Michael Olson with Peter Savio, Savio Realty LTD, Honolulu, HI

In the 1970s, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told America’s farmers to “Get big or get out.” Since Butz made his proclomation, farms have been getting bigger, and farmers have been getting fewer. This leads us contrarians to ask:

Can unprofitable big farms be converted into profitable small farms?

Topics include how real estate developer Peter Savio converted Hawaii’s defunct plantations into income-generating condominium farms; how condominium farmers generate a huge cash income from their 1 or 2 acre-sized farms; and how the condominium farm community is organized around a plantation camp. Radio Station: www.santacruzvoice.com Show Host Contact: www.metrofarm.com

Technology has given us the ability to look deep into the human body, and to see how the body reacts to various environmental stimuli. That being the case, we simply must ask:

Does alcohol do a body good?

The Food Chain Radio Show & Podcast with Michael Olson hosts Timothy B. Sullivan, Doctor of Psychiatry and Internal Medicine, for a conversation about alcohol’s effects on the body and mind.

Topics include the 9,000 year history of the human use and abuse of alcohol; how many of the studies that tout the health benefits of alcohol are tainted with biases; and whether alcohol really does do a body and mind good. Broadcast Home: www.santacruzvoice.com Host contact: www.metrofarm.com

Claire Kelloway, Manager, Food Systems Program, Open Markets Institute

As is true with the fish swimming in the sea, big companies grow bigger by eating smaller companies. That being the case, we simply must ask:

Should Kroger be allowed to eat Albertsons?

The Food Chain Radio Show & Podcast with Michael Olson hosts Claire Kelloway, Manager, Food Systems Program, Open Markets, for a conversation about the consolidation of the nation’s grocery stores.

Topics include why Kroger and Albertsons believe they must merge to survive; why some believe that a merger of the supermarket chain giants is unfair; and whether the competition between businesses for the consumers’ dollars can be managed fairly by the government. Host Radio: www.SantaCruzVoice.com

Producer / Host Contact: www.metrofarm.com

Michael Olson hosts Scott Moses, Partner, Solomon Partners Head of Grocery, Pharmacy and Restaurnts, for a conversation about the consolidation of the nation’s grocery stores.

Should Kroger and Albertsons be allowed to merge?

For the moment, you and I live in the small town of Anywhere, USA. There are two grocers in town, Deluxe Food on North Main and Star Market on South Main. Deluxe and Star have been competing for our grocery dollars by offering their best prices on food. Sometimes Deluxe has the best prices and wins our dollars, other times Star wins.

All goes well, in our small town world, until one day a big box store pops up in the neighboring small town of Somewhere with really cheap prices! Deluxe and Star are now unable to compete for our grocery dollars with their prices. To survive, Deluxe and Star must do something. But what can they do?

We see this small town dilemma being played out on a national scale with the proposed $20 billion merger of two of the nation’s largest supermarket chains, Kroger and Albertsons.

With about 5,000 stores between them, Kroger and Albertsons would seem to be big enough to compete for the nation’s grocery dollars. And they were big enough, until others with different business models appeared on the scene and grew to be much larger. You know the names: Walmart, Costco, Amazon.

Kroger and Albertsons, though with many stores between them, now find themselves becoming the little fish in the sea, and their business is gradually being eaten up by bigger fish.

What can Kroger and Albertsons do to survive?

Contact: www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host: www.santacruzvoice.com

Michael Olson hosts Robert Wolcott & Kaihan Krippendorff, Co-Authors, Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-In-Time Transform Business, Society and Daily Life.

It is said that food now travels an average of 1200 miles from where it was grown to where it is eaten.

If one were to look forward a hundred years into the future, from a hundred years in the past – when people lived on farms and ate food they grew those farms – one would think that 1200-mile food chain of the future to be an impossibility. And yet, here we are, eating food that traveled 1200 miles to get to our dinner plate.

This 1200-mile food is very convenient for us city people: Just open the plastic container and eat. No spending hours out in the fields and gardens with shovels, rakes and hoes. Just open and eat, and move on to the more important things we conjure up to do with our time.

But wait! According to Michael Olson’s Second Law of the Food Chain, “The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in our food.”

It is a fact: those of us who eat 1200-mile food have very little control over what is, or is not, in that food. We can only trust the businesses that grow, process, package, ship, store and sell that food to deliver us real nutrition. However, we also know that the businesses that sell the least amount of essential nutritients for the highest price are the businesses that tend to stay in business. And so we wonder:

Can the technology and innovation that delivers 1200-mile food, deliver 1-mile food?

