Tasting the Terroir of Your Food with plant scientist Dr. Jill Clapperton

Have you ever tasted a really great blueberry and wondered why it was better than a different batch?  Maybe it was the way it was grown?  Maybe it was affected by the health of the soil and the farming practices used to build it up?

Building up soil health isn't just a topic that should interest farmers.  It should interest anyone who enjoys flavorful food!  

In this episode, hear from soil and plant scientist and my co-host, Dr. Jill Clapperton as she shares insights she has gathered about the link between soil health and the flavor and health of our food.    

Tasty examples Jill shares in this episode include the flavor differences that can be detected in pasture-raised beef and dairy, grains turned into bread and pasta and blueberries! 

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This podcast is brought to you by:

Rhizoterra - an international food security consulting firm owned by Dr. Jill Clapperton that provides expert guidance for creating healthy soils that yield tasty and nutrient-dense foods. Rhizoterra works together with producers and food companies to regenerate the biological and environmental integrity of the land.

The Global Food & Farm Community - a private, supportive, ad-free, global social network and soil health streaming service that provides information and connections to help you apply and communicate the science, practice, and outcomes of improving soil health.  

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Patrons receive access to our full-length interviews and selected additional materials. Patrons also have the ability to submit questions that we will answer on the podcast.

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Transcript

Sara Harper: 0:16

How does the health of the soil affect the flavor of our food? How do the farmers choices, the weather, the soil microbiome that world underground around shape the taste of our food? Who are the amazing people growing food in this regenerative way? And how can we taste the difference that they make? These and many other questions are what we explore in our podcast tasting Terroir a Journey into the Connection between Healthy Soil and the Flavor of Food. I'm your host, Sarah Harper.

Jill Clapperton: 0:53

Farmers in general, they will tell you that when they have good soils, the flavor of their crops and the quality of their crops reflects it. So we know that the quality of crops, like from a growing standpoint, I know that when I get my soils right, my crops are reflected, the quality of my crops are reflected in that I see healthier crops. My yields are good, whether it's wheat berries or whether it's seeds or whatever it is, is filled out really beautifully. The harvest goes well. The question is, and we know from some of our mineral nutrient density work that we've been doing with rhizotera, that we already know that we do differ wildly in the concentration of minerals in these grains, but that as our soils get better and better and better, we see more and more and more of them using less and less and less. So we're like, okay, so there's something to this. Now, the question is, does it bake differently? Does it taste differently? In the case of Diana, who's in our network, does it make pasta differently? And the answer is, yes, it does.

Sara Harper: 1:59

We are super excited to launch this podcast. In our first episode, we will explain what we mean by the ability to taste the terroir of your food, how this concept is directly linked to the health of the land and the decisions farmers make in growing food, and many other great insights from top soil health expert Dr. Jill Clapperton, my co host on this food journey. Quick background on me. Sarah Harper. I'm a regenerative agriculture policy expert who has worked for over 20 years in the public, nonprofit and private sectors on what is now called regenerative agriculture. From my experiences working in the US. Senate on agricultural and environmental policy, to building bridges between farmers and some environmentalists, to doing consulting work on corporate sustainability policy, I've had the opportunity to meet and learn from some of the best farmers in the world who are focused on building up soil health and working with nature rather than against her to do it. Joining me as my cohost on this podcast is my dear friend and mentor, Dr. Jill Clapperton, a soil health scientist and plant physiologist. Through her company Rhizoteera, Jill provides expert advice to farmers around the world to help regenerate their farm and pasture land. She helps farmers understand and apply the science of using plants to solve soil health problems. Planting with purpose instead of depending only on artificial inputs. She also measures the nutrient density of food and is researching the link between the practices on the farm and the nutrient density of the food it creates over time. All of this expertise is a great background to then dive into how these practices and the place where food has grown affects its flavor. Join us as we start this journey. Well, hi, Jill. Hi, my friend. How are you?

Jill Clapperton: 4:04

You know, this is a great day, Sarah. It really is cold off. Yes.

