Intensive Agriculture and Human Health, with Marion Werner and Patrick Lango

Join UB graduate students Lianne Novak (public health) and Logan (international development and global health) as they interview Dr. Marion Werner, and local farmer Patrick Lango about intensive agricultural practices and the effects on human health.

Dr. Marion Werner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research is located at the nexus of critical development studies, feminist theory, and political economy with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean.

Patrick Lango is a local farmer, maker of artisanal dairy products, and enthusiastic food radical.  He owns White Cow Dairy, located in Buffalo's Elmwood Village, where he sells his artfully-crafted yogurts, custards and dairy drinks to the public.  Lango's farming techniques haven't changed with the emergence of intensive agriculture, and his business is prime example of how to sustainably farm.

Credits:
Host/Writers: Lianne Novak, MPH | N. Logan | Keerthana Maddirala, MS
Guests: Dr. Marion Werner, PhD | Patrick Lango
Production Assistant/Audio Editor: Sarah Robinson, MPH | Omar Brown
Theme Music: Dr. Sungmin Shin, DMA 

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Transcript

Intro 0:01 
Welcome to Buffalo HealthCast, the official health equity podcast of the University at Buffalo's School of Public Health and Health Professions. In this podcast, we cover topics related to health equity in Buffalo, the US and globally. This season, we'll take a look at food insecurity and health equity on a global scale. You'll hear from experts around the world who specialize in areas like urban agriculture and food contamination, soil science, food sovereignty, refugee health, intensive agriculture, and more. This season's episodes were completed in Dr. Kasia Kordas' Global Health class, a graduate level course offered at the University at Buffalo, and produced by the School of Public Health and Health Professions.

Lianne Novak  0:50 
Good morning, afternoon, or night. Whenever you are listening to this podcast, we are glad you're with us.

Logan  0:56 
My name is Logan.

Lianne Novak  0:57 
My name is Lianne and today we will discuss some intensive agricultural practices, paying close attention to the effect on human health, livelihood, and climate change. We will also talk with a farmer, Patrick Lango, about alternative methods he's employed, and speak with Dr. Marian Werner from the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo. There's a good chance that you've seen some intensive agriculture even if you aren't familiar with the term. Perhaps you've seen a large plot of land with machinery mowing down corn stalks at the end of the season, or have read about preventive pesticide or antibiotic use across a whole crop or herd. These are examples of intensive agriculture, which is a global phenomenon. Our first guest today is Dr. Merian Werner, an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Buffalo. She is going to discuss pesticide use and its effect on human health and how alternatives might be more than just cost effective. Now, you might be wondering, how does this relate to intensive agriculture? And this is a loaded question. In this podcast, we will primarily be focusing on excessive pesticide use and how this affects food production and its connection to the industrial shift that has happened in the past century within food production. To give a little bit of context globally, pesticide use has been increasing with herbicides being the most common at 43% and insecticides and fungicides following. However, the biggest growth is seen in the Global South. For example, Bolivia's pesticide use increased by 300% from 2005 to 2015, while California's use increased by 10%. Many farmers and businesses use heavy amounts of pesticides and fertilizers on crops and antibiotics preventatively in livestock to account for overcrowding in order to generate this large amount of food. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also known as the CDC, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, also known as IARC, along with the State of California have all found glyphosphate, which is also commonly known as the generic brand name "Roundup" to have cancer and non cancerous effects on human health. These non cancerous effects include endocrine system interruptions, and possible antibiotic resistance for E. coli and salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium. With these worries in mind, let's take a look at the conversation we had with Dr. Werner. Thank you so much for taking the time today, especially right before Thanksgiving break to come speak to us about intensive agriculture. Our first question for you is if you can briefly describe what a pesticide is, its relations to farming and its influence on the economics of agriculture.

