First hour: Hot Farm
Second hour: Seeking Harmony for Global Asian Immigrants
We have special national programming on this Memorial Day.
In the first hour, climate change is coming for your food. In the American heartland, farmers are battling increasingly severe weather, with epic floods and heat. Nearly half the land in the United States is used to grow crops and food animals, and agriculture accounts for an impossible to ignore 10 percent of our total greenhouse gas emissions. If we’re serious about fighting climate change, we need farmers to be part of the solution. In this documentary, based on Hot Farm, a new podcast from the Food & Environment Reporting Network and hosted by Eve Abrams, we travel across the Midwest, talking to farmers about what they are doing, or could be doing, to combat climate change.
Among the people we meet is David Bishop, an Illinois farmer who became an unlikely Pied Piper in the sustainable agriculture movement. More than 30 years ago, after a drought wiped out his corn and soybean crops, Bishop changed the way he farmed. It was 1988, the same summer that a scientist named James Hansen told Congress that human activity was causing “global warming,” unofficially launching the climate-change era. While Bishop’s neighbors vowed that next year would be better, Bishop decided that he couldn’t go on doing the same thing. He started diversifying the crops he grew and replacing chemical fertilizer with manure. Over the next decade he kept asking himself, “What else can I do?” He began selling what he grew directly to consumers—something virtually unheard of in farm country back then. He didn’t consider what he was doing a crusade against climate change, but rather a way to break free of a system that was squeezing farmers from both ends—forcing them to grow only a handful of commodity crops and sell those crops to a handful of big buyers who set the prices. Along the way, Bishop has inspired—and helped guide—many younger farmers. Which is crucial, because as Abrams explains, we need more Dave Bishops if we are going to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions coming from U.S. agriculture.
In the second half of the documentary, we meet some farmers who, unlike Bishop, are still raising commodity crops and remain unconvinced that how they farm is contributing to climate change. This is true of most American farmers. But as producer Dana Cronin explains, farmers are practical above all else. If doing something differently makes farming and financial sense, they’re likely to embrace it. This is how Lin Warfel, who is skeptical of man-made climate change, came to be involved in a farmer-led initiative called Saving Tomorrow’s Agriculture Resources, STAR for short. The idea is to change farming practices in ways that safeguard the soil—the foundation of a farmer’s livelihood—for the next generation to farm. But many of the practices endorsed by STAR also help reduce carbon emissions, even if that isn’t the reason the farmers adopt them. It’s the kind of voluntary, meet-them-where-they-are strategy that the USDA and others hoping to convince farmers to join the climate.
Then in the second hour, in this PEACE TALKS RADIO episode, correspondent Sen Zhan explores three perspectives on the nature of intercultural conflict in transcultural Asian immigrants in western countries. When East meets West in the modern-day, it’s not only cultures that can clash, it’s also the past crashing into the present. Asians who have been formed by both cultures know this very well, and are one group among many who navigate the conflicts of transcultural existence.
We hear from Chinese-Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. Julian Xue, educated in both Confucian philosophy, and in western psychiatry. Dr. Xue offers singular insights on why first generation Asian immigrants have a harder time acclimating to a new host culture in the West, as well as what their children need to go through to blend both their cultural value sets into a coherent whole. Also on the program, Chinese-American author Iris Chen speaking about her book "Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent," and her take on bridging the gap between traditional Asian values and contemporary values in the Western world as a parent who straddles both sides. Additionally, Sen speaks with Chinese-Canadian trauma recovery coach Sherry Yuan Hunter, who works intimately with clients with Asian backgrounds around the world to understand and heal the root causes of intergenerational trauma.