Sara Harper: 4:11

We've been cooking this up, this podcast idea, for quite some time, and I'm so excited to get to do it with you. Really bringing together the science of food. The flavor of food. How food gets its flavor. And exploring all these things with people like you who are scientists who understand the science of it. And the farmers who are doing the practices on the ground that are making a change and the chefs that are seeing the change. And just all these different people that you've assembled in your community. Your online community. And being able to bring some of that knowledge out to the people that the consumers are really interested in this kind of stuff.

Jill Clapperton: 4:50

Yeah, I'm not going to tell you that as scientists, we know a whole lot about I think we know about how we taste food and whatnot. But I don't think as scientists, we really understand how that connection between soils and taste and nutrition all that well. I think that's an area that we're still working on, which is kind of unbelievable. But it is true.

Sara Harper: 5:15

That gets us to our podcast. And our podcast is called tasting terroir. And by that, we are describing all the different elements that go into making distinct, flavorful, healthy food. So to taste is to experience something, to know it beyond just the academic. And terroir refers to the place where something is grown, the impact that the conditions of a place have on its development, whether it's weather or the type of soil or all those things that practice done by the farmer, how it became what it is, the unique flavor of it. So this uniqueness is very much connected to minerals in the soil and many, many factors, as we've talked about. But with that in mind, as a plant physiologist and a soil scientist, what do you mean when we talk about tasting terroir? Beyond just wine?

Jill Clapperton: 6:06

Yeah, it's beyond wine. The question for me was, can we taste what we do with the soil? Can we taste a healthy soil? If I grew all the same varieties and five different soils side by side that were all treated differently, could I taste the difference?

Sara Harper: 6:32

Wow.

Jill Clapperton: 6:33

Like, could I taste that I grew this plant in this way? Could I taste that I grew this plant this way? I think the answer is yes. I do hear it from the people that have vineyards and the wine makers, the vintage. You hear from them that if we grow different cover crops between the vines, we can taste that subtle difference in the flavor of the grapes. Scientifically, I think I understand how this could happen. I've been thinking about this a lot since we decided we're going to do this podcast. And I'm like, okay, so how does this actually work? Yeah, and I think that terroir refers to different regions, too. If we go back to that wine terroir, then you can grow the same grape in different areas of the world, and you will taste the regionality of where that grape is being grown, because the parent soils are very different. So the minerals in that soil are very different. So the minerality of the food are going to reflect, to a certain extent, the parent material. Now, with crops that we grow, we fertilize them and we add things to them. So we are going to not always reflect that terroir perfectly because we've added things to them to help them grow and to make sure that they have all the nutrition that we think we need, and certainly to add all the nutrition that we think the plant needs. However, we still have the climate. And how does the climate affect things? So if we think about let's even think about grassfed. Beef, for example, if I took the same genetics and I put them in different regions of North America, they're going to taste different. I know that beef grown on the East Coast tastes different from the beef grown in Kansas. I know it does. I know that the beef grown in Argentina tastes very different from the beef that I've eaten in other places of the world.

Sara Harper: 8:51

Now, does that require it to be all the way grass finished? Or does that even and grass finished.

Jill Clapperton: 8:57

Totally makes a difference. It totally makes a difference. And now we know from some of the work that's coming forward on multispecies pastures that multispecies pastures also change things. So we think about milk, for example, that if cows are fed multi species pastures every day, that their milk quality changes the quality of the fat, changes the color of the fat. And that affects how the smell of the milk, which also affects how delicious it is and how it stimulates our taste buds and things like that. And that's all based on the plants that we grew up with. We know that if we feed dairy cattle too many brassicas or too many flax seeds or things like that, then we start to have sulfur flavors in the milk, or we have netty flavors in the milk. Once again, that's tasting the terroir. You're tasting what you've been doing, your practice. So we're adopting the term terroir a little bit to mean how we're actually growing things. So can we taste practice? Can we taste how we grew it? Can we taste how we fed it? Can we taste all these things. Is that reflected in the ultimate outcome? And I think the answer is yes. I think we measure it. Do we know what we measure is reflected in the tastiness? No, we don't actually know that that's reflected in the tastiness, because we know that people have different tastes and that everybody can taste the same thing, and they can taste it all very differently because of just our own genetics. And a lot of it has to do with the way we grew up and our images of things. So our search image. So when we look at something, we go, oh, yeah, I wouldn't buy that. Now, if I ask you to taste it, and then you taste it, and you go, oh, you know, I totally wouldn't have bought that, but I actually really liked that.

