Podcast (sustainable-dish-podcast): Play in new window | Download
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson is the author of Hoofprints on the Land: How Traditional Herding and Grazing Can Restore the Soil and Bring Animal Agriculture Back in Balance with the Earth.
Ilse began her career as a veterinarian and eventually became an archaeozoologist. It was on an archeological expedition in Jordan that she encountered a Bedouin camel herd on their daily pass by the camp. She fell in love with the camels and wanted to learn more about this way of life.
In 1990, Ilse moved to India to do fieldwork on camel pastoralists and never looked back. Her work evolved into supporting socially responsible and ecologically sustainable livestock development.
Ilse co-founded the League for Pastoral Peoples and works with Lokhit Pashu-Palak Sansthan, a local organization that supports Rajasthan Pastoralists. And if that’s not enough, she co-founded Camel Charisma, a social enterprise that develops and markets camel products and runs a camel dairy
In her conversation with my co-host, James Connolly, Ilse expresses the benefits of pastoralism when compared to modern-day animal science and how much can be learned from this centuries-old wisdom. Their conversation includes topics like:
- The efficiency paradigm
- How government policies impact animal health
- Protein production of pastoralist societies
- The myopic view of climate change
- The need for predator species
- The 30 by 30 proposal
- Valuing biodiversity
- Balancing modernization while respecting indigenous wisdom
Resources:
International Year of Rangelands of Pastoralists
Compassion in World Animal Farming
Connect with Ilse:
Website: Ilse Kohler-Rollefson | The League for Pastoral Peoples
Twitter @islekohler
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connelly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Global Food Justice Alliance members, and listeners.
If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join.
A big thanks to the sponsor of today’s show, LMNT. Do you often suffer from headaches, muscle cramps, fatigue, or sleeplessness? It could be from an electrolyte deficiency, and drinking plain water may not be enough to replenish lost electrolytes. LMNT is a drink mix that has everything you need and nothing you don’t – no artificial ingredients, food coloring, gluten, fillers, or sugar!
LMNT comes in lots of great flavors, and when you go to sustainabledish.com/LMNT, you’ll get a free sample pack with your purchase. Plus, they have a convenient subscription program that makes it easy for you to keep your favorite flavors fully supplied. Head over to sustainabledish.com/LMNT to give it a try.
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connolly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
James Connolly
So this is James Connolly for the Sustainable Dish podcast. This is a sort of real honor. I read a lot of books. And you know, one of the things I actually really, really enjoy is whenever I sit down and read a book, and somebody, the writer kind of understands the poetry of writing. There are so many blurbs that I actually just cut and pasted and posted to my Twitter. They were perfect encapsulations of the way that I try to think about moving into you know, a future that is in align with nature and with our planet. And building a sort of a utopia built on, you know, harkening back to the past, in a way that actually builds biodiversity and builds a movement and a culture that is centered around all of this stuff. And one of the things I kept on thinking about when I was reading the book – let me introduce the book right now. It’s called Hoofprints On the Land: How Traditional Herding and Grazing can Restore the Soil and Bring Animal Agriculture Back in Balance with the Earth. And one of the things I was thinking about with this was a story from Daniel Quinn, who was talking about the book of Genesis and sort of Cain and Abel. And he said, if you actually look at it from an agricultural lens, you have the sort of Cain is the sedentary farmer. And Abel is the pastoralist, and God actually accepts Abel’s sacrifice, and rejects Cain’s, and he tries to give it from the perspective of what was happening during that time, as pastoralist communities were actually bumping up against sedentary agricultural communities. And the amount of blood that was spilled between the two. And a lot is said, when you think about sedentary agricultural communities, from a historical perspective, were very dominated by hierarchical structures, are very dominated by control. And pastoralists like are kind of hard to control. They move a lot. And so this book actually kind of really gives you an understanding of this. And so I want to introduce Ilse Kohler Rollefson. And thank you so much for coming on. This book is so wonderful.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Thank you. Thank you.
