thrown out of a Michigan state was the next best school where it was a premed. And then, um, I was sent out to silicon valley. I was working as a field service engineer and what I didn't realize two years later was 16% [00:03:00] startup to bring up a computer system in a place called San Jose. And San Jose was so unknown that my admin got us tickets for San Jose, Puerto Rico until I said, I think it's not out of the country. I came out there to do a job to install a process control system. I thought it was some kind of joke is that there were 45 pages of advertisements in the newspaper at the time for scientists, engineers, et cetera. And I flew back and quit, got a job at my first startup in Silicon Valley [00:03:30] and subsequently I did eight of them in 21 years. Speaker 5: What were some of the ones that stand out out of the eight? You know, I had some great successes. There were four IPOs out of the eight, I'd say one or two. I had something to do with the others. I was just kinda standing there when the safe fell on the guy in front of me and the money dropped down and I got to pick it up. But honestly, in hindsight, and I can now say this only in hindsight, I learned the most from some of the failures though I wouldn't tell you why I wanted to learn that at the time, but failing [00:04:00] and failing hard when it was absolutely clear it was your fault and no one else's forced me to go through the stages of denial and then blame others and then whatever. And then acceptance and then ultimately kind of some real learning about how to build early stage ventures. Speaker 5: You know, I blew my Nixon last company, I was on the cover of wired magazine and 90 days after the cover I realized my company was going out of business and eventually did. And I called my mother who was a Russian immigrant and every time I spoke to my mother I [00:04:30] had to pause because English wasn't her first language. And you know, I'd say something and pause and then she'd say something back and pause. And whenever I said, mom, I lost 35 million hours, pause. And then she said, where'd you put it? I said, no, no, no mom, I'm calling you to tell you none of them was 30 I didn't even get the next sentence out. Cause then she went, oh my gosh, she wants $35 million. We can't even change your name. It's already plank. And then she started thinking about it and she said, and the country we came from [00:05:00] is gone. Speaker 5: There's no fast to go. I said, no, no mom though. What I'm trying to tell you is that the people gave me $35 million, just give me another $12 million to do the next startup. And it was in comprehensible because what I find when I talked to foreign visitors to silicon valley or to any entrepreneurial cluster, you know, we have a special name for failed entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Do you know what it is? Experienced? It's a big idea in the u s around entrepreneurial clusters, failure equals experience. [00:05:30] People don't ask you if you change your name or have to leave town or you're going to go bankrupt, et cetera. The first thing your best friend will ask you is, so what's your next startup? That's an amazing part of this culture that we've built here and that's what happened to me. My last startup, I returned $1 billion each to those two investors and it's not a story about me, it's a story about the ecosystem that we live in that's both supremely American and supremely capitalists, but also Sir Pulliam clustered in just [00:06:00] a few locations in the United States where there are clear reasons why one succeeded to some fail. Speaker 5: You know, when I retired from my last one, I decided that after eight startups in 21 years, my company was about to go public and my kids were seven and eight years old at the time and luckily we had children when I was in my late thirties and so therefore I got to watch people I admired incredibly at work, watch how they dealt with their families. And what was surprising [00:06:30] is that most of them had feet of clay when it came to home. They basically focused 100% of their efforts at work and as their kids grew up, their kids hated them. I kind of remember that in the back of my head, and so when I had the opportunity to retire, I said, I want to watch my kids grow up. And so I did. And that's a preambled answer your question. That's at the end. Speaker 5: For the first time in my life, my head wasn't down completely inside trying to execute in a single company. I had a chance to reflect on [00:07:00] the 21 years and believe it or not, I started to write my memoirs and I got, you know what I realize now in hindsight, it was actually an emotional catharsis of kind of purging. What did I learn? And I asked, it was 80 pages into it writing. He was a vignette and I would write lessons learned from each of those experiences and what I realized truly the hair was standing up and back of my neck. On page 80 there was a pattern I had never recognized in my career and I realized no one else had recognized [00:07:30] it either and either I was very wrong or there might be some truth and here was the pattern in silicon valley since the beginning we had treated startups like they were smaller versions of large companies. Speaker 5: Everything a large company did. The investment wisdom was, well they write business plans, you write business plans, they organize sales, marketing and Bizdev and you do that. They write our income statement, balance sheet and cashflow and do five year plans and then you do that too. Never noticing that. In fact that distinction, and no one had ever said this [00:08:00] before, what large companies do is execute known business models and the emphasis is on execution, on process. What a known business model means is we know who our customer is, we know how to sell it, we know who competitors are. We know what pride in an existing company it's existing cause somebody in the dim past figured that stuff out. But what a startup is doing is not executing. You think you're executing. That's what they told you to go do, but reality you failed most of the time because you were actually searching [00:08:30] for something. Speaker 5: You were just guessing in front of my students here at Berkeley and at Stanford I used the word, you have a series of hypotheses that are untested, but that's a fancy word for you're just guessing. And so the real insight was somebody needed to come up with a set of tools for startups that were different than the tools that were being taught on how to run and manage existing corporations. And that tool set in distinction at the turn of the century didn't exist. That is 1999 [00:09:00] there was not even a language to describe what I just said and I decided to embark on building the equivalent of the management stack that large corporations have for founders and early stage ventures. Speaker 6: Mm, Speaker 7: [00:09:30] yeah. Speaker 8: You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Steve Blank is our guest. He is an entrepreneur and lecturer at the hospital of business. In the next segment of your talks about collaborating with the National Science Foundation Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 4: [00:10:00] So when you're advising scientists and engineers who think they might be interested in trying to do a startup, what do you tell them they need to know about business and business people? Okay. Speaker 5: It's funny you mentioned scientists and engineers because I didn't know too many years in my career. I mean I sold to them as customers, [00:10:30] but in the last three or four years I got to know some of the top scientists in the u s for a very funny experience. Can I tell you what happened? It turned out that this methodology, I've been talking about how to build startups efficiently with customer development and agile engineering and one other piece called the business model canvas. This theory ended up being called the lean startup. One of my students, Eric Reese and I had actually invested in his company and then actually made him sit for my class at Berkeley because his cofounder, [00:11:00] the lost my money last time I invested. I said, no, no, sit through my class. And of course his co founder was slow to get it, but Eric got it in a second, but came the first practitioner of customer development, the first lean startup practitioner in the world. Speaker 5: Eric got it so much he became the Johnny Appleseed of the idea. In fact, it was actually Ericson side, the customer development. Then agile development went together and he named it the lean startup. But even though we had this theory, the practice was really kind of hard. It was like liking the furniture and Ikea until you got the pieces at home [00:11:30] and then realized it was Kinda hard to assemble. So I decided to do is take the pieces and teach entrepreneurs in a way they have never been taught before on how to start a company. Now this requires a two minutes sidebar. Can I give you? It turns out one of the other thing that I've been involved with is entrepreneurial education as I teach here at Haas, but I also teach at Stanford at UCF and a Columbia, but entrepreneurship used to be kind of a province, mostly of business schools and we used [00:12:00] to teach entrepreneurs just like they were accountants. Speaker 5: No one ever noticed that accountants don't run startups. It's a big idea. No one ever noticed. That's the g. We don't teach artists that way and we don't teach brain surgeons that way. That is sit in the class, read these cases like you were in the law school and somehow you'll get smarter and know how to be an operating CEO of an early stage venture. Now with this, you have to understand that when I was an entrepreneur, rapacious was applied word to describe my behavior and my friends who knew me as an entrepreneur [00:12:30] would laugh when they realized that was an educator and say, Steve, you were born entrepreneur. You knew you can't teach entrepreneurship. You can't be taught. You were born that way. Now since I was teaching entrepreneurship, this set of somewhat of a conundrum in my head, and I pondered this for a couple of years until I realized it's the question everybody asks, but it was the wrong question. Speaker 5: Of course you could teach entrepreneurship. The question is that we've never asked is who can you teach it to and that once you frame the question that way you start [00:13:00] slapping your forehead because you realize that founders of companies, they're not like accountants or MBAs. I mean they were engineers, they might be by training and background, but founders, visionaries, they're closer to artists than anybody else in the world and we now know how to teach artists for the last 500 years since the renaissance. How do we teach artists what we teach them theory, but then we immerse them in experiential practice until they're blue in the face or the hands fall off or they never want to look at another [00:13:30] brusher instrument or write another novel again in their life. We just beat them to death as apprentices, but we get their hands dirty or brain surgeons. Speaker 5: You have, they go to school, but there's no way you'd ever want to go to a doctor who hadn't cracked open chest or skulls or whatever or a surgeon, but we were teaching entrepreneurship like somehow you could read it from the book. My class at Stanford was one of the first experiential, hands-on, immersive float body experience and I mean immersive is that basically [00:14:00] we train our teams in theory that they're going to frame hypotheses with something called the business model canvas from a very smart guide named Alexander Osterwalder. They were going to test those hypotheses by getting outside the building outside the university, outside their lab, outside of anywhere and talk. I bought eyeball to 10 to 15 customers a week. People they've never met and start validating or invalidating those hypotheses and they were going to in parallel build as much of the product as [00:14:30] they can with this iterative and incremental development using agile engineering, whether it was hardware or software or medical device, it doesn't matter. Speaker 5: I want you to start building this thing and also be testing that. Now, this worked pretty well for 20 and 22 year olds students with hoodies and flip flops. But it was open question. If this would work with scientists and engineers, and about three years ago I was driving on campus and I got a call and then went like this, hi Steve, you don't know me. My name is heirarchical lick. I'm the head of the National Science Foundation [00:15:00] SBR program. We're from the U s government. We're calling you because we need your help. And because I was still a little bit of a jerk, I said, the government got my help during Vietnam. I'm not giving it an anymore. And he went, no, no, no, no. We're talking about your class. I went, how do you know about my class? They said, well, you've clogged every session of it. Speaker 5: And I just tend to open source everything I do, which is a luxury I have, not being a tenured professor, you know, I, I think giving back to our community is one of the things that silicon valley excels [00:15:30] at. And I was mentored and tutored by people who gave back. And so therefore since I can't do it, I give back by open sourcing almost everything I do. If I learn it and my slides are out there and I write about it and I teach them. And so I was sharing the experiences of teaching this first class. I didn't realize there were 25 people at the National Science Foundation following every class session. And I didn't even know who the National Science Foundation was. And I had to explain what Steve, we give away $7 billion [00:16:00] a year. We're the group that funds all basic science in universities in the u s where we're on number two to the National Institute of Health, which is the largest funder of medical and research in the u s and that's great. Speaker 5: So why are you calling? We want you to do this class for the government. I said, for the government, and I thought, you guys just fund bigger. He said, no, we're, we're under a mandate from theU s congress. All research organizations is that if any scientist wants to commercialize their basic research, we have programs called the spr and STTR programs that [00:16:30] give anywhere from $500,000 in the first phase or up to three quarters of a million dollars in phase two or more for scientists who want to build companies. Well, why are you calling me? And they're all nicely said, well thank God Congress doesn't actually ask how well those teams are doing. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, we're essentially giving away cars without requiring drivers Ed and you can imagine the results. And I said, okay, but what did you see in what I'm doing? Speaker 5: He said, Steve, you've invented the scientific [00:17:00] method for entrepreneurship. We want you to teach scientists. They already know the scientific method. Our insight here is they'll get what you're doing in a second. You just need to teach them how to do it outside the building. And so within 90 days I've got a bunch of my VC friends, John Fiber and Jim Horton follow and a Jerry angle and a bunch of others. And we put together a class for the national science foundation as a prototype. They got 25 teams headed up by principal investigators in material science and robotics and computer science and fluidics and teams [00:17:30] of three from around the country. And we put them through this 10 week process and we trained scientists how to get outside the building and test hypotheses. And the results were spectacular. So much so that the NSF made it a permanent program. Speaker 5: I trained professors from Georgia tech and university of Michigan who then went off to train 15 other universities. It's now the third largest accelerator in the world. We just passed 300 teams of her best scientists. Well, let me exhale and tell you the next step, which really got interesting. This worked for [00:18:00] National Science Foundation, but I had said that this would never work for life sciences because life sciences therapeutics, cancer, dry. I mean, you know, you get a paper and sell nature and science and maybe 15 years later, you know, something happens and she, you know, what's the problem? If you cure cancer, you don't have a problem finding customers. But at the same time I've been saying this, you CSF, which is probably the leading biotech university in the world here in San Francisco, was chasing me to actually put on this class for them. And I kept saying, no, you don't [00:18:30] understand. Speaker 5: I say it doesn't work. And they said, Steve, we are the experts in this. We say it does. And finally they called my bluff and said, well, why don't you get out of the building with us and talk to some of the leading venture capitalists in this area who basically educated me that said, look, the traditional model of drug companies for Pharma has broken down. They're now looking for partnerships, Obamacare and the new healthcare laws have changed how reimbursement works. Digital health is an emerging field, you know, medical devices. Those economics have changed. So we decided [00:19:00] to hold the class for life sciences, which is really a misnomer. It was a class for four very distinct fields for therapeutics, diagnostics, devices, and digital health. How to use CSF in October, 2013 is an experiment. First we didn't know if anyone would be interested because I know like the NSF, we weren't going to pay the teams. Speaker 5: We were going to make them pay nominal tuition and GCSF and we were going after clinicians and researchers and they have day jobs. Well, surprisingly we had 78 teams apply for 25 slots and we took 26 [00:19:30] teams including Colbert Harris, who was the head of surgery of ucs, f y Kerrison, the inventor of fetal surgery. Two teams didn't even tell Genentech they were sneaking out at night taking the class as well. And the results, I have to tell you, I still smile when I talk about this, exceeded everybody's wildest expectations such that we went back to Washington, took the results to the National Institute of Health and something tells me that in 2014 the National Institute of Health will probably be the next major government organization to adopt [00:20:00] this class in this process. Again, none of this guarantees success and these are all gonna turn into winners. What it does is actually allow teams to fail fast, allows us to be incredibly effective about the amount of cash we spent because we could figure out where the mistakes are rather than just insisting that we're right, but we now have a process that we've actually tested. Speaker 5: Well, I got a call from the National Science Foundation about six months ago that said, Steve, we thought we tell you we need to stop the experiment. And I thought, why? [00:20:30] What do you mean? Well, we got some data back on the effectiveness of the class. He said, well, we didn't believe the numbers. You know us. We told you we've been running this SBI our program for 30 years and what happens to the teams who want to get funded after? It's kind of a double blind review. People don't know who they are. They review their proposals and they on average got funded 18% of the time. Teams that actually have taken this class get funded 60% of the time. I thought we might've improved effectiveness 10 20% but this is a 300% [00:21:00] now let's be clear. It wasn't. That was some liquidity event mode as they went public. Speaker 5: It was just a good precursor on a march to how much did they know about customers and channels and partners and product market fit, et Cetera, and for the first time somebody had actually instrumented the process. So much so that the national science foundation now requires anybody applying for a grant. It's no longer an option to get out of the building and talk to 30 customers before they could even show up at the conference to get funded. That was kind of the science side and that's still going on and [00:21:30] I'm kind of proud that we might've made a dent in how the government thinks for national science foundation stuff, commercialization and how the National Institute of Health might be thinking of what's called translational medicine, but running those are 127 clinicians and researchers through the f program was really kind of amazing. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:22:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Steve Blank electrode at UC Berkeley's Haas School of business. In the next segment, he goes into more detail about the lean startup, also known as the lean launchpad Speaker 2: [00:22:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 4: with your launchpad startup launchpad. Is that, Speaker 5: well, there's two things. The class is called the lean launchpad lean launch and the software [00:23:00] we built for the National Science Foundation and now we use in classes and for corporations it's called launchpad central. We've basically built software that for the first time allows us to manage and view the innovation process as we go. Think of it as salesforce.com which is sales automation tool for salespeople. We now have a tool for the first time for entrepreneurs and the people working with them and managing them and trying to keep track of them and we just crossed 3000 teams who are using the software and I [00:23:30] use it in everything I teach and dude, Speaker 4: how long does the class take for a scientist or engineer who might be trying to think about, well, what's the time sink here? Yeah, Speaker 5: there's a shock to the system version, which I taught at cal tech and now teach twice a year at Columbia, which is days, 10 hours a day. But the ones that we teach from national science foundation, one I teach at Stanford and Berkeley, Stanford, it's a quarter at Berkeley semester from the NSF. It depends. It's about an eight to 10 week class. You could do this over a period of time. There's no magic. [00:24:00] There is kind of the magic and quantity to people you talk to and it's just a law of numbers. You talk to 10 people, I doubt you're going to find any real insight in that data. It talked to a thousand people. You know, you're probably, if you still haven't found the repeatable pattern, probably 20 [inaudible] too many or Tenex, too many a hundred just seem to be kind of a good centroid. And what you're really looking for is what we call product market fit. Speaker 5: And there are other pieces of the business model that are important. But the first two things you're writing at is, are you building something [00:24:30] that people care about? Am I care about? I don't mean say, oh, that's nice. I mean is when you show it to them, do they grab it out of your hands or grab you by the collar and say you're not leaving until I can have this. Oh, and by the way, if you built the right thing or your ideas and the right place, you will find those people. That's not a sign of a public offering, but it's at least a sign that you're on the right track. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [00:25:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: be sure to catch part two of this interview with Steve Blank in two weeks on spectrum. [00:25:30] In that interview, Steve Talks more about the lean launch pad, the challenge of innovation, Speaker 10: modern commerce, the evolution of entrepreneurship and the pace of technology. Steve's website is a trove of information and resources. Go to Steve Blank, all one word.com Steve Aalto, I mentioned the lean launchpad course available Speaker 2: on you, Udacity. That's you. [00:26:00] udacity.com Speaker 8: spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum Speaker 2: [00:26:30] [inaudible]. Speaker 10: Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Naoshima joins me for the calendar. Speaker 1: Dr Claire Kremen. Our previous guest on spectrum is a professor in the Environmental Science Policy and management department at UCB. She is the CO director of the center [00:27:00] for diversified farming systems and a co faculty director of the Berkeley Food Institute. Claire [inaudible] will be giving a talk on Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. She will be talking about pollinators as a poster child for diversified farming systems. Dr Kremlin's research on pollinators has attracted national news coverage and is of great importance to California agriculture. The talk will be followed by a reception with snacks and drinks. Again, this will be Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. Speaker 6: [00:27:30] Okay. Speaker 4: The science of cal lecture for March will be delivered by Dr Troy Leonberger. The topic is genetics. The lecture is Saturday, March 15th at 11:00 AM in room one 59 of Mulford Hall. Now a single news story presented by Neha Shah Speaker 1: just over a week ago. You see Berkeley's own. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of several biology and chemistry classes at cal, was awarded [00:28:00] the lorry prize in the biomedical sciences for her work on revealing the structure of RNA and its roles in gene therapy. Doudna will receive the Lurie metal and $100,000 award this May in Washington DC. The Lurie Prize is awarded by the foundation for the National Institutes of health and this is its second year of annually recognizing young scientists in the biomedical field. Doudna was originally intrigued by the 1980 breakthrough that RNA could serve as enzymes. In contrast to the previously accepted notion that RNA was [00:28:30] exclusively for protein production. Downness is work today with RNA deals specifically with a protein known as cas nine which can target and cut parts of the DNA of invading viruses. Doudna and her collaborators made use of this knowledge of cast nine to develop a technique to edit genes which will hopefully lead to strides in human gene therapy. Dowden is delighted by her recent recognition and confident in the future of RNA research and the medical developments that will follow Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 10: [00:29:00] The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 7: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them. Speaker 9: All [00:29:30] right. Email address is spectrum to klx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a [00:00:30] l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Hi, and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we present part one of two interviews with Steve Blank, a lecturer at the Haas School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s [00:01:00] see if you recognize any of these companies. He was involved with Xylog convergent technologies, MIPS, computer, ardent, super Mack, rocket science games and epiphany. In 1999 Steve Retired from day to day involvement in running a company since 2002 he has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. By 2011 he was said to have devised [00:01:30] the scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the Lean launch pad. In part one Steve Talks about his beginnings, the culture of Silicon Valley, the intersection of science, technology, finance, and business. Steve Blank, welcome to spectrum. Oh, thanks for having me. I wanted to find out from you how it is you got started as an entrepreneur. What attracted you to that? Speaker 5: He's probably the military. I, uh, spent four years in the air [00:02:00] force during Vietnam and a year and a half in Southeast Asia. And then when I came back to the United States, I worked on a B, 52 bombers in the strategic air command. And I finally years later understood the difference between working in a crisis organization, which was in a war zone where almost anything was acceptable to get the job done versus an execution organization that was dealing with mistakes. Men dropping a 20 megaton nuclear weapon where you process and procedure was actually imperative. And it turned [00:02:30] out I was much better in the organizations that required creativity and agility and tenacity and resilience. And I never understood that I was getting the world's best training for entrepreneurship. I went back to school in Ann Arbor and managed to get thrown out the second time in my life out of University of Michigan. Speaker 5: I call that the best school I was ever thrown out of a Michigan state was the next best school where it was a premed. And then, um, I was sent out to