Sara Harper: 10:57

Well, back to your point about the healthier fat. I remember hearing you and I think Dr. Van Vie in a conversation talk about that the healthier fat is often yellow. And so if you saw it in a store, you would think, oh, that's gone bad. But that's actually healthier, and for some people, more flavorful.

Jill Clapperton: 11:17

Yeah, I mean, we were doing that tasting at last week. We're tasting grassfed, beef, and grain fed beef. And it was fascinating. You know, the yellow fat wasn't that obvious in the grassfed until we cooked it. And then when we cooked, it was really bright yellow. And you compared that with the same genetics and the animals that had been grown up on the same pasture, but then had been moved to a feedlot for six weeks to finish, the fat was still very white. To me. It wasn't perfectly white because it takes a long time to get the color out of your fat. But the flavor was like night and day. And the differences in these animals is almost negligible because, really, one of them just spent more time on the grass to be finished another six weeks. And the other ones were in the feedlock for six weeks.

Sara Harper: 12:24

Yeah, because it was the same herd.

Jill Clapperton: 12:25

Same herd, same background, all of it. And the taste was quite different.

Sara Harper: 12:32

Wow.

Jill Clapperton: 12:32

Tenderness was mildly more tender. It would have been hard for my untalented palette or my unexperienced palette. I didn't notice the change in the tenderness. But the chefs that were tasting me like, yeah, this is just slightly more tender, but it doesn't have any flavor.

Sara Harper: 12:54

That's another great point to bring in. So you're doing some good work with chefs, and you have a good network of chefs in your world. And that's a really exciting thing that we're looking forward to bringing to the podcast audience, is their expertise paired with yours, like, very different ends of the same spectrum.

Jill Clapperton: 13:15

Yeah, it's that whole idea of, and I take this all from Chef Dan Barber. It was his idea when I first met him, like, well, can we taste? If I taste food, that I really like, and it's really tasty. Is it good for me? And I'm like, I don't know, intuitively, I think that's probably right, but I don't know. And so now we're actually working on that question. We're actually asking that question. Not only can we chemically understand, like, from a chemistry perspective, understand that taste, and then is that same taste reflected in the nutrition of the product? This is going to be a big project that we're working on in the next I think for the next three or four years, we're going to be really diving into this whole idea of what is tasty and is tasty, nutritious and intuitively. We all expect it will be, but we're taking another step. And that is that same flavor, is that same taste linked back to how I grew it?

Sara Harper: 14:26

Yeah.

Jill Clapperton: 14:27

And can I taste regenerative soil? I think about a baker who is using, I think it was Rouge de Bordeaux wheat. And he said, oh, using Rouge de Bordeaux doesn't really make that good a bread by itself. It just doesn't do this. It doesn't do this, at least the ones I've done before. And then all of a sudden, he was using this other grain that had been grown in a really good soil by somebody who really tended it really well and not with a whole lot of chemicals. And he said, I actually baked Olive O bread with it baked fine. And he said, Usually it doesn't do that. And so there's obviously something there. We just have to start understanding it. And we need more scientists to sort of jump onto the bandwagon and start looking at this connection. So if this bakes differently and it's linked to this practice, then the question becomes, how do we tell people about that? How do we help people do what they've done? Like, what practice is it that's going to help you get to hear? And it may not be for everybody, I admit, but for anybody who's really interested in that, that's the whole idea. How can you differentiate your own product? How can your product be differentiated based on the practices on your farm and how you regenerate your soil?