Dr. Marion Werner  4:02 
Sure. Well, thanks for the question. And also thanks for the invitation. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about my research. Your question, what a pesticide is, I think that's a great place to start because there's really two ways to think about what a pesticide is. The first is what a pesticide does, right? It's a biocide. It's a chemical compound that kills unwanted pests, and plants that we designate as weeds. But it's also a commodity, right. It's something that's bought and sold on the market. Its production is subject to economic logics. And so a lot of my research is looking at the interactions between these two social lives of pesticides, right? One, its chemical effect, what it does, and the other is really the social and economic and political forces that produce it and circulate it. So, to turn to the next part of your question, what's its relationship to farming? And, you know, I think we all know that pesticides are really integral to industrial, or we could also call capitalist agriculture. And so I wanted to actually take a step back and first think about, you know, what do we mean by industrial agriculture, because it's a really strange idea. We associate industrialization with factories, and, you know, there's no factory in farming, it's the land itself or nature that produces the food that we eat. And so where did this idea, what's this idea of an industrial agriculture, and it really refers to the many technologies and inputs that have been introduced into agriculture since the mid 19th century, to essentially try to put people more in control of that production that nature does, right, leave less to nature, put more under our control. And that whole approach has from the beginning, been driven by we could think of as modernist thinking, or what feminist historian Carolyn Merchant talks about as the death of nature. So this desire of industrial agriculture to control or dominate the elements. And then the other goal of industrial agriculture has been to replace as much labor as possible with machinery or with chemicals. So over time, all of these efforts to let's say dominate nature, within the production of food, we've seen homogenization of agricultural production. So we've really seen the emergence of a common set of what we could think of as agronomic practices and generic industrial inputs. So that's a long, perhaps winded way of saying, how we get to pesticides. Pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers have really become the scenic qua non, or the thing you can't do without in this process of industrial agriculture. So this shift to it, the shift to industrial capitalist agriculture is really meant that pests and unwanted plants have to be controlled, and inorganic, and later, synthetic organic chemicals become the way to do that. And in fact, the whole shift towards homogenization of what we grow and the process we use to grow, it has also changed the pest problem. So pesticides have become really sort of woven into the fabric of how we farm today.

Lianne Novak  7:48 
You came to our Global Health class as a guest lecturer a few weeks ago, and you spoke about the shift from agrarian lifestyles to industrialism. So we were wondering if you could talk about this a bit more and its influence on modern day pesticide use within intensive agriculture.

Dr. Marion Werner  8:06 
You're going to have people sort of move away from subsistence production or producing their own food towards urbanization and dependence on buying their food, principally, development in that sense, right, that shift towards urban and industrial livelihoods dependent primarily, in many places on selling your labor, you know, requires essentially food to be made available cheaply at a low cost to, you know, new industrial workers in these new factories. And so that's been a consistent theme in the logics of why to intensify agriculture, which is the principle logic has been, how can you produce a lot of food for as low a cost as possible? The thing is that that's never happened just in one country on its own. It's always been part of a global trade system, who's going to supply the food? And at what cost to these new industrial workforces? How pesticides fit into this, of course, is that, you know, the US has really been ground zero for introducing pesticides as ways to do what I was talking about the last question, you know, succeed in those goals of industrial agriculture, which is to produce more per hector, to produce it more quickly, and to control for the vagaries of nature, be that again, pests or weeds or drought, or excessive rainfall. So pesticides have been important to all of that. And as industrial agriculture has itself, gone global, and it's done that not just kind of naturally, excuse the metaphor, organically, but it's been promoted, very decisively with lots of development funding aid and projects. So as it's gone global, those pesticides have also spread, not just for the production of domestic goods, but also for the production of goods that countries in the Global South would export to the Global North.

Lianne Novak  10:17 
Shifting gears a little - in the Global Health Lecture, you briefly spoke about political ecology, and how man now uses nature as a means to an end. So could you talk about how important this is within the context of intensive agriculture and our relationship with food production and its effects on the environment?