silicon valley. I was working as a field service engineer and what I didn't realize two years later was 16% [00:03:00] startup to bring up a computer system in a place called San Jose. And San Jose was so unknown that my admin got us tickets for San Jose, Puerto Rico until I said, I think it's not out of the country. I came out there to do a job to install a process control system. I thought it was some kind of joke is that there were 45 pages of advertisements in the newspaper at the time for scientists, engineers, et cetera. And I flew back and quit, got a job at my first startup in Silicon Valley [00:03:30] and subsequently I did eight of them in 21 years. Speaker 5: What were some of the ones that stand out out of the eight? You know, I had some great successes. There were four IPOs out of the eight, I'd say one or two. I had something to do with the others. I was just kinda standing there when the safe fell on the guy in front of me and the money dropped down and I got to pick it up. But honestly, in hindsight, and I can now say this only in hindsight, I learned the most from some of the failures though I wouldn't tell you why I wanted to learn that at the time, but failing [00:04:00] and failing hard when it was absolutely clear it was your fault and no one else's forced me to go through the stages of denial and then blame others and then whatever. And then acceptance and then ultimately kind of some real learning about how to build early stage ventures. Speaker 5: You know, I blew my Nixon last company, I was on the cover of wired magazine and 90 days after the cover I realized my company was going out of business and eventually did. And I called my mother who was a Russian immigrant and every time I spoke to my mother I [00:04:30] had to pause because English wasn't her first language. And you know, I'd say something and pause and then she'd say something back and pause. And whenever I said, mom, I lost 35 million hours, pause. And then she said, where'd you put it? I said, no, no, no mom, I'm calling you to tell you none of them was 30 I didn't even get the next sentence out. Cause then she went, oh my gosh, she wants $35 million. We can't even change your name. It's already plank. And then she started thinking about it and she said, and the country we came from [00:05:00] is gone. Speaker 5: There's no fast to go. I said, no, no mom though. What I'm trying to tell you is that the people gave me $35 million, just give me another $12 million to do the next startup. And it was in comprehensible because what I find when I talked to foreign visitors to silicon valley or to any entrepreneurial cluster, you know, we have a special name for failed entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Do you know what it is? Experienced? It's a big idea in the u s around entrepreneurial clusters, failure equals experience. [00:05:30] People don't ask you if you change your name or have to leave town or you're going to go bankrupt, et cetera. The first thing your best friend will ask you is, so what's your next startup? That's an amazing part of this culture that we've built here and that's what happened to me. My last startup, I returned $1 billion each to those two investors and it's not a story about me, it's a story about the ecosystem that we live in that's both supremely American and supremely capitalists, but also Sir Pulliam clustered in just [00:06:00] a few locations in the United States where there are clear reasons why one succeeded to some fail. Speaker 5: You know, when I retired from my last one, I decided that after eight startups in 21 years, my company was about to go public and my kids were seven and eight years old at the time and luckily we had children when I was in my late thirties and so therefore I got to watch people I admired incredibly at work, watch how they dealt with their families. And what was surprising [00:06:30] is that most of them had feet of clay when it came to home. They basically focused 100% of their efforts at work and as their kids grew up, their kids hated them. I kind of remember that in the back of my head, and so when I had the opportunity to retire, I said, I want to watch my kids grow up. And so I did. And that's a preambled answer your question. That's at the end. Speaker 5: For the first time in my life, my head wasn't down completely inside trying to execute in a single company. I had a chance to reflect on [00:07:00] the 21 years and believe it or not, I started to write my memoirs and I got, you know what I realize now in hindsight, it was actually an emotional catharsis of kind of purging. What did I learn? And I asked, it was 80 pages into it writing. He was a vignette and I would write lessons learned from each of those experiences and what I realized truly the hair was standing up and back of my neck. On page 80 there was a pattern I had never recognized in my career and I realized no one else had recognized [00:07:30] it either and either I was very wrong or there might be some truth and here was the pattern in silicon valley since the beginning we had treated startups like they were smaller versions of large companies. Speaker 5: Everything a large company did. The investment wisdom was, well they write business plans, you write business plans, they organize sales, marketing and Bizdev and you do that. They write our income statement, balance sheet and cashflow and do five year plans and then you do that too. Never noticing that. In fact that distinction, and no one had ever said this [00:08:00] before, what large companies do is execute known business models and the emphasis is on execution, on process. What a known business model means is we know who our customer is, we know how to sell it, we know who competitors are. We know what pride in an existing company it's existing cause somebody in the dim past figured that stuff out. But what a startup is doing is not executing. You think you're executing. That's what they told you to go do, but reality you failed most of the time because you were actually searching [00:08:30] for something. Speaker 5: You were just guessing in front of my students here at Berkeley and at Stanford I used the word, you have a series of hypotheses that are untested, but that's a fancy word for you're just guessing. And so the real insight was somebody needed to come up with a set of tools for startups that were different than the tools that were being taught on how to run and manage existing corporations. And that tool set in distinction at the turn of the century didn't exist. That is 1999 [00:09:00] there was not even a language to describe what I just said and I decided to embark on building the equivalent of the management stack that large corporations have for founders and early stage ventures. Speaker 6: Mm, Speaker 7: [00:09:30] yeah. Speaker 8: You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Steve Blank is our guest. He is an entrepreneur and lecturer at the hospital of business. In the next segment of your talks about collaborating with the National Science Foundation Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 4: [00:10:00] So when you're advising scientists and engineers who think they might be interested in trying to do a startup, what do you tell them they need to know about business and business people? Okay. Speaker 5: It's funny you mentioned scientists and engineers because I didn't know too many years in my career. I mean I sold to them as customers, [00:10:30] but in the last three or four years I got to know some of the top scientists in the u s for a very funny experience. Can I tell you what happened? It turned out that this methodology, I've been talking about how to build startups efficiently with customer development and agile engineering and one other piece called the business model canvas. This theory ended up being called the lean startup. One of my students, Eric Reese and I had actually invested in his company and then actually made him sit for my class at Berkeley because his cofounder, [00:11:00] the lost my money last time I invested. I said, no, no, sit through my class. And of course his co founder was slow to get it, but Eric got it in a second, but came the first practitioner of customer development, the first lean startup practitioner in the world. Speaker 5: Eric got it so much he became the Johnny Appleseed of the idea. In fact, it was actually Ericson side, the customer development. Then agile development went together and he named it the lean startup. But even though we had this theory, the practice was really kind of hard. It was like liking the furniture and Ikea until you got the pieces at home [00:11:30] and then realized it was Kinda hard to assemble. So I decided to do is take the pieces and teach entrepreneurs in a way they have never been taught before on how to start a company. Now this requires a two minutes sidebar. Can I give you? It turns out one of the other thing that I've been involved with is entrepreneurial education as I teach here at Haas, but I also teach at Stanford at UCF and a Columbia, but entrepreneurship used to be kind of a province, mostly of business schools and we used [00:12:00] to teach entrepreneurs just like they were accountants. Speaker 5: No one ever noticed that accountants don't run startups. It's a big idea. No one ever noticed. That's the g. We don't teach artists that way and we don't teach brain surgeons that way. That is sit in the class, read these cases like you were in the law school and somehow you'll get smarter and know how to be an operating CEO of an early stage venture. Now with this, you have to understand that when I was an entrepreneur, rapacious was applied word to describe my behavior and my friends who knew me as an entrepreneur [00:12:30] would laugh when they realized that was an educator and say, Steve, you were born entrepreneur. You knew you can't teach entrepreneurship. You can't be taught. You were born that way. Now since I was teaching entrepreneurship, this set of somewhat of a conundrum in my head, and I pondered this for a couple of years until I realized it's the question everybody asks, but it was the wrong question. Speaker 5: Of course you could teach entrepreneurship. The question is that we've never asked is who can you teach it to and that once you frame the question that way you start [00:13:00] slapping your forehead because you realize that founders of companies, they're not like accountants or MBAs. I mean they were engineers, they might be by training and background, but founders, visionaries, they're closer to artists than anybody else in the world and we now know how to teach artists for the last 500 years since the renaissance. How do we teach artists what we teach them theory, but then we immerse them in experiential practice until they're blue in the face or the hands fall off or they never want to look at another [00:13:30] brusher instrument or write another novel again in their life. We just beat them to death as apprentices, but we get their hands dirty or brain surgeons. Speaker 5: You have, they go to school, but there's no way you'd ever want to go to a doctor who hadn't cracked open chest or skulls or whatever or a surgeon, but we were teaching entrepreneurship like somehow you could read it from the book. My class at Stanford was one of the first experiential, hands-on, immersive float body experience and I mean immersive is that basically [00:14:00] we train our teams in theory that they're going to frame hypotheses with something called the business model canvas from a very smart guide named Alexander Osterwalder. They were going to test those hypotheses by getting outside the building outside the university, outside their lab, outside of anywhere and talk. I bought eyeball to 10 to 15 customers a week. People they've never met and start validating or invalidating those hypotheses and they were going to in parallel build as much of the product as [00:14:30] they can with this iterative and incremental development using agile engineering, whether it was hardware or software or medical device, it doesn't matter. Speaker 5: I want you to start building this thing and also be testing that. Now, this worked pretty well for 20 and 22 year olds students with hoodies and flip flops. But it was open question. If this would work with scientists and engineers, and about three years ago I was driving on campus and I got a call and then went like this, hi Steve, you don't know me. My name is heirarchical lick. I'm the head of the National Science Foundation [00:15:00] SBR program. We're from the U s government. We're calling you because we need your help. And because I was still a little bit of a jerk, I said, the government got my help during Vietnam. I'm not giving it an anymore. And he went, no, no, no, no. We're talking about your class. I went, how do you know about my class? They said, well, you've clogged every session of it. Speaker 5: And I just tend to open source everything I do, which is a luxury I have, not being a tenured professor, you know, I, I think giving back to our community is one of the things that silicon valley excels [00:15:30] at. And I was mentored and tutored by people who gave back. And so therefore since I can't do it, I give back by open sourcing almost everything I do. If I learn it and my slides are out there and I write about it and I teach them. And so I was sharing the experiences of teaching this first class. I didn't realize there were 25 people at the National Science Foundation following every class session. And I didn't even know who the National Science Foundation was. And I had to explain what Steve, we give away $7 billion [00:16:00] a year. We're the group that funds all basic science in universities in the u s where we're on number two to the National Institute of Health, which is the largest funder of medical and research in the u s and that's great. Speaker 5: So why are you calling? We want you to do this class for the government. I said, for the government, and I thought, you guys just fund bigger. He said, no, we're, we're under a mandate from theU s congress. All research organizations is that if any scientist wants to commercialize their basic research, we have programs called the spr and STTR programs that [00:16:30] give anywhere from $500,000 in the first phase or up to three quarters of a million dollars in phase two or more for scientists who want to build companies. Well, why are you calling me? And they're all nicely said, well thank God Congress doesn't actually ask how well those teams are doing. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, we're essentially giving away cars without requiring drivers Ed and you can imagine the results. And I said, okay, but what did you see in what I'm doing? Speaker 5: He said, Steve, you've invented the scientific [00:17:00] method for entrepreneurship. We want you to teach scientists. They already know the scientific method. Our insight here is they'll get what you're doing in a second. You just need to teach them how to do it outside the building. And so within 90 days I've got a bunch of my VC friends, John Fiber and Jim Horton follow and a Jerry angle and a bunch of others. And we put together a class for the national science foundation as a prototype. They got 25 teams headed up by principal investigators in material science and robotics and computer science and fluidics and teams [00:17:30] of three from around the country. And we put them through this 10 week process and we trained scientists how to get outside the building and test hypotheses. And the results were spectacular. So much so that the NSF made it a permanent program. Speaker 5: I trained professors from Georgia tech and university of Michigan who then went off to train 15 other universities. It's now the third largest accelerator in the world. We just passed 300 teams of her best scientists. Well, let me exhale and tell you the next step, which really got interesting. This worked for [00:18:00] National Science Foundation, but I had said that this would never work for life sciences because life sciences therapeutics, cancer, dry. I mean, you know, you get a paper and sell nature and science and maybe 15 years later, you know, something happens and she, you know, what's the problem? If you cure cancer, you don't have a problem finding customers. But at the same time I've been saying this, you CSF, which is probably the leading biotech university in the world here in San Francisco, was chasing me to actually put on this class for them. And I kept saying, no, you don't [00:18:30] understand. Speaker 5: I say it doesn't work. And they said, Steve, we are the experts in this. We say it does. And finally they called my bluff and said, well, why don't you get out of the building with us and talk to some of the leading venture capitalists in this area who basically educated me that said, look, the traditional model of drug companies for Pharma has broken down. They're now looking for partnerships, Obamacare and the new healthcare laws have changed how reimbursement works. Digital health is an emerging field, you know, medical devices. Those economics have changed. So we decided [00:19:00] to hold the class for life sciences, which is really a misnomer. It was a class for four very distinct fields for therapeutics, diagnostics, devices, and digital health. How to use CSF in October, 2013 is an experiment. First we didn't know if anyone would be interested because I know like the NSF, we weren't going to pay the teams. Speaker 5: We were going to make them pay nominal tuition and GCSF and we were going after clinicians and researchers and they have day jobs. Well, surprisingly we had 78 teams apply for 25 slots and we took 26 [00:19:30] teams including Colbert Harris, who was the head of surgery of ucs, f y Kerrison, the inventor of fetal surgery. Two teams didn't even tell Genentech they were sneaking out at night taking the class as well. And the results, I have to tell you, I still smile when I talk about this, exceeded everybody's wildest expectations such that we went back to Washington, took the results to the National Institute of Health and something tells me that in 2014 the National Institute of Health will probably be the next major government organization to adopt [00:20:00] this class in this process. Again, none of this guarantees success and these are all gonna turn into winners. What it does is actually allow teams to fail fast, allows us to be incredibly effective about the amount of cash we spent because we could figure out where the mistakes are rather than just insisting that we're right, but we now have a process that we've actually tested. Speaker 5: Well, I got a call from the National Science Foundation about six months ago that said, Steve, we thought we tell you we need to stop the experiment. And I thought, why? [00:20:30] What do you mean? Well, we got some data back on the effectiveness of the class. He said, well, we didn't believe the numbers. You know us. We told you we've been running this SBI our program for 30 years and what happens to the teams who want to get funded after? It's kind of a double blind review. People don't know who they are. They review their proposals and they on average got funded 18% of the time. Teams that actually have taken this class get funded 60% of the time. I thought we might've improved effectiveness 10 20% but this is a 300% [00:21:00] now let's be clear. It wasn't. That was some liquidity event mode as they went public. Speaker 5: It was just a good precursor on a march to how much did they know about customers and channels and partners and product market fit, et Cetera, and for the first time somebody had actually instrumented the process. So much so that the national science foundation now requires anybody applying for a grant. It's no longer an option to get out of the building and talk to 30 customers before they could even show up at the conference to get funded. That was kind of the science side and that's still going on and [00:21:30] I'm kind of proud that we might've made a dent in how the government thinks for national science foundation stuff, commercialization and how the National Institute of Health might be thinking of what's called translational medicine, but running those are 127 clinicians and researchers through the f program was really kind of amazing. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:22:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Steve Blank electrode at UC Berkeley's Haas School of business. In the next segment, he goes into more detail about the lean startup, also known as the lean launchpad Speaker 2: [00:22:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 4: with your launchpad startup launchpad. Is that, Speaker 5: well, there's two things. The class is called the lean launchpad lean launch and the software [00:23:00] we built for the National Science Foundation and now we use in classes and for corporations it's called launchpad central. We've basically built software that for the first time allows us to manage and view the innovation process as we go. Think of it as salesforce.com which is sales automation tool for salespeople. We now have a tool for the first time for entrepreneurs and the people working with them and managing them and trying to keep track of them and we just crossed 3000 teams who are using the software and I [00:23:30] use it in everything I teach and dude, Speaker 4: how long does the class take for a scientist or engineer who might be trying to think about, well, what's the time sink here? Yeah, Speaker 5: there's a shock to the system version, which I taught at cal tech and now teach twice a year at Columbia, which is days, 10 hours a day. But the ones that we teach from national science foundation, one I teach at Stanford and Berkeley, Stanford, it's a quarter at Berkeley semester from the NSF. It depends. It's about an eight to 10 week class. You could do this over a period of time. There's no magic. [00:24:00] There is kind of the magic and quantity to people you talk to and it's just a law of numbers. You talk to 10 people, I doubt you're going to find any real insight in that data. It talked to a thousand people. You know, you're probably, if you still haven't found the repeatable pattern, probably 20 [inaudible] too many or Tenex, too many a hundred just seem to be kind of a good centroid. And what you're really looking for is what we call product market fit. Speaker 5: And there are other pieces of the business model that are important. But the first two things you're writing at is, are you building something [00:24:30] that people care about? Am I care about? I don't mean say, oh, that's nice. I mean is when you show it to them, do they grab it out of your hands or grab you by the collar and say you're not leaving until I can have this. Oh, and by the way, if you built the right thing or your ideas and the right place, you will find those people. That's not a sign of a public offering, but it's at least a sign that you're on the right track. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [00:25:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: be sure to catch part two of this interview with Steve Blank in two weeks on spectrum. [00:25:30] In that interview, Steve Talks more about the lean launch pad, the challenge of innovation, Speaker 10: modern commerce, the evolution of entrepreneurship and the pace of technology. Steve's website is a trove of information and resources. Go to Steve Blank, all one word.com Steve Aalto, I mentioned the lean launchpad course available Speaker 2: on you, Udacity. That's you. [00:26:00] udacity.com Speaker 8: spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum Speaker 2: [00:26:30] [inaudible]. Speaker 10: Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Naoshima joins me for the calendar. Speaker 1: Dr Claire Kremen. Our previous guest on spectrum is a professor in the Environmental Science Policy and management department at UCB. She is the CO director of the center [00:27:00] for diversified farming systems and a co faculty director of the Berkeley Food Institute. Claire [inaudible] will be giving a talk on Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. She will be talking about pollinators as a poster child for diversified farming systems. Dr Kremlin's research on pollinators has attracted national news coverage and is of great importance to California agriculture. The talk will be followed by a reception with snacks and drinks. Again, this will be Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. Speaker 6: [00:27:30] Okay. Speaker 4: The science of cal lecture for March will be delivered by Dr Troy Leonberger. The topic is genetics. The lecture is Saturday, March 15th at 11:00 AM in room one 59 of Mulford Hall. Now a single news story presented by Neha Shah Speaker 1: just over a week ago. You see Berkeley's own. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of several biology and chemistry classes at cal, was awarded [00:28:00] the lorry prize in the biomedical sciences for her work on revealing the structure of RNA and its roles in gene therapy. Doudna will receive the Lurie metal and $100,000 award this May in Washington DC. The Lurie Prize is awarded by the foundation for the National Institutes of health and this is its second year of annually recognizing young scientists in the biomedical field. Doudna was originally intrigued by the 1980 breakthrough that RNA could serve as enzymes. In contrast to the previously accepted notion that RNA was [00:28:30] exclusively for protein production. Downness is work today with RNA deals specifically with a protein known as cas nine which can target and cut parts of the DNA of invading viruses. Doudna and her collaborators made use of this knowledge of cast nine to develop a technique to edit genes which will hopefully lead to strides in human gene therapy. Dowden is delighted by her recent recognition and confident in the future of RNA research and the medical developments that will follow Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 10: [00:29:00] The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 7: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them. Speaker 9: All [00:29:30] right. Email address is spectrum to klx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Kremen and Alastair Iles of ESPM at UC Berkeley, who ran the Berkeley Center for Diversified Farming. Next on their agenda is the Berkeley Food Institute, which will include College of Natural Resources, Goldman School of Public Policy, School of Journalism, Berkeley Law and School of Public Health.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest today, our professor Claire Kremen and Assistant Professor Allister isles in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and management at the University of California Berkeley. Claire Carmen focuses her research on conservation, biology and biodiversity. [00:01:00] Allister isles focuses his research on the intersections of science, technology, and environment that contribute to public policy, community welfare, environmental justice, and increased democracy and societal governance. Brad swift interviews the pair about their time as faculty directors of the Berkeley Center for diversified farming and the recent launch of the Berkeley Food Institute. This ambitious enterprise is a collaboration between the College of natural resources, the Goldman School of public policy, the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, [00:01:30] Berkeley Law School, and the school of public health. Allister isles is hearing impaired, so phd candidate Patrick Bower will be reading Alistair's answers during this interview. Speaker 4: In today's interview we have three folks, Claire, Carmen, Allister isles and Patrick Bower. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you and a nod from Allister. I want to ask each of you, how were you drawn [00:02:00] to the study of sustainability and diversified farming Speaker 1: on native bees and how they contribute to crop pollination in California and it was really through my study of the bees and particularly of how bees respond to agriculture that I got interested in farming and that my eyes got opened to how unsustainable our current farming system is, particularly with its heavy reliance on monoculture. Speaker 4: [00:02:30] My background is in environmental policies and I've mostly worked on industrial chemical issues for a long time. I've also researched the consumption side of food starting with sustainable seafood. About three years ago, Claire was running a series of round tables on diversified farming systems and by a chance at a faculty lunch, she invited me to participate. I wasn't sure what it was all about, but I enjoyed learning about ecosystem services. I realized that agriculture has a major role to play. I'm making the planet more in the face [00:03:00] of many 21st century environmental dangers like climate change. Trying to change consumer behavior isn't going to be enough to achieve greater sustainability. We need to cover the whole food system and to find new connections across each part, so that's why I moved much more upstream into agriculture. Talk about the new Berkeley Food Institute that you've formed a cow. Speaker 4: How did it get started and what are its goals? We began with [00:03:30] a round table series on diversified farming systems or DFS about three years ago. I can't believe how far we've already come since then. The series was based on a seed grant from the Berkeley Institute of Environment. It had monthly meetings and spent an enormous range of topics from conservation, biology, consumer behavior, the health effects of pesticides on farm workers to policies for promoting DFS. At first, we weren't sure what our goals were. We had a vague idea that the round [00:04:00] table might evolve into a more institutionalized forum. Claire wanted to co-write a paper covering the results of the round tables, but it quickly became obvious that it was such a large topic that we needed a whole special issue. Do you even do justice to the topics? Fortunately we were able to persuade the ecology and society journal to accept our specialists. You plan. It was a lengthy process of assembling the various papers as students are coauthors on most of the papers. We believe strongly in promoting student research and Claire and I wanted [00:04:30] to institutionalize the round tables and that is how we can see to the DFS center. We realized that we couldn't manage all this new growth without hiring an executive director, which meant that we needed to start raising funds Speaker 1: and as we started looking into funding for the center for diversified farming and as we engaged both with donors and also with the top levels of the College of natural resources administration, it became clear that there was actually an opportunity to do something much bigger and much more far reaching [00:05:00] by partnering with the schools of journalism and of public policy. And that's because it's not sufficient to conduct the research that demonstrates the social and environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture or diversified farming systems. You really have to get the word out to a large public and you have to be able to influence key decision makers. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be partnering with journalism and Public Policy. Later on in the institutes development we also were joined [00:05:30] by other key actors, specifically the schools of public health and also the school of law. Speaker 1: So the goal of the institute is really a lofty one. We want nothing less than to be able through research teaching and outreach to be able to actually transform our current food system to one that is far more resilient, far more healthy and far more just how is the institute funded. We're funded this point by private individuals and also by family foundations [00:06:00] are their undergraduate and graduate degree programs within the institute? Not yet, but we are contemplating creating something called a designated emphasis for graduate students, which means several different departments combined together and create an additional degree program that graduate students can go through and we're also beginning to assess whether an undergraduate major makes sense. The first step we're taking already is to conduct an inventory of what's already [00:06:30] available on campus. There are quite a few different faculty that are already teaching courses related to the food system and so we're identifying all of these so that students can have access to this information. Those who are already interested in this Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Our guest today on Spec gem are Claire Allister Isles. In the next segment they talk about impediments to sustainable farming. Is k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:07:00] What sort of collaborations will you be trying to foster with the institute? One of the key actions that the new institute will emphasize is nurturing new research and policy collaborations between faculty and students. Many parts of the food system are balkanized. They're divided up from each other and seldom communicate across disciplinary industry or supply chain segment lines. For example, urban agriculture policy makers might not think much about the sorts of foods [00:07:30] that city gardens are providing to poor minority neighborhoods. What we hope for is a set of collaborations that will cross disciplinary lines and that will address research topics that aren't being done but they could help bring about positive changes in the food system. Another thing that we are eager to look into is helping foster stronger connections with off campus actors such as farmers, food worker unions, government agencies and Bay area communities. This is where this would help inform the research being done on campus and where it might help enhance the ability [00:08:00] of these actors to work toward the transformation of the food system that Claire talked about. Some of our faculty already have off campus partners that they run research projects with citizen science or working with lay people and helping generate new science will likely be an important element, but not the only one. How directly will the institute be involved in actual farming or working directly with farmers? Speaker 1: We will definitely include growers on our advisory board and [00:08:30] also some faculty actually work with growers. For example, my work is all on farms owned by real people and so I work with growers on the kinds of experiments we're going to do and also on sometimes on land management that they're doing on their land. Speaker 4: What do you see as the impediments to the broad practice of sustainable agriculture and how can research and education help the impediments to sustainable agriculture legion? The most important impediment is arguably [00:09:00] the industrialized food system that we currently live in. The system is based on farming methods that include monoculture farming, the pervasive use of chemical and fossil fuel inputs, and an emphasis on increasing yields to the exclusion of other outcomes. The system is so entrenched that everyone who grows processes and eats food is caught in it. One example of how the industrial system discourages sustainable farming is the artificially cheap price of foods the food industry can externalize most environmental and social costs of producing food [00:09:30] by displacing these into farming communities, consumers and ecosystems. Public policies can Ivan this by promoting inappropriate subsidies for commodity crops and not properly funding conservation measures on farmland. Speaker 4: In turn, many farmers are trapped within a production structure or they have little room to adopt sustainable farming methods. They may have to comply with supply chain pressures such as contract farming that prescribes exactly what they should do on the farm or the rapid growth and market power of the agrifood corporations. [00:10:00] For decades, farmers have been struggling with the technological treadmill or they're obliged to adopt technological innovations such as pesticides and now GM seeds to be able to maintain their yields and cost structures in order to compete with other farmers doing likewise. Conversely, it can be very challenging for farmers to move to more sustainable methods. It is risky for farmers to try something new that they aren't familiar with and that requires them to develop new skills and knowledge. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of farmers in the u s [00:10:30] and there has been a trend of fewer new farmers entering the sector. On the positive side. These new entrants are more likely to use sustainable farming methods because they've been trained differently. Speaker 1: I think the broadest impediments are some aspects of our regulatory system and also market forces that encourage economies of scale sort of thing that make farmers have to get big or get out. For example, on the regulatory side, this new food safety modernization act is something that's going to impose [00:11:00] a lot of regulations on growers and that can actually disadvantage small growers. And sometimes it's the small growers that are the ones that are practicing more sustainable or more diversified forms of agriculture. But with this new food safety modernization act, they just might not be able to stay in business any longer. So the critical research that we need to do is to document the benefits and the costs and also the trade offs of different approaches. We need to be able to show what these benefits are so that we can hopefully have an influence [00:11:30] on some of the regulations. Speaker 6: Oh, you are listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guests today are Claire Kremen and Alister aisles. Patrick Bower will be reading out and styles and series Alistair's hearing impaired. In the next segment, they talk about how they analyze farming. Oh, okay. Speaker 4: Would you explain [00:12:00] how you analyze an agricultural system for sustainability? Speaker 1: From an ecological perspective? What I find helpful is the concept of an agriculture that is regenerative. What that means, it's an agriculture that demands few external inputs and creates few wastes. Instead it tends to use the waste products that are produced in the production cycle as inputs, so for example, by composting waste materials or by integrating animals back onto the farm, growers can build soils. [00:12:30] These wells are then able to store water much more effectively protecting against droughts and they can also require, in that case, less water from external sources. Also, these oils can trap and filter nutrients leading to less nutrient waste and less pollution off site, and then such soils are also much more productive so they can lead to greater yields, so it's really a win, win, win, win. I can't really see any downside to farming like that. Speaker 4: In terms of the social and economic components [00:13:00] of an agricultural system, there are many possible measures that we could use. Social scientists have looked at measures such as the justice that is embodied in the system. That is as the agricultural system assuring justice for all the workers, growers in communities across the system. This justice could take the form of fair worker treatment such as paying farm workers better wages and preventing adverse health effects like heatstroke. It could also be limiting the exposures of farm workers in rural communities to pesticides. [00:13:30] Another measure is food security or the ability of consumers and communities, especially poor and minority people to gain access to enough nutritious and healthy foods to feed themselves. In the u s there are at least 40 million people who depend on food stamps to supplement their diets. Yet these people may not be able to afford healthy, sustainably produced foods. Speaker 4: Yet another measure is whether farmers able to sustain themselves through their work or whether they fall into greater debt to be able to stay in farming at all. Many [00:14:00] NGOs and food movements such as the food sovereignty movement would argue that the ability of farmers and communities to decide on what sorts of foods they want to produce and eat isn't an important outcome in and of itself. How has the understanding and measurement of sustainability changed over the years? You have studied it. Social scientists have only been thinking about sustainability for a fairly short time since about the early 1990s sustainable development as a discourse [00:14:30] first began developing in the late 1980s with the Brundtland Commission's report. Initially, social scientists were focused more on the rural sociology of agricultural production. They looked at issues in isolation and emphasized farmers only, but as more researchers began to enter the sustainability field, the focus shifted to thinking more holistically. They started to look at food supply Speaker 7: chains and commodities and how these shape the sustainability of farming. Researchers also began looking at how communities were defining sustainability [00:15:00] in their own terms. In 2000 Jack Kloppenburg led a very interesting study that surveyed a set of rural and urban communities for the sorts of words they would use to describe sustainability. More recently, social scientists have looked at how ecological and social sustainability are closely interconnected. Some of the most exciting new work is looking at the concept of socio ecological systems or how farmers are actively shaping farming landscapes and vice versa. Speaker 8: [00:15:30] Are there estimates or models that show the reductions in greenhouse gas that could be achieved in the conversion from industrial monoculture agriculture to sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: This is actually something that's fairly well known. The production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is a really energy intensive process and so where it has been looked at, when people compare organic agriculture that avoids using those chemicals with conventional agriculture, organic agriculture [00:16:00] usually stacks up much better as far as greenhouse gas emissions, and this is true even though often organic growers have to perhaps use more fuel to do more cultivation practices on their lands, but it balances out because they're not using these energy intensively produced chemicals. Speaker 8: Biofuels were thought to be a sustainable source of energy and an enormous boost for agriculture as well. What are your thoughts on biofuels? Speaker 7: I've been looking [00:16:30] at the