Sara Harper: 15:56

And how can you cut through the miles of marketing that are so confusing and frankly, misleading in a lot of cases? And that's been my frustration. As you know, I worked a lot with farmers, trying to help them explain regenerative agriculture and bring that forward, working with small brands, and they just get lost in a sea of claims that may be legally correct, but that's not what the consumer thinks, if they even know what regenerative agriculture is, or this better way of farming is. What they're buying is not what they think they're getting, because it's hard to build a whole supply chain. But anyway, that will talk more about all that.

Jill Clapperton: 16:40

I actually know you're going to talk.

Sara Harper: 16:42

A whole lot more about that.

Jill Clapperton: 16:44

And that's part of it because this started with our whole idea of asking people, what is regenerative?

Sara Harper: 16:52

Yeah.

Jill Clapperton: 16:53

And we got all these answers, and it's wonderful. But this is also part of regenerative. It's regenerating the taste in our food. Regenerating the nutrition in our food.

Sara Harper: 17:04

And those two are coming back together. So you don't have to give up taste for health, and you don't have.

Jill Clapperton: 17:10

To give up taste for yields either. That's the whole thing, this whole idea of abundance. Well, I just have to have abundance. And who cares how it tastes? I just need a lot of it. Well, no, actually, the whole idea of, well, we just need enough to feed ourselves, I think that's where we all went wrong. I think that the explicit outcome of agriculture for a long time has been abundance more and more without any concentration on nutrition. Like, is this more any good for us? And I go back to one of my mentors, dr. Ross Welsh. And a project, when he started on his journey was a project that he and Dr. Jerry Coons. Were working on in Bangladesh. And they can grow wheat, bushels of wheat. They're always yielding over that 120 to 140 mark of bushels of wheat per acre, which a lot of people here struggle for on a regular basis, but they could do it fairly regularly. So they started eating wheat and gave up their diets of beans and peas and things like that because, well, they took more energy to cook, and energy was that was another thing. They need to regenerate energy, too, but it just was easier to cook. So they started eating more and more of their wheat. Well, turns out their wheat was very deficient in zinc and iron and all these things, and they actually noticed that their kids were not as smart as they used to be.

Sara Harper: 18:48

Wow.

Jill Clapperton: 18:49

And that's when they called in Jerry and Ross and they started looking at this and they realized that they had two generations of children that were deficient in zinc, which really affects their cognitive abilities. We think about that. Why isn't the explicit outcome of agriculture food that's good for you? So instead of growing food that's good for us, we just grow an abundance of food, and then we add a little zinc and we'll add a little iron and we'll add this and we'll add that, and then we'll make it good for you. We're not going to grow it good for you. We're just going to make it good for you. No, we should be growing it good for us, because then we really get regenerative, because once we start growing, it good for us. And we start growing the nutrition, we start talking about climate change. We start making the whole water cycle different. We start having clean water. We start having every drop of water go into the ground. We start having water holding capacity. We start having all these really good things and the whole system becomes much better. Do we taste that too? I don't know, but I think we do, yes.

Sara Harper: 20:05

Before we go too much further, I want to make sure and give the audience a chance to learn more about your background and how you're able to know a lot of these things about the nutrition and food. So just share with them a little bit about you, about your background.