Dr. Marion Werner  10:37 
Sure, you know, this is such a good question. Because again, this shift to industrial or capitalist agriculture is so laser focused on a particular set of goals. It has not historically been very sensitive, either to human health, or to environmental effects. So in terms of human health, when I say it hasn't been sensitive to human health, we could say this in a couple of ways. But rather than focus on nutrition, which is not my area, but there's definitely a whole story there about the introduction of kind of a "nutritionism" or nutritional logic into the food system that has not done good things for human health. But just with respect to human health, in terms of the effects of exposure to pesticides. One thing that has, you know, continually been a problem in industrial agriculture is in fact, worker exposure to pesticides and their effects on health. A lot of the policy and advocacy around pesticides often focuses on the consumer, right, we have a whole, you know, organic labeling apparatus now. And the idea here is that well, you know, consumers don't want to, we don't want consumers to be exposed to harm in their food supply through residues of harmful chemicals. But one of the problems if we only think about effects on human health through that consumer lens is that too often the effects on workers have been sidelined.

Lianne Novak  12:19 
Shifting gears yet again, was there ever a time in the evolution of industrial food production where pesticides were used at a reasonable or normal amount, or have pesticides always been used in excess?

Dr. Marion Werner  12:32 
This is a great question to think about the pesticide problem. And to answer it, I want us to think about pesticides and their interactions with humans in the environment as part of three cycles. Okay, so one is biological. One is economic. And the third I'll say is research or scientific research, in particular, in your field of public health, but more specifically, you know, toxicology, epidemiology, those kinds of fields. So let's start with the first cycle - biological. So when, for example, a new herbicide is introduced, at first, it may work exceptionally well, a farmer, you know, armed with a new pesticide that has a new mode of action that has not circulated much in our environment, will not need to use as much to get rid of the weeds that she wants to eliminate. But we know, you know, that over some amount of time, through the evolutionary process, we're going to select for plants that will be able to, that will develop resistance to that herbicide, which means that over time, that herbicide will become less and less effective. And so if at first it was being used at a reasonable amount, over time, farmers will need, if they simply need to do their work to farm what they need to farm in order to make their livelihoods, they will need to use more. The second cycle is the economic cycle. So what that refers to specifically here is patents. So any new herbicide or insecticide that's introduced into the market that benefits from 25 year patent protection, meaning that no other company can produce it, and therefore the company that develops it reaps the returns for that development. Now, while the pesticide is under patent, that also means that the compound is going to be quite expensive. So the other thing that's going to stop it from being overused is just economically the price is going to be very expensive. But as those patents expire, like with pharmaceuticals, those agrichemicals will go generic and the prices will drop. So what that means is, and we've seen this, for example, the case I've looked at closely with glyphosate. Just as farmers are starting to experience more and more weed resistance, they also then encounter a marketplace where they can access or acquire by the herbicides that they need, at a much lower price. And to give you an example, in Argentina, where glyphosate is used extensively as it is in the States for soy production, because it's packaged with seeds to form a sort of farm system around herbicide tolerant seeds, you can spray the whole soy field with glyphosate and only kill the weeds, whereas the soy that you want, remains alive and good for harvest. When that glyphosate was under patent, it sold for $40 a liter. And when it went completely off patent, initially, the price dropped to $10 a liter. And today, you know, barring supply chain bottlenecks that happened with COVID, but before that glyphosate was about $3 a liter in Argentina. So if it wasn't overused at the beginning, the combination of patent expiry and weed resistance means that today, it definitely gets overused. And to add to that example, the growing ineffectiveness of glyphosate, of this particular herbicide has meant that these seed herbicide systems where you have seeds, that are genetically modified to be resistant to one herbicide, in this case, glyphosate, so that you can grow that plant and you can spray your whole field with the herbicide and only kill the weeds. Well, that's not working anymore, because those weeds are resistant. So what the latest technology here is to now genetically modify soy, for example, with stacked traits, meaning that now you're planting soy seeds that are resistant to three different herbicides, which means you're not going to spray those three different herbicides over the same field where you used to spray only one, when the whole point of these genetically modified seeds is that they would drastically reduce the amount of herbicides that you would need in the soil farm system. And then there's one more cycle I've mentioned, that I would say is the knowledge or scientific cycle, which is the research cycle, how we know what the effects are, of these chemicals in the environment, and in the human body. And what I mean by that cycle is that oftentimes, the state of the art for understanding toxicology and ecotoxicology is in one place where,  when these chemicals are developed, introduced in the market, but it's in a very different place 10, 20, 30, 40 years later, a lot of the technologies that we use, by which I mean, the pesticides that we use today are, in fact old technology in terms of herbicides, there's been no major mode of action released in 30 years. So there's a lag oftentimes between our use of these compounds, and what we can know about them. I think there is a way to use pesticides rationally, in the absence of what are these three cycles, where on the one hand, you're going to have just evolution itself, pushing farmers to use pesticides more intensively, you're going to have the economics of pesticides changing as prices drop, and these inputs become accessible at a much lower price point. And then you're going to have the interaction of what we can know about pesticide's effects, which often takes much longer, years or even decades after we've introduced a compound, what its effects might be on humans in the environment.

