Cal Ag Roots Podcast

Mai Nguyen is an innovative grain farmer and an influential farmer organizer. In this interview, the first in our new series of conversations with food movement leaders that we're calling "Digging Deep," Mai talks with Ildi Carlisle-Cummins about how examining our agricultural past is the only way to move into a just, healthy farming future. As she puts it, "I, like other farmers, have perhaps 40 tries to grow my crops. That's not many, but we have more data points by looking back and looking around us. Scale isn't about one individual using their monoculture of the mind to manage vast acreage. Scale is time, human history, diversity -- the polyculture of many minds working lands in different ways throughout time and at the same time." This new Cal Ag Roots podcast series--Digging Deep: Conversations with Food Movement Leaders about the History of Farming-- will be released every other month. I’ll be talking with people who are working to shift farming right now, bringing California farming into the futur