Jill Clapperton: 20:20

Oh, my background. Well, since I can remember, I had an interest in plants right from the time that my grandfather was growing, had this gorgeous garden in his backyard, and he also bred roses. So I remember in the morning waking up and the smell of the roses from the garden, and that's something that you don't have as much anymore. But it actually walked all the way to the second floor of my bedroom when I stayed at his house, and I can remember waking up to the smell of roses just marvelous into this day. I love roses, and I think it's because it takes me back to those days of the kid waking up to this fragrance of roses. And then he used to leave cucumbers hiding in my stall of vegetation for me to find. So he tasked me with going out to find a cucumber. And, I mean, I was less than five years old when we were doing this, so I would be rummaging around, grandpa, grandpa, I found one. And of course, he knew exactly where it was, but just from that time on. And then we'd go in and we'd make cucumber sandwiches with the cucumber I found, and they always tasted delicious. And I went on to work in botany. I have a PhD in plant physiology, biochemistry, and went on to try and understand the effects of the environment on plant physiology and mostly how mycorrhizal fungi, how fungi and the soil bring in all these nutrients and how that affects plants and then how that changes the whole environment of the roots. And I've really concentrated on roots rather than above ground because I've always believed that roots are where it all happens. I mean, roots are the whole nutrition aspect. They keep the plants healthy, and it changes the soils. And I was really lucky along the way. I mean, I was mentored by two brilliant Australian scientists, dr. Albert Rivera and Dr. Glenn Bowen, really early on. Like, just I mean, I hadn't even graduated when they sort of mentored me a little bit. And Dr. Dennis Parkinson, who was mycologist who really spawned my interest in fungi and this whole idea of what fungi could do. But, I mean, Dr. Albert Riviera really coined the term rises here and how the rise here works together. And that sort of came together. And I hit it at a time when I just started university where I got to meet all these amazing scientists like Dr. Jack Harley from Oxford, who wrote the first book on mycorrhiza and I got to listen to lectures from him and then later with his daughter, Sally Smith. And I'm sure I'm going to forget people here, but I just was so lucky to have had the input in my developing scientific years from people also like Lynette Abbott out of Western Australia, who has this passion, who really coined the term soil health. Most people don't know that, but she did. And I can't thank these people enough for sort of like, keeping me going along the way. And then it was really Ross Welsh who took me aside and really started helping me understand the links between practice and nutrition. And he said that was the one thing he really regretted in his career, was that he never got a chance to really look at practice and how it linked to nutrition.

Sara Harper: 24:26

So you took up that?

Jill Clapperton: 24:28

I did. I grabbed the torch.

Sara Harper: 24:31

That's good. That's what every scientist wants, right? I clearly defined path to continue on.

Jill Clapperton: 24:37

Yeah. So I grabbed the charge, and even though I haven't really worked on it fully until the last couple of years, I've always been sort of dabbling in that area and sort of asking farmers, what does it take? And asking people, does it taste different? But then I realized that the people who have embraced regenerative agriculture and who really grown their soil and who have made these changes, then, there's lots of them.

Sara Harper: 25:06

I'm glad you said that, because that's the thing I hear all the time in talking with emerging brands and companies that want to bring Regenerative to the public, and they even portray to the public, well, if just the farmers would come along and I'm over here screaming in the corner, there are tons of farmers. There are more farmers doing this than you can manage in your supply chain. And that's the problem. They don't want to manage a separate supply chain. They don't want to deal with the complexity of it. But don't say it's not that there aren't any farmers doing it, because there are around the world.

Jill Clapperton: 25:39

I know. I heard that when I was in Brussels at a conference on food security and nutrition, and they said, well, we need to bring the farmers along. And I stood up and I was like, no, actually, you need to actually listen to the farmers.

Sara Harper: 25:54

You need to come along. You need to bring the processes along. That's what you need to do.

Jill Clapperton: 25:59

And I was like, it's not farmers. Farmers have embraced regenerative agriculture.

Sara Harper: 26:03

Yeah.

Jill Clapperton: 26:03

They are rebuilding their soils. They are doing all these things. You just are so isolated in your silo that you don't realize this whole movement is going on around you.

Sara Harper: 26:15

Well, and they don't want to pay for it. They don't want to pay for it.

Jill Clapperton: 26:18

Well, but also, as scientists, we haven't connected there because we're not supposed to connect there. I mean, I remember applying for grants early on and we were doing nutrition, but we were linking it to soils. And they said, well, but this is not really in nutritional science, so you should apply in soil. So we apply in soils. And they go, yeah, but we don't do that in soils. And I'm like, look, this is the integration of these too, because the outcome of working on soil health the outcome of soil health is more nutritious food. So how are they not linked together? But the problem was that we're so used to pigeonholing all these disciplines that we don't see the requirement for interdisciplinary science. And that's where we need we need everybody working together. We need us all to come together.