environmental and social effects of biofuels in the u s and Brazil for a few years now. Some years ago, biofuels were seen as a very promising technology that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in 2008 and a scientists called Tim searching gear sparked off a long debate about whether biofuels actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the overall picture. Some biofuels can actually lead to increased emissions because their production involves a direct or indirect cutting down forests to clear land for agriculture, which results in carbon [00:17:00] dioxide release. The upshot is that governments and NGOs now see biofuels much more skeptically. I think this is a positive development rather than uncritically embracing biofuels as a new development pathway. At the same time, the debate has now swung so much that people often don't distinguish between different types of biofuels. Biofuels are actually very diverse in their feedstock and production methods. Speaker 7: Most of the bad press is around corn ethanol in the u s and I think it's justified because as Michael Pollan, [00:17:30] for example, has written about the corn industry has created countless environmental problems, but there are what we call cellulosic feedstocks, grasses, agricultural crop, leftovers and trees and principle. We can have diversified farming systems that include these sorts of cellulosic crops as part of a fully integrated and diversified rather than having a few larger farmers and agrifood businesses dominate corn ethanol and thereby the biofuels industry. We could alternatively have many smaller farmers produce [00:18:00] grasses. For example. This is something that the new institute may look at. The challenge however is that cellulosic ethanol could easily succumb to the same industrialized monoculture model models we see for corn. So policy will have a very important role in the next decade and helping decide whether this will happen or not. Speaker 6: [inaudible] spectrum is a public affairs show. Hey Alex Berkley, our guests are clear come in and Allister isles, [00:18:30] they're starting the Berkeley food institute this fall and the next thing they talk about the scalability of sustainable farming and its impact on rural communities. Speaker 7: From your experience, what is the scale range of farms doing sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: Even large scale farms are starting to incorporate sustainability practices into their businesses, which is really exciting, but it's a question whether they're truly sustainable. [00:19:00] As an ecologist, I don't believe that the practice of monoculture is compatible with sustainability. To have sustainability. We need more diverse farming systems when we have these diverse farming systems that can reduce the need for off farm inputs and also generate fewer ways. A good example of this is going back to pesticides and monoculture. When a grower grows a monoculture, they're pretty much forced to use pesticides. When you think about it, they're planting [00:19:30] a huge expanse of the same thing and it's kind of like laying out a feast for a pest species that can just go and rampage through that. And at the same time they've also eradicated the habitat that would have promoted the natural enemies that could've kept that past in check. Speaker 1: So then they really have no other recourse. They have to use pesticides and as I already noted, these take a great deal of energy to produce the results in greenhouse gas emissions. They pollute the surrounding environment. They can lead to unintended loss of biodiversity, of [00:20:00] non target insects. Also both subtle and not so subtle impacts on human health. When we do that, we can't really have a sustainable system, but on the other hand, we shouldn't conflate the practice of monoculture with scale because smaller farms can also practice monoculture and do sometimes practice monoculture and at the same time, perhaps larger farms can practice really diversified agriculture. It's not what I would think of as typical, but that doesn't mean it's impossible and I think it's important that we not limit [00:20:30] our imagination. We'd be able to imagine that a really large farm could be diverse, could be sustainable. Why not? Speaker 7: Does sustainability in any way limit the scale that can be achieved? Speaker 1: Well, I think it's an excellent question and we don't really have the answer to it. If we just look at what's out there, it seems like if you're at a larger scale, maybe that's going to be less sustainable in some ways, but it might be more sustainable in some other ways. There's certainly a relationship between scale ins and sustainability. If [00:21:00] we just look out at what's happening now, there can be unexpected twists. For example, very large companies may be able to develop sustainable practices of certain types such as efficiencies in distribution that small companies can't. On the other hand, smaller farms or companies might be better able to create the ecological complexity that we think is required to engender sustainable processes on farms. Also, when we think about it, some of these limits if do exist to creating sustainable systems [00:21:30] might relate not to biophysical limits, but to institutional arrangements or governance structures, business plans, et cetera. And again, they might be failures of our imagination to conceive of a better way of doing things. So I think it's really an excellent research topic. We need to study the successful models that exist out there at various scales and try to learn from them. Speaker 7: Are there studies that show the impact of sustainable agriculture on rural societies and economies and Willy Institute [00:22:00] undertake work in this area? Frankly, we don't really know what the answers may be. This is because there've been very few systemic studies done of the ways in which sustainable agriculture might benefit rural areas. And the 1940s a UC researcher called Walter Goldschmidt did a very important study and compared to rural towns in California that deferred in the degree of diversified farming and the degree to which they relied on industrialized farming methods. The town that you used more diversified from methods [00:22:30] showed significant gains of social and economic outcomes such as employment and community cohesiveness compared to the more industrialized town. Unfortunately, this sorta study hasn't been done. Again, as far as we are aware, thus the priority of the new institute will be to help sponsor a collaborative research project that updates this research and uses the tools and data that we now have to appraise whether and how diversified farming can provide greater benefits compared to the existing system. Speaker 7: What do you feel [00:23:00] are the best ways to encourage and enable young people to pursue farming? One of the most challenging obstacles we face in the food system today is that there is a rapidly aging farmer workforce. The average age of farmers in the U S is about 57 years, which is something you see in other industrial countries as well. There are widespread perceptions of farming as an acronystic and tedious. Many commentators think that many young people are unenthusiastic [00:23:30] about taking up farming for this reason. Farming is in the past. Therefore, one argument goes, we should invest more and more in labor saving technology to help offset the fact that fewer young people are entering farming in Australia. Where I come from, I heard about a farmer recently who just installed a $400,000 robotic system to milk cows. I don't agree with this sort of argument. To the contrary. Speaker 7: We are seeing a good number of young people take up farming in [00:24:00] both rural and especially urban areas. Farming seems to be a way to reconnect these people with a more sensory and experience rich life. There are tens of farmers schools that are developed across the countries such as the Alba Center near Salinas, where immigrant workers learn to be farmers and are given some support for entering the sector. This is one very powerful way to help new farmers provide training programs to help equip them for actual production, but they then face enormous problems and even getting a [00:24:30] toehold on the farming landscape because land can be very costly and very scarce. So they need financial help like loans and grants to sustain their first few years. At least. There's a new farmer network that has been pushing for bill and Congress to create this new institutional base, but unfortunately, so far it's not been very successful. Speaker 6: A big thanks to Claire Kremen at Alster Isles [00:25:00] for coming on to spectrum. I'll pass. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes. You we've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few of the signs of technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. We kind of ski and I present the calendar. Speaker 3: On September 8th the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden will be hosting a workshop led by author [00:25:30] Amy Stewart, who wrote the drunken botanist, the plants that create the world's greatest strengths, a book that details the leaves, bark seeds, roots, flowers and fruit around the world that humans have contrived to turn into alcohol. Stuart will lead a walk through the garden to look at some of the typical plants that have been used throughout the ages. The workshop will be held in the garden from three to 6:00 PM on September 8th the first installment of the six part public lecture series, not on the test. The pleasures and uses [00:26:00] of mathematics will be held this September 11th past spectrum guests, Tony de Rose, a senior scientist and leader of the research group at Pixar animation studios presented a lecture on the use of mathematics in the making of Pixars animated films. Pixar animation is done entirely by computer and Dr. Rose will demonstrate how math and science helped create these stunning visuals in each Pixar film and explain the underlying computer technology, physics, geometry, and applied mathematics that made these pictures possible. [00:26:30] The lecture will be held on September 11th at 7:00 PM in the Berkeley City College Auditorium located at 2050 Center street in Berkeley. The rent is free and open to the public Speaker 7: this month. Science neat is on Tuesday the 17th the topic is fun guy here talks about mushrooms and bring your own mushrooms to have my colleges. Chris Green help you identify them. Science need is a monthly science happy hour for those 21 and over at El Rio bar [00:27:00] three one five eight mission street in San Francisco. Admission is $4 Speaker 3: here at spectrum. We'd like to share our favorite science stories with you. Rick Kaneski joins me for presenting the news. Speaker 7: Nature news reports that several journals have been caught in a scheme to artificially inflate their impact factors by strongly encouraging citations to other journals that were in on the scheme. The impact factor of journals is a measure of the average number of citations to recent articles [00:27:30] and is often used to compare the relative importance of a journal to the field. That is general is with higher impact factors are generally thought of more favorably than lower impact journals. The factors are calculated by Thomson Reuters, the company responsible for both end note citation software and the web of science literature database. Well, self citations have been caught in the past weeding out this collaborative gaming of the system is difficult and it can be costly for those journals [00:28:00] caught Thomson Reuters has suspended the impact factors of 0.6% of the more than 10,000 journals. They index a record percentage. In some cases, editors have been fired in others. Articles published in the suspended journals will not contribute to the rankings of universities responsible for them. Speaker 3: According to a UC Berkeley study published in the Journal proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, blocking a certain enzyme can dramatically slow the ability of tumor cells [00:28:30] to multiply and spread to other tissues. Scientists have long observed that cancer cells metabolize lipids in particular ester lipids at higher rates than normal cells. The UC Berkeley team in activated a certain enzyme known as LPL glycerol phosphate synthase, or a gps that is critical to lipid formation and human breasts and skin cancer cells knocking out the enzymes, significantly reduced tumor growth and movement. The inhibitor has also been [00:29:00] tested in live mice, injected with Kansas owls too, promising results. While other studies have examined specific lipids, a gps appears to regulate a much broader portion of tumor growth and malignancy. Next steps will include developing a cancer therapy based on the age gps inhibitors. Speaker 5: Mm. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. We'd also like to thank Patrick Bower [00:29:30] first assistance during the interview. Thank you for listening to spectrum. Join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Claire Kremen and Alastair Iles of ESPM at UC Berkeley, who ran the Berkeley Center for Diversified Farming. Next on their agenda is the Berkeley Food Institute, which will include College of Natural Resources, Goldman School of Public Policy, School of Journalism, Berkeley Law and School of Public Health.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest today, our professor Claire Kremen and Assistant Professor Allister isles in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and management at the University of California Berkeley. Claire Carmen focuses her research on conservation, biology and biodiversity. [00:01:00] Allister isles focuses his research on the intersections of science, technology, and environment that contribute to public policy, community welfare, environmental justice, and increased democracy and societal governance. Brad swift interviews the pair about their time as faculty directors of the Berkeley Center for diversified farming and the recent launch of the Berkeley Food Institute. This ambitious enterprise is a collaboration between the College of natural resources, the Goldman School of public policy, the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, [00:01:30] Berkeley Law School, and the school of public health. Allister isles is hearing impaired, so phd candidate Patrick Bower will be reading Alistair's answers during this interview. Speaker 4: In today's interview we have three folks, Claire, Carmen, Allister isles and Patrick Bower. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you and a nod from Allister. I want to ask each of you, how were you drawn [00:02:00] to the study of sustainability and diversified farming Speaker 1: on native bees and how they contribute to crop pollination in California and it was really through my study of the bees and particularly of how bees respond to agriculture that I got interested in farming and that my eyes got opened to how unsustainable our current farming system is, particularly with its heavy reliance on monoculture. Speaker 4: [00:02:30] My background is in environmental policies and I've mostly worked on industrial chemical issues for a long time. I've also researched the consumption side of food starting with sustainable seafood. About three years ago, Claire was running a series of round tables on diversified farming systems and by a chance at a faculty lunch, she invited me to participate. I wasn't sure what it was all about, but I enjoyed learning about ecosystem services. I realized that agriculture has a major role to play. I'm making the planet more in the face [00:03:00] of many 21st century environmental dangers like climate change. Trying to change consumer behavior isn't going to be enough to achieve greater sustainability. We need to cover the whole food system and to find new connections across each part, so that's why I moved much more upstream into agriculture. Talk about the new Berkeley Food Institute that you've formed a cow. Speaker 4: How did it get started and what are its goals? We began with [00:03:30] a round table series on diversified farming systems or DFS about three years ago. I can't believe how far we've already come since then. The series was based on a seed grant from the Berkeley Institute of Environment. It had monthly meetings and spent an enormous range of topics from conservation, biology, consumer behavior, the health effects of pesticides on farm workers to policies for promoting DFS. At first, we weren't sure what our goals were. We had a vague idea that the round [00:04:00] table might evolve into a more institutionalized forum. Claire wanted to co-write a paper covering the results of the round tables, but it quickly became obvious that it was such a large topic that we needed a whole special issue. Do you even do justice to the topics? Fortunately we were able to persuade the ecology and society journal to accept our specialists. You plan. It was a lengthy process of assembling the various papers as students are coauthors on most of the papers. We believe strongly in promoting student research and Claire and I wanted [00:04:30] to institutionalize the round tables and that is how we can see to the DFS center. We realized that we couldn't manage all this new growth without hiring an executive director, which meant that we needed to start raising funds Speaker 1: and as we started looking into funding for the center for diversified farming and as we engaged both with donors and also with the top levels of the College of natural resources administration, it became clear that there was actually an opportunity to do something much bigger and much more far reaching [00:05:00] by partnering with the schools of journalism and of public policy. And that's because it's not sufficient to conduct the research that demonstrates the social and environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture or diversified farming systems. You really have to get the word out to a large public and you have to be able to influence key decision makers. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be partnering with journalism and Public Policy. Later on in the institutes development we also were joined [00:05:30] by other key actors, specifically the schools of public health and also the school of law. Speaker 1: So the goal of the institute is really a lofty one. We want nothing less than to be able through research teaching and outreach to be able to actually transform our current food system to one that is far more resilient, far more healthy and far more just how is the institute funded. We're funded this point by private individuals and also by family foundations [00:06:00] are their undergraduate and graduate degree programs within the institute? Not yet, but we are contemplating creating something called a designated emphasis for graduate students, which means several different departments combined together and create an additional degree program that graduate students can go through and we're also beginning to assess whether an undergraduate major makes sense. The first step we're taking already is to conduct an inventory of what's already [00:06:30] available on campus. There are quite a few different faculty that are already teaching courses related to the food system and so we're identifying all of these so that students can have access to this information. Those who are already interested in this Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Our guest today on Spec gem are Claire Allister Isles. In the next segment they talk about impediments to sustainable farming. Is k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:07:00] What sort of collaborations will you be trying to foster with the institute? One of the key actions that the new institute will emphasize is nurturing new research and policy collaborations between faculty and students. Many parts of the food system are balkanized. They're divided up from each other and seldom communicate across disciplinary industry or supply chain segment lines. For example, urban agriculture policy makers might not think much about the sorts of foods [00:07:30] that city gardens are providing to poor minority neighborhoods. What we hope for is a set of collaborations that will cross disciplinary lines and that will address research topics that aren't being done but they could help bring about positive changes in the food system. Another thing that we are eager to look into is helping foster stronger connections with off campus actors such as farmers, food worker unions, government agencies and Bay area communities. This is where this would help inform the research being done on campus and where it might help enhance the ability [00:08:00] of these actors to work toward the transformation of the food system that Claire talked about. Some of our faculty already have off campus partners that they run research projects with citizen science or working with lay people and helping generate new science will likely be an important element, but not the only one. How directly will the institute be involved in actual farming or working directly with farmers? Speaker 1: We will definitely include growers on our advisory board and [00:08:30] also some faculty actually work with growers. For example, my work is all on farms owned by real people and so I work with growers on the kinds of experiments we're going to do and also on sometimes on land management that they're doing on their land. Speaker 4: What do you see as the impediments to the broad practice of sustainable agriculture and how can research and education help the impediments to sustainable agriculture legion? The most important impediment is arguably [00:09:00] the industrialized food system that we currently live in. The system is based on farming methods that include monoculture farming, the pervasive use of chemical and fossil fuel inputs, and an emphasis on increasing yields to the exclusion of other outcomes. The system is so entrenched that everyone who grows processes and eats food is caught in it. One example of how the industrial system discourages sustainable farming is the artificially cheap price of foods the food industry can externalize most environmental and social costs of producing food [00:09:30] by displacing these into farming communities, consumers and ecosystems. Public policies can Ivan this by promoting inappropriate subsidies for commodity crops and not properly funding conservation measures on farmland. Speaker 4: In turn, many farmers are trapped within a production structure or they have little room to adopt sustainable farming methods. They may have to comply with supply chain pressures such as contract farming that prescribes exactly what they should do on the farm or the rapid growth and market power of the agrifood corporations. [00:10:00] For decades, farmers have been struggling with the technological treadmill or they're obliged to adopt technological innovations such as pesticides and now GM seeds to be able to maintain their yields and cost structures in order to compete with other farmers doing likewise. Conversely, it can be very challenging for farmers to move to more sustainable methods. It is risky for farmers to try something new that they aren't familiar with and that requires them to develop new skills and knowledge. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of farmers in the u s [00:10:30] and there has been a trend of fewer new farmers entering the sector. On the positive side. These new entrants are more likely to use sustainable farming methods because they've been trained differently. Speaker 1: I think the broadest impediments are some aspects of our regulatory system and also market forces that encourage economies of scale sort of thing that make farmers have to get big or get out. For example, on the regulatory side, this new food safety modernization act is something that's going to impose [00:11:00] a lot of regulations on growers and that can actually disadvantage small growers. And sometimes it's the small growers that are the ones that are practicing more sustainable or more diversified forms of agriculture. But with this new food safety modernization act, they just might not be able to stay in business any longer. So the critical research that we need to do is to document the benefits and the costs and also the trade offs of different approaches. We need to be able to show what these benefits are so that we can hopefully have an influence [00:11:30] on some of the regulations. Speaker 6: Oh, you are listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guests today are Claire Kremen and Alister aisles. Patrick Bower will be reading out and styles and series Alistair's hearing impaired. In the next segment, they talk about how they analyze farming. Oh, okay. Speaker 4: Would you explain [00:12:00] how you analyze an agricultural system for sustainability? Speaker 1: From an ecological perspective? What I find helpful is the concept of an agriculture that is regenerative. What that means, it's an agriculture that demands few external inputs and creates few wastes. Instead it tends to use the waste products that are produced in the production cycle as inputs, so for example, by composting waste materials or by integrating animals back onto the farm, growers can build soils. [00:12:30] These wells are then able to store water much more effectively protecting against droughts and they can also require, in that case, less water from external sources. Also, these oils can trap and filter nutrients leading to less nutrient waste and less pollution off site, and then such soils are also much more productive so they can lead to greater yields, so it's really a win, win, win, win. I can't really see any downside to farming like that. Speaker 4: In terms of the social and economic components [00:13:00] of an agricultural system, there are many possible measures that we could use. Social scientists have looked at measures such as the justice that is embodied in the system. That is as the agricultural system assuring justice for all the workers, growers in communities across the system. This justice could take the form of fair worker treatment such as paying farm workers better wages and preventing adverse health effects like heatstroke. It could also be limiting the exposures of farm workers in rural communities to pesticides. [00:13:30] Another measure is food security or the ability of consumers and communities, especially poor and minority people to gain access to enough nutritious and healthy foods to feed themselves. In the u s there are at least 40 million people who depend on food stamps to supplement their diets. Yet these people may not be able to afford healthy, sustainably produced foods. Speaker 4: Yet another measure is whether farmers able to sustain themselves through their work or whether they fall into greater debt to be able to stay in farming at all. Many [00:14:00] NGOs and food movements such as the food sovereignty movement would argue that the ability of farmers and communities to decide on what sorts of foods they want to produce and eat isn't an important outcome in and of itself. How has the understanding and measurement of sustainability changed over the years? You have studied it. Social scientists have only been thinking about sustainability for a fairly short time since about the early 1990s sustainable development as a discourse [00:14:30] first began developing in the late 1980s with the Brundtland Commission's report. Initially, social scientists were focused more on the rural sociology of agricultural production. They looked at issues in isolation and emphasized farmers only, but as more researchers began to enter the sustainability field, the focus shifted to thinking more holistically. They started to look at food supply Speaker 7: chains and commodities and how these shape the sustainability of farming. Researchers also began looking at how communities were defining sustainability [00:15:00] in their own terms. In 2000 Jack Kloppenburg led a very interesting study that surveyed a set of rural and urban communities for the sorts of words they would use to describe sustainability. More recently, social scientists have looked at how ecological and social sustainability are closely interconnected. Some of the most exciting new work is looking at the concept of socio ecological systems or how