Lianne Novak  19:10 
We recognize that intensive agriculture isn't going to end tomorrow. So our last question to kind of wrap everything up is in your opinion, what are a few realistic changes that you can see being an option for large farmers or businesses that could positively impact population health?

Dr. Marion Werner  19:28 
So I think this is a really great question, and businesses need to be given options to reduce pesticide use that can really work for them. So I just gave you this example of herbicide tolerant genetically modified seeds. So again, seeds that are genetically modified to be tolerant to a given herbicide so that - and this was sold to farmers to drastically reduce their costs, right? So they would have to buy the seeds every year. But that investment was worthwhile because they would be able to use fewer pesticides, and they would be able to spray their fields post emergence, so while the crop was growing to control for weeds, and would be able to spray less pesticides, right. So the only thing that's being offered farmers today to deal with the problems of weed resistance, the main thing being offered by agribusiness, big agribusiness, are now these stack trait systems, you know, placing farmers in the position to now having to apply multiple herbicides to the same field. And they're really locked into that farm system. A big problem in the US is the problem of Dicamba. So one of the - an herbicide that's been one of the herbicides that's been included in a different stack trait farm, I believe it's maize, it's either maize or soy, seed package. And Dicamba has a huge problem with drift. So it's very easy for if you sprayed on one field for it to move and affect farmers in a neighboring field. And, you know, farmers are up in arms trying to get the US Environmental Protection Agency to regulate Dicamba. But it's been a real battle. So to give farmers options and really also protect farmworkers, we needed, really effective regulation of pesticides. And that's what scientists and academics have long been pushing for and really led by farmers and their advocates in the field who would like alternative farm systems where they might use multiple agronomic practices, combining both pesticides but also different cropping patterns, to be able to farm in a more healthy and sustainable way.

Logan  22:12 
Thank you so much for your time today Dr. Werner, we really do appreciate it, especially before Thanksgiving. Within the food industry, there's pressure put on small farms to produce enough crop to make a livable wage, and to support the livelihood of not only themselves but their family. This leads to continued use of pesticides to meet the demands of the industry. To give you more context on the relationship between big business and small family farms, the largest farms being defined as farms with sales of 5 million US dollars or more, account for fewer than 1% of all farms, yet they consume 35% of all sales. Small farms, which are defined as farms with sales of 50,000 US dollars or less account for 76% of all farms, but consume only 3% of sales, according to the 2019 US census data. We are joined by Patrick Lango, a Buffalo micro celebrity, who was able to break free from the industrial milk production industry and create his own farm to consumer storefront. In our interview, he speaks about the journey of taking over his family owned farm, which has been in operation since the early 20th century. He describes how his practices bypass the current culture surrounding food production and consumerism, which has generated much buzz and publicity, as you will hear. All right, well, I'm here with Patrick Lango. Thank you so much for taking your time with us for today. Can you start by introducing yourself?

Patrick Lango  23:34 
Yeah. My name is Patrick Lango. And I came from a farming family that's been farming in the western region of New York State since 1908. And, you know, it's a family tradition. It's a family business, and it's a family responsibility. And at a certain point in my life, it came to me where my mother came to me and said, you know, what are we going to do with the farm and so on. She said, you know, we always milk cows, and it always paid the bills and it's fine. So we took the old dairy barn and we rehabbed it and got ready. And I think it was in 1990, we started milking, we got a handful of cows started milking again, and then went into the 90s that way, and it wasn't very long before we got into it, that we realized that it was a difficult business to be in because everything changed.