Sara Harper: 27:14

That's back to so much of what you have helped me see is how amazing the whole world underground is, the microbiome, and how it all works together in harmony. Like, one thing gives this chemical and the other thing takes it up, and it's all this massive it looks like chaos, maybe to those the uninitiated, but when you really understand it, it's a massive amount of harmony that could only exist because there's no one person directing at all. They're all synchronized together. And maybe that's a system that is hard for us people to do or to think about, because we used to just, like, clear it all away and put what's supposed to be there and manage it. That's very different than nature.

Jill Clapperton: 28:02

I was listening to the creative director for the silk road ensemble this morning on the radio, and she talked about and she said they were talking about, well, a Japanese flute working with a sitar and some of these other instruments. Like, you don't think that song they would even belong in that song. And yet after you hear it, you go, oh, course they do. And that's my point here, is that we need that creative. It's not about everybody doing the same thing, repeating the same thing. We have to be able to have that creative spirit where what you do on your farm to regenerate is soil is uniquely yours and grew up on you because you're working with your environment to do this, and somebody else on their farm is working with their environment to do this. And in the end, we're getting all this great food. We're all growing all these different varieties. The varieties are fine. We can't just grow one variety. We need to grow many varieties, and then we can blend all these different varieties or even the same variety growing in all these different places together to get it. Instead of fortifying with ingredients, why don't we just blend grains from different areas of the world together to get the nutrition we want? Just like farmers in north Dakota and South Dakota were selling grain over to Europe because it was high selenium, because they have high selenium soils, and it was being reflected in the quality of their grain. We can use all of that. And that's part of the terroir. That's part of the connection to the terroir is that my soils are going to have unique characteristics that your soils do not. But if we blend them together and we regenerate all our soils together, it's going to be so much better for all of us. And we have to work together. We can't just work in one little cluster here and one little cluster there. It's got to start to move out from the clusters, and it can't be. Well, do I have to do exactly what so and so did? The answer is no, you don't. You have to do what you can do to regenerate your farm. You have to do what you can do to make tasty food on your farm. And maybe you're going to have slightly different genetics than somebody else. That's okay, because the other thing that we found growing 84 different genetic grays, a wheat on the same farm over the same season, is that they all took up different amounts of nutrients.

Sara Harper: 30:36

Wow. That's amazing.

Jill Clapperton: 30:38

I know. And so there's no standardization here. This is embracing the very wonderful French term, which is the blood default. And we all need to embrace the difference. We all need to be the same. We all need to be different. We need to grow different varieties. We need to grow varieties that are adapted to our own climates. What is adapted over there, it might not grow here, but maybe I can grow the same amount and a different quality in my own backyard. And maybe I need the varieties that grow best in my really dry, hot climate instead of trying to grow something that was developed in Florida with a lot of water. Example of that came to me last week. There was a blueberry grower from Florida who was talking to a group of chefs, and he was at Blue Hill restaurant talking to a group of chefs, and chef Dan Barber was talking about how these blueberries were so amazing. And we're going to get him to talk. He's going to talk on tasting terroir. Great. So I'm not going to give his name away, but he was talking about his soil and how he was growing the same variety as everybody else around him. He wasn't growing special varieties or anything like that, but he believed that what he was doing, like his mulching and all these other things were affecting. And he said, I don't understand how that works, but I think it works. And then it's just to me, I said to him, I said, we'll works. Because when you mulch so this is another connection. Just little things here and there. But when you mulch, you insulate the roots from temperature, which is why we want cover crops and why we want more residents. But you actually insulate the roots from the effects of temperature. Well, blueberries don't like really hot temperatures. So now you throw. That mulch on top of them. So you're mowing between the rows and you throw all the weed, mulch and everything else on top of them. You insulate the roots so the roots stay cool. When the roots stay cool, even if it's hot outside, they keep pumping. So the transpiration steering keeps going because the roots are cool enough. They don't care. We can keep cooling you off. It's like on a hot day, you have to keep drinking, right? So that you can keep sweating.

Sara Harper: 33:12

Yeah.