Contact: www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host: www.santacruzvoice.om

Michael Olson hosts Nicole Virgil, Gardener and Practitioner of Christian Science, for a conversation about winning the right to garden.

Topics include how municipal governments prohibit residents from establishing gardens in their yards, why Nicole Virgil refused to accept that prohibition; and how Nicole’s fight for the right to garden resulted in Illinois becoming the second state in the U.S. to guarantee residents the right to garden.

One thing we learned from the Covid years is that our food chain has some very weak links, and that is a cause for concern for all of us who eat food for a living.

Consequent to that concern, many of the hungry have turned to growing their own food. Only a very few can grow all of their own food, but many can grow some of their own food in a garden.

Those who do garden enjoy the physical benefits of eating food they have grown, but also the spiritual benefits of growing the food.

But wait! What if City Hall prohibits the growing of food within its City limits? Sounds perfectly crazy, don’t you think. Not so, say most cities. In fact, only six states in the United States have passed legislation guaranteeing citizens the right to garden within the limits of cities.

Florida was the first state to grant such a right in 2019. Illinois became the second state in 2021. Those that won the right to garden in the city, lead us to ask…

How can one fight City Hall and win?

Contact: www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host: www.santacruzvoice.com

Michael Olson hosts Will Harris, Farmer, Rancher and Author of Giving a Damn: A Bold Return to Giving A Damn for a conversation about giving a damn farming and ranching.

Topics include why conventional farming and ranching were industrialized into commodity agriculture; why some farmers and ranchers are returning to conventional agriculture; and what it means to be “give a damn” farmers and ranchers.

I spent many of my early summers growing up on the Grandparents’ farm near Belfry, Montana.

The farm was a 360-acre boy wonderland, as it contained most all of the traditional farm animals, an orchard filled with fruit trees, a huge kitchen-garden, pastures for grazing animals, crop lands for growing plants and the Big Red Barn.

Everywhere this boy looked, there was an adventure in living to be had, and food to eat ­– real, whole food fresh from the soil in which it was raised.

Then, somewhere along the way, farmers and ranchers learned to grow crops with money instead of time. With money borrowed against the equity in their land, they could buy equipment and chemicals that reduced the time required for them to work in the field.

Today the farm that sits where the Grandparents’ farm sat grows government-subsidized sugar beets fence post to fence post. The big red barn is gone, and so are all the people.

As a citified adult, I am always keeping an eye open for that farm of my youth. I hunger for the farm’s adventures in living, and most especially, for its food. Those farms and ranches are not easy to find. Indeed, the great majority of the nation’s farmers and ranchers now grow commodity crops that are processed, wrapped in plastic, and shipped over a thousand miles to where we eat.

In commodity farming and ranching, whoever grows the most for the least wins, and least is what most of us eat in the confined animal feeding operations we call “the city.”

When I do find that farm of my youth – with real farmers growing real food in real soil –I like to call attention to it, in the hope that attention will engender more farms of my youth. One of the best ways to call attention to something, is to ask questions. And so today I pause ask:

Have you ever tasted “Giving a Damn” food?

Contact: www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host: www.santacruzvoice.com

Charlie Jenks, Founder, Connecting Vets with Horses

(Animals as Emotional and Cognitive Therapists for humans)

To heal one’s broken body, frazzled nerves or confused mind, one could take the drugs, as many do… or one could hop into the saddle and ride the horse. And so we ask…

How can one be healed by horse?

To heal our broken bodies, frazzled nerves and confused minds, we Americans take drugs, and we take lots of them. But what if… What if we could be healed by horse?

Now, had it not been for the fact that I was once healed by horse, I might have trouble taking the notion seriously…

But I was once healed by horse…. Way back then I was an inner-city, rabble-rousing community-organizer, things got out of hand and just quit making sense. There were a lot of confusion cures available on the streets in those days, as there are today, but none of them appealed, and so I went home to Montana and took a job as a hired-hand on a ranch.

That ranch filled my days with hard physical and mental labor. I ate hungrily of the ranch meals and slept the deep sleep of work done well. The big reward, however, came at the end of my work day. After the evening meal, I would saddle up a favorite quarter-horse gelding for a ride out into the lingering twilight of those great big prairie skies.

Though the horse and I never talked much, something must have been communicated because things began making sense again. After the season was over, I returned to my big city life, healed by horse.

Equine therapy is now claimed to be an effective therapy for physical, cognitive, emotional and spiritual affilictions, including attention-deficit, autism, conduct and dissociative disorders, dementia, post traumatic stress and many other related disorders. And so we ask:

Can one be healed by horse?

Connect: www.metrofarm.com