Logan  24:27 
And I did a little bit of research prior to us talking. So I wanted to start with the work that you did with a TED Talk at Cansius College, and this is called "Breaking Out of an Exquisite Prison." And in the TED Talk, you stated that you take the point of view of the people who are running these plants and some of the conglomerates. They will tell you small dairy farms, family dairy farms are antiquated, obsolete, inefficient and really have no business being an operation. And with this, you had to find a way to bypass the industrial food system. And you later go on to say you examine the history of milk and food and model your current business after the late 19th century and earliest 20th century practices, essentially going backwards in time to adapt to modern times. So could you elaborate on this journey to creating your own storefront and changing your means of economic sustainability and growth?

Patrick Lango  25:21 
Yeah, it's an epic endeavor. Because when you come out of the barn, and you're milking cows every day, and you look at what's going on, and you're not getting paid, and it's hard to pay the bills, you go, you know what, this is a terribly broken system. Is it broken everywhere? Is it broken for everyone? Is it just broken for us? Now, mass production of food and feeding millions of people has just gotta be done. And you know, so you really can't blame them for trying to run the most efficient system they possibly can. And you really have to look at yourself and say, you know what, maybe we are antiquated. Maybe we are broken, maybe we don't make sense. Because we're just too small, we're not producing enough and all of these things, then you go, wait a minute. What is it about this, being small, staying small, grazing your animals, raising your own animals, living this, what is now an antiquated, farming way of life? What can you do to that to keep that going? And my conclusion was, you got to build a system that works. And what does working mean? Working means the farmer gets paid for his milk or real price. That's the theory. And when we embarked on this, we first of all had to do every layer that it would require to go from being just a milk producing farm, to a food producing dairy farm. In order to do that, you have to have a factory. And the next step, after creating the place to make the food and becoming licensed was, is really, where do you sell it? We sold locally in the Lexington Co Op, we sold in different stores, we eventually were dragged into Wegmans and were selling there on the shelves with mass produced products. And all of these things were just like going down a bumpy road with a flat tire. It wasn't what was working, it was very, very hard to do. Our original idea was to be small, think small, and stay small.

Logan  27:32 
Can you talk a little bit more about how the slow food, knowing where your food is from, can kind of connect back to your farming practices, and perhaps the dire need that we have to take a step back and reevaluate intensive agricultural practices and how this affects an individual's connection to food?

Patrick Lango  27:49 
I mean, you know, our practices for what we do on our farm haven't changed. If you look at Virgil's Georgics. And I don't know when those poems are written. It's all about the seed, the sun, the soil, the olive, the grape, the sheep, the milk, the cheese. None of those things have changed since Virgil, really, how we do it, where it goes, how we mass produce it, those kinds of things are all vastly different, mechanized, and so on for life. But say, for us, we have some cows. They're bred to have babies, we milked them. We turn them loose out of the pasture, they eat the grass, the spring water, there's an advantage to be small. There's an advantage to this. We're controlling everything. And people are responding to food because we're controlling the flavor that's in it from how we do what we do.

Logan  28:48 
You're hands-on every step.

Patrick Lango  28:50 
It's really cool. So what we're doing is so different. So, our system, our ideas, our theory was really like, how do you take our farm, turn it inside out and figure out a way to make it sustainable by doing antiquated farming and keep things getting to people. But what we did is we came into Buffalo, into the Elmwood Village, actually on Lexington, we found a 15 by 15 foot space, and we unlocked the door and started putting our food in there and we didn't tell anybody. And so 12 years ago, I guess. We were just an empty storefront with a fridge with some yogurt and stuff in it. And people would come by and say wow, and we were never open. We were only open on Friday or Saturday.  We were making the food at the farm. But it worked. It started working within a year or so where people were just coming. We were being fed the way we were feeding people. So we had this direct contact and where the sense of community and food was being regenerated through this transaction.Us making the food on the farm, bringing it to people - the benefits were that as we were able to get people to bring the glass back, reusing all the glass.