Jill Clapperton: 33:13

So the same thing on a hot day. If we keep the roots cool, the plant can keep sweating, can keep transpiring. That transpiration stream comes all the calcium and the boron. I don't normally move at all unless they're pulled up by the transportation stream. So now I get fruit set. I keep the skins of my berries really good because I got a lot of calcium going into them. They get the boron so they stay on the plant much more easily. Don't drop off all these things. And I'm sure that you would be able to taste maybe you won't taste the calcium per se, but you'll taste.

Sara Harper: 33:54

The effect of that much and you'll get the calcium.

Jill Clapperton: 33:57

And you'll get the calcium.

Sara Harper: 33:59

Yes, I get it.

Jill Clapperton: 34:01

Maybe that's why it tastes so good, because people go amazing. Because you also have all the ingredients to make those anticyens and those antioxidants that are rich in the skin of the blueberries.

Sara Harper: 34:14

Right?

Jill Clapperton: 34:14

They get all this mineral nutrition because the blueberries are well mulched. So they can keep transpiring. They can keep sucking up the zinc, they can suck up the iron. They can suck up all these other things that can make all the amino acids that give it that slight tarp layer in the organic acid. Maybe we don't taste the terroir in the same way we think, but we taste it through the nutrition of the plant that allows them to make these molecules that we taste and make the.

Sara Harper: 34:41

Flavor and that we crave, because we.

Jill Clapperton: 34:44

Crave when we have it.

Sara Harper: 34:46

Right? It strikes me as you're talking about all of this, that really what we want to see is a system of growing that's more like a garden and less like a factory. So you're still tending it. You're still involved with it. You're interacting it. You're noticing what the plants need and you're helping it's not your absent. Just like throw a field to chaos and throw a few seeds out there and hope it works. That's always how I described Iowa farmers actually coming from Kansas. But anyway, so you are involved in the system. You are a part of it. You are tending it. But a factory is much more in control. And back to the specialization they talked about. Like, each person just hits their widget or pushes their button. Each person plays a very separated piece of the supply chain puzzle. But the loss of the organic interaction, it stops being an organic system.

Jill Clapperton: 35:44

Yeah. I have a friend, a scientist, Renny Anchor, he from University of Gulf in Ontario, and he talks about Betty Crocker farming. Some of the millennials are not going to understand Betty Crocker farming. Betty Crocker was or Duncan Hines, but it was like a cake in a box. And I'm sure there are other examples of this, but it was everything. All you had to do was add water and stir and then throw it in the oven and you bake the cake.

Sara Harper: 36:19

Right.

Jill Clapperton: 36:21

And they still have cake in a box. I don't know what it's called, but we used to laugh because it used to be like seeds in a box with the seed companies and Roundup Ready seeds and all these other seeds was like, you just buy the seed, buy the chemicals, put them in, and voila, there's your crop, all taken care of. And you just go out there and you harvest it. And I think what you are talking about is you have to manage it in your head. You actually have to think about, what am I growing next? I've grown peace, so what's going to come after peace? Or in my case, and I'll use an example from my own farm, I grew a lot of winter rye in my cover crops because I was trying to change the soils a whole lot and grow a lot of roots and things like that. And it just turned out that the rye grew better than pretty much anything else. So then the next year, later on that summer when I went to grow milo, I struggled. My milo is taking its time. It is lethargic. It's like, oh, something about this is not quite right. And I realized it was like my rye is inhibiting. I actually have an alleopathic reaction on my myelo. Well, I have to rethink that I didn't fail and too many people go, oh, well, cover crops don't work. No, that is because I chose wrong. And I'm good at choosing, but I chose wrong.

Sara Harper: 37:57

It does a specific thing, and I.