farmers are actively shaping farming landscapes and vice versa. Speaker 8: [00:15:30] Are there estimates or models that show the reductions in greenhouse gas that could be achieved in the conversion from industrial monoculture agriculture to sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: This is actually something that's fairly well known. The production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is a really energy intensive process and so where it has been looked at, when people compare organic agriculture that avoids using those chemicals with conventional agriculture, organic agriculture [00:16:00] usually stacks up much better as far as greenhouse gas emissions, and this is true even though often organic growers have to perhaps use more fuel to do more cultivation practices on their lands, but it balances out because they're not using these energy intensively produced chemicals. Speaker 8: Biofuels were thought to be a sustainable source of energy and an enormous boost for agriculture as well. What are your thoughts on biofuels? Speaker 7: I've been looking [00:16:30] at the environmental and social effects of biofuels in the u s and Brazil for a few years now. Some years ago, biofuels were seen as a very promising technology that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in 2008 and a scientists called Tim searching gear sparked off a long debate about whether biofuels actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the overall picture. Some biofuels can actually lead to increased emissions because their production involves a direct or indirect cutting down forests to clear land for agriculture, which results in carbon [00:17:00] dioxide release. The upshot is that governments and NGOs now see biofuels much more skeptically. I think this is a positive development rather than uncritically embracing biofuels as a new development pathway. At the same time, the debate has now swung so much that people often don't distinguish between different types of biofuels. Biofuels are actually very diverse in their feedstock and production methods. Speaker 7: Most of the bad press is around corn ethanol in the u s and I think it's justified because as Michael Pollan, [00:17:30] for example, has written about the corn industry has created countless environmental problems, but there are what we call cellulosic feedstocks, grasses, agricultural crop, leftovers and trees and principle. We can have diversified farming systems that include these sorts of cellulosic crops as part of a fully integrated and diversified rather than having a few larger farmers and agrifood businesses dominate corn ethanol and thereby the biofuels industry. We could alternatively have many smaller farmers produce [00:18:00] grasses. For example. This is something that the new institute may look at. The challenge however is that cellulosic ethanol could easily succumb to the same industrialized monoculture model models we see for corn. So policy will have a very important role in the next decade and helping decide whether this will happen or not. Speaker 6: [inaudible] spectrum is a public affairs show. Hey Alex Berkley, our guests are clear come in and Allister isles, [00:18:30] they're starting the Berkeley food institute this fall and the next thing they talk about the scalability of sustainable farming and its impact on rural communities. Speaker 7: From your experience, what is the scale range of farms doing sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: Even large scale farms are starting to incorporate sustainability practices into their businesses, which is really exciting, but it's a question whether they're truly sustainable. [00:19:00] As an ecologist, I don't believe that the practice of monoculture is compatible with sustainability. To have sustainability. We need more diverse farming systems when we have these diverse farming systems that can reduce the need for off farm inputs and also generate fewer ways. A good example of this is going back to pesticides and monoculture. When a grower grows a monoculture, they're pretty much forced to use pesticides. When you think about it, they're planting [00:19:30] a huge expanse of the same thing and it's kind of like laying out a feast for a pest species that can just go and rampage through that. And at the same time they've also eradicated the habitat that would have promoted the natural enemies that could've kept that past in check. Speaker 1: So then they really have no other recourse. They have to use pesticides and as I already noted, these take a great deal of energy to produce the results in greenhouse gas emissions. They pollute the surrounding environment. They can lead to unintended loss of biodiversity, of [00:20:00] non target insects. Also both subtle and not so subtle impacts on human health. When we do that, we can't really have a sustainable system, but on the other hand, we shouldn't conflate the practice of monoculture with scale because smaller farms can also practice monoculture and do sometimes practice monoculture and at the same time, perhaps larger farms can practice really diversified agriculture. It's not what I would think of as typical, but that doesn't mean it's impossible and I think it's important that we not limit [00:20:30] our imagination. We'd be able to imagine that a really large farm could be diverse, could be sustainable. Why not? Speaker 7: Does sustainability in any way limit the scale that can be achieved? Speaker 1: Well, I think it's an excellent question and we don't really have the answer to it. If we just look at what's out there, it seems like if you're at a larger scale, maybe that's going to be less sustainable in some ways, but it might be more sustainable in some other ways. There's certainly a relationship between scale ins and sustainability. If [00:21:00] we just look out at what's happening now, there can be unexpected twists. For example, very large companies may be able to develop sustainable practices of certain types such as efficiencies in distribution that small companies can't. On the other hand, smaller farms or companies might be better able to create the ecological complexity that we think is required to engender sustainable processes on farms. Also, when we think about it, some of these limits if do exist to creating sustainable systems [00:21:30] might relate not to biophysical limits, but to institutional arrangements or governance structures, business plans, et cetera. And again, they might be failures of our imagination to conceive of a better way of doing things. So I think it's really an excellent research topic. We need to study the successful models that exist out there at various scales and try to learn from them. Speaker 7: Are there studies that show the impact of sustainable agriculture on rural societies and economies and Willy Institute [00:22:00] undertake work in this area? Frankly, we don't really know what the answers may be. This is because there've been very few systemic studies done of the ways in which sustainable agriculture might benefit rural areas. And the 1940s a UC researcher called Walter Goldschmidt did a very important study and compared to rural towns in California that deferred in the degree of diversified farming and the degree to which they relied on industrialized farming methods. The town that you used more diversified from methods [00:22:30] showed significant gains of social and economic outcomes such as employment and community cohesiveness compared to the more industrialized town. Unfortunately, this sorta study hasn't been done. Again, as far as we are aware, thus the priority of the new institute will be to help sponsor a collaborative research project that updates this research and uses the tools and data that we now have to appraise whether and how diversified farming can provide greater benefits compared to the existing system. Speaker 7: What do you feel [00:23:00] are the best ways to encourage and enable young people to pursue farming? One of the most challenging obstacles we face in the food system today is that there is a rapidly aging farmer workforce. The average age of farmers in the U S is about 57 years, which is something you see in other industrial countries as well. There are widespread perceptions of farming as an acronystic and tedious. Many commentators think that many young people are unenthusiastic [00:23:30] about taking up farming for this reason. Farming is in the past. Therefore, one argument goes, we should invest more and more in labor saving technology to help offset the fact that fewer young people are entering farming in Australia. Where I come from, I heard about a farmer recently who just installed a $400,000 robotic system to milk cows. I don't agree with this sort of argument. To the contrary. Speaker 7: We are seeing a good number of young people take up farming in [00:24:00] both rural and especially urban areas. Farming seems to be a way to reconnect these people with a more sensory and experience rich life. There are tens of farmers schools that are developed across the countries such as the Alba Center near Salinas, where immigrant workers learn to be farmers and are given some support for entering the sector. This is one very powerful way to help new farmers provide training programs to help equip them for actual production, but they then face enormous problems and even getting a [00:24:30] toehold on the farming landscape because land can be very costly and very scarce. So they need financial help like loans and grants to sustain their first few years. At least. There's a new farmer network that has been pushing for bill and Congress to create this new institutional base, but unfortunately, so far it's not been very successful. Speaker 6: A big thanks to Claire Kremen at Alster Isles [00:25:00] for coming on to spectrum. I'll pass. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes. You we've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few of the signs of technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. We kind of ski and I present the calendar. Speaker 3: On September 8th the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden will be hosting a workshop led by author [00:25:30] Amy Stewart, who wrote the drunken botanist, the plants that create the world's greatest strengths, a book that details the leaves, bark seeds, roots, flowers and fruit around the world that humans have contrived to turn into alcohol. Stuart will lead a walk through the garden to look at some of the typical plants that have been used throughout the ages. The workshop will be held in the garden from three to 6:00 PM on September 8th the first installment of the six part public lecture series, not on the test. The pleasures and uses [00:26:00] of mathematics will be held this September 11th past spectrum guests, Tony de Rose, a senior scientist and leader of the research group at Pixar animation studios presented a lecture on the use of mathematics in the making of Pixars animated films. Pixar animation is done entirely by computer and Dr. Rose will demonstrate how math and science helped create these stunning visuals in each Pixar film and explain the underlying computer technology, physics, geometry, and applied mathematics that made these pictures possible. [00:26:30] The lecture will be held on September 11th at 7:00 PM in the Berkeley City College Auditorium located at 2050 Center street in Berkeley. The rent is free and open to the public Speaker 7: this month. Science neat is on Tuesday the 17th the topic is fun guy here talks about mushrooms and bring your own mushrooms to have my colleges. Chris Green help you identify them. Science need is a monthly science happy hour for those 21 and over at El Rio bar [00:27:00] three one five eight mission street in San Francisco. Admission is $4 Speaker 3: here at spectrum. We'd like to share our favorite science stories with you. Rick Kaneski joins me for presenting the news. Speaker 7: Nature news reports that several journals have been caught in a scheme to artificially inflate their impact factors by strongly encouraging citations to other journals that were in on the scheme. The impact factor of journals is a measure of the average number of citations to recent articles [00:27:30] and is often used to compare the relative importance of a journal to the field. That is general is with higher impact factors are generally thought of more favorably than lower impact journals. The factors are calculated by Thomson Reuters, the company responsible for both end note citation software and the web of science literature database. Well, self citations have been caught in the past weeding out this collaborative gaming of the system is difficult and it can be costly for those journals [00:28:00] caught Thomson Reuters has suspended the impact factors of 0.6% of the more than 10,000 journals. They index a record percentage. In some cases, editors have been fired in others. Articles published in the suspended journals will not contribute to the rankings of universities responsible for them. Speaker 3: According to a UC Berkeley study published in the Journal proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, blocking a certain enzyme can dramatically slow the ability of tumor cells [00:28:30] to multiply and spread to other tissues. Scientists have long observed that cancer cells metabolize lipids in particular ester lipids at higher rates than normal cells. The UC Berkeley team in activated a certain enzyme known as LPL glycerol phosphate synthase, or a gps that is critical to lipid formation and human breasts and skin cancer cells knocking out the enzymes, significantly reduced tumor growth and movement. The inhibitor has also been [00:29:00] tested in live mice, injected with Kansas owls too, promising results. While other studies have examined specific lipids, a gps appears to regulate a much broader portion of tumor growth and malignancy. Next steps will include developing a cancer therapy based on the age gps inhibitors. Speaker 5: Mm. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. We'd also like to thank Patrick Bower [00:29:30] first assistance during the interview. Thank you for listening to spectrum. Join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.