Logan  30:04 
Was sustainability always kind of a part of what you were trying to do?

Patrick Lango  30:07 
Sustainability at every level, at every, in other words, what we were trying to do is we were trying to be in a pure cloud and say like, you know, we want to do everything to the land that is pure, we want to do everything to the animals that is pure in every way. And then we want to, and then so on, through all the steps of making the food and processing it.

Logan  30:07 
Do you think that this is something you would recommend to small farmers everywhere?

Patrick Lango  30:14 
In our case, taking the small family dairy farm, and trying to transition into this idea is really challenging. And part of what I was set out to do was to create a blueprint where we could transplant this into other farming communities and other systems.

Logan  30:55 
Well, it looks like our time is up for today. But thank you so much for speaking with us, telling us your story. Greatly appreciate it.

Patrick Lango  31:04 
No, I appreciate it. It's good to get this out there in a way because a lot of people just have no clue. And you know, and answering questions about how we can feed ourselves on this planet are really important. And this is just one set of solutions for one farm that we were able to do.

Logan  31:27 
Thank you so much.

Patrick Lango  31:28 
All right. Thank you for having me.

Logan  31:30 
Patrick's story is a unique one full of self agency and gaining back his independence as a dairy farm owner. Our conversation sheds light on a multitude of issues, such as environmental impact and sustainability within food production. While he is operating on a small scale, he did acknowledge the fact that we have to feed our world's population. And not all of this is possible on the micro scale. This does not mean that we can ignore the current negative effects that our planet is enduring at the price of large scale food production.

Lianne Novak  32:00 
Agricultural and farming practices impact our Earth's health in a multitude of ways. Unsustainable practices cause ripple effects starting with the soil and local wildlife. For example, 26% of global emissions or greenhouse gases are from food production of this 26%, 27% comes from crop production, and 8% comes from crops land use, due to rising greenhouse gas emissions, the fourth US National Climate Assessment reported the earth is experiencing the warmest temperatures in recorded history, increasing about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit or one degree Celsius over 115 years. Intensive agriculture requires land and lots of it. 1000 years ago, less than 4% of the world's available land was used for farming. That figure now is at 50%. In some areas, deforestation is a first step to converting land for agricultural use. It is estimated that the planet will need 7400 trillion additional calories by 2050, compared to 2010. This will require a landmass twice the size of India. By 2019, 38 million square kilometers, which is over 23 million square miles, were cleared for agricultural use in Australia. In New South Wales, Australia, agriculture was responsible for over 50% of the deforestation. This deforestation displaces local wildlife, reducing biodiversity, changes local water balance, rainfall patterns and surface temperature. However, the full effects of deforestation are not yet understood. There are certainly appropriate times to use pesticides and antibiotics. However, farmers should minimize their use and introduce practices that are safe for the staff, consumers and animals alike. While sustainability may seem like a new age idea, this is certainly not a modern concept. The United Nations established the Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, in 1945, to coordinate international efforts to improve food security, nutrition and defeat hunger. The FAO more recently began the Greening the Economy with Agriculture Initiative, or GEA. As current agricultural practices feed into our global greenhouse gas emissions, agriculture and food security become threatened by climate change. The GEA was created to tackle these exact issues by bridging together economic and agricultural prosperity. Today, 106 countries have National Sustainable Development Strategies, and over 200 voluntary sustainability standards are being implemented by the food and agriculture industry. Another example of the work done by the FAO is through the Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems, or SAFA, which was created in 2013. SAFA works to conserve natural resources around the globe and manages technological advancement to ensure sustainable development and satisfaction of human needs for present and future generation. Their work surrounds conservation of a variety of natural resources such as water, land, plant and animal genetic resources in regards to the work of industry sectors, such as forestry and agriculture.

Logan  35:34 
Living an eco friendly lifestyle is a privilege. It is costly not only for the consumer, but for the industries making the products as well. However, this may not be financially viable for all farms. This type of change is one that requires time and persistence through social advocacy and global cooperation. The more information we share and conversations we have, will draw attention to our current crisis and lead us towards positive change.