Jill Clapperton: 38:02

Can be very litopathic and especially a little pathetic to warm season plants. And I didn't get my mix right. And because I'm in south central Kansas on the border with Oklahoma, it's dry and the residues are there and the roots are there. And we're going in. No till. Here's my effective tear water. My cover crop was inhibiting the growth of my other crop, and I was inhibiting weeds and a bunch of other things. But this is about choosing wisely and getting your plants so that they all grow together, because plant communities don't just grow together. I mean, some plants don't like to grow with others, and some plants like some of the weeds that we have. So for the farmers that are in rangeland, like me, spurge actually sends out root signals that inhibit things from growing around them so they can exploit all the resources around their roots. Plants aren't above doing that. Like getting the elbows out and going, hey, stay over, keep your own space. And those are the plants you don't want in your community, because you want plants that allow roots to move together and allow the roots to weave together so they all share. And I think that's another part of terroir is that when we get plant communities right, like when I get my companions right, so they support my cash crop, I think that the whole community is working together because we know that they survive drought a whole lot better. So they're sharing resources. How will that not be reflected in the grains or in the food that I grow from those? Like the beans and the peas and the sesame and all that? Well, it will, I think. And even it's reflected in my beef as well.

Sara Harper: 39:56

It's great to have the effects of the nutrition for the consumer, but even the bottom line for the farmer, because they lose crops to drought all the time, especially drought continues. And it seems counterintuitive. Like if you plant a cover crop, I know a lot of farmers that haven't worked with it as much are fearful that, well, that cover crop is going to take up moisture, and I need that moisture for my cash crop next year. But it's the opposite. It's an abundance principle.

Jill Clapperton: 40:23

And it's so weird. I mean, I know that Green Cover did all these experiments where they put moisture probes in the ground and showed very clearly that twelve species cover crop use less moisture than a soybean crop. And you're like, whoa.

Sara Harper: 40:38

And hold it in, right?

Jill Clapperton: 40:40

Hold the moisture in. Put your hand underneath that cover. You can feel the moisture and you can feel the coolness. And it's like I said, you insulate the soil. There's no evaporation off the soil itself. Soil never really heats up, so it keeps working. And that means roots can go deeper. That means roots getting more nutrition. Yes. Do they transpire? Yes. But that's the whole point. When they transpire, then we build up moisture in the atmosphere, which eventually comes down as rain again. We start working on this whole water cycle in a really good way. I think the whole point here of tasting terroir is that it's all connected. What we taste and the flavor in our food is connected to what we do on the land. And it's connected them to climate and all these other big regional variations that sometimes we only have this intuitive understanding of. And do we need to understand everything explicitly? I'm not sure we do. I think it's okay to know. And I think that I don't know that there could be anything bad about enjoying natural flavor. Like if something is really good and you are loving it and you know it's grown in this, I think you could probably trace it back and go, I love the flavor of this, like these blueberries. And everybody's like, oh my gosh, they were so amazing. And they were grown in this really interesting and unique way without any real additives in the same variety. Neighbors doesn't taste nearly as good as this. Why? Because of the way it's grown.

Sara Harper: 42:24

You've been listening to Tasting Terroir, a podcast made possible by a magical collaboration between the following companies and supporters, all working together to help farmers, chefs, food companies and consumers to build healthier soil for a healthier world. Risotera Owned by Dr. Joe Clapperton, Rizotera is an international food security consulting company providing expert guidance for creating healthy soils that yield tasty nutrientdense foods. Check us out@rizotera.com. That's Rhizoterra.com and the Global Food and Farm online community, an ad free global social network and soil health streaming service that provides information and connections that help you apply the science and practice of improving soil health. Join us at Global Foodandfarm.com and from listeners like you to support us through our Patreon account@patreon.com, Tasting Terroir. Patrons receive access to our full length interviews and selected additional materials. Patrons will also have the opportunity to submit questions that we will answer on the podcast. Tune in next week to hear more interviews and insights with myself, Sarah Harper and Dr. Joe Clapperton, as well as the regenerative farmers, chefs and emerging food. Companies in the Global Food and Farm online community and beyond. If you like our work, please give us a five star rating and share the podcast with your friends. Thanks so much for listening and for helping us get the word out about this new resource to taste the health of your food. Until next week, stay curious, keep improving, and don't stop believing that better is possible when knowledge is available.