James Connolly
Yeah, so this is I mean, this is a combination of like a career working in veterinary science. It is a combination of an attitude of really wanting to understand the deep knowledge within pastoralist communities, but I kind of want to get into the sense of how you ended up in the space.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Basically, I’m an animal person. I’ve loved animals from when I was a child, I grew up with animals, and then the natural choice for professionals to become a veterinary doctor. And I went through my veterinary studies and then I started to practice and I found out I didn’t… it didn’t really agree with me because I couldn’t… I was not suited to be a small animal person because it involves a lot of owner psychology and you have to do… you know to please the owner, most of many of the pets don’t really have that much room with them. And I liked Large Animal Farm Animal Practice because I love talking to the farmers but I didn’t like the work that was associated with it. Mostly involved doing artificial insemination on cows and already you know this trend towards more industrial livestock keeping was you know, it was showing up and it was I didn’t like that every decision was based on economics. You know it’s happening. It’s understandable for a farmer of course, a farmer has to make a living and can’t be too sentimental but I don’t know I just didn’t feel really comfortable and then what really killed everything off of my identification is a veterinary professionals that I went to Kentucky on a horse breeding – a very famous horse breeding farm to stop back… to see practice here because I love thoroughbred horses. They’re so beautiful and elegant and everything and then I found out this is all this is hyper commercial and it was just about money and these poor you know, horses like two year old horses they raised on painkillers and at the end of the first season they’re finished off. So I thought no. That’s not what I want to do. And I don’t know, I came across archaeology. And fortunately I had a skill that was useful for archaeologists, I had that anatomical knowledge from my veterinary studies. I could identify the animal bones that they take up on archaeological sites and large… 1000s of them basically. And if you identify them by species, and by body part, and so on, you can actually make conclusions about class ecologies, and also past economies, what people were eating, how they were using the animals, and you can trace changes in the relationship with environment over time. And so I had the good fortune, I got accepted as volunteer on an archeological expedition in Jordan, lovely site called Pella in the Jordan Valley, which was occupied from the Stone Age until basically the present time, so it was just so… it was interesting from the bone pile, from that perspective. It was interesting also from the fact that archaeologists have a holistic approach, you know, they try to reconstruct former civilizations and cultures. And from all perspective, you need a lot of different disciplines that are involved in order to do these reconstructions and interpretations. You have geologists, botanists zoologists, human osteologist and stratigraphers and palaeontologist and so on. So it was a multidisciplinary team working together. So, I loved that work. But I even more, I fell in love with a Bedouin camel herd that was passing by on site every day. It was a beautiful scene of that camel herders singing to his herd and that… and how this, you know, huge herd of camels about 100 or so they were so obedient, you know, he gave them a voice command, and they all stopped in their tracks, or they started drinking, or did they did… I was just totally taken by that. I fell in love with camels and I did research on them. So at first, it was just emotional. And then I started reading about camels, how useful they are for people who live in arid parts of the world, and how wonderful their products are, and then all these things. So I just got into camel research, did my PhD on camel domestication. And yeah, and after having worked for 10 years, with just bones of dead animals, I felt it’s time now to do some work with living camels. And so it went and I ended up in India, because at that time, India still had a huge camel population. I had a fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies. And it was very difficult to start working there. It took me months to actually meet any camel nomads, because you know, they’re here one day gone the next day. I didn’t know the language at that time. So it was, it was just a lot of trouble. And then finally, I was fortunate and I met the first veterinarian from the Raika community. And he talked to me about his caste and how they were made by God Shiva to take care of camels, and he introduced me to a village where they were like, having a lot of camels. And then I don’t know, one step led to another I, yeah, I just, it was all emotional. But then afterwards, I found a lot of rationale to actually do what I felt like doing and I was so impressed by this culture of intimacy between people and animals and the people being members of the household and members of the family and how the fate of the animals and people were kind of interlinked. And already at that time, this was early 1990-91. Actually, already, it was evident that this country was under a lot of pressure, because they were being excluded from their traditional grazing areas of camels were undernourished as a consequence that made them predisposed to becoming sick. So they wanted veterinary support. Yeah. So I ended up by accident.
James Connolly
So there’s so many different directions where we can go right now, but I do think it’s interesting how timely this book is because I think what we are seeing is the end results or even, you know, in some ways, my fear is the results of a huge push a global push for dedicated and protected conservation areas. And if you’re studying the Maasai, especially in Kenya and Tanzania, we already are seeing the end result of that they’ve already been there a number of different protests that ended the violence over the past year and a half, specifically against the Maasai. But this is also a 30 year campaign where they’ve essentially been enclosed within these spaces that don’t allow for a greater free range of movements. And we see this happening globally with reindeer herders, we see it happening with the Maasi. And we also see it happening in different sections in Eastern Europe. And I just wonder if you want to kind of give sort of an overall sort of comparison to what you think is actually happening? Because if the animals are getting sick, it’s the result of poor nutrition because of governmental policies. Do you agree or?
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Exactly, I totally agree. It’s a result of government, basically, also of the lack of government policies, of governments not being able to understand or realize or see the enormous economic importance that there the pastoralist communities actually have in their respective countries. And this is all based… it goes back to how, you know, the people who are in charge of policymaking for animal husbandry are so they are all trained in the western model. So they went to study in the US or in Europe, and they’re infused this is what I call the efficiency paradigm, which basically looks at animals in from a very narrow perspective. They, I mean, natural, what they call natural resource efficiency, that is kind of the mantra of the discipline, and it just looks at basically, how much feed you put into the animal, and then how much product you get out. And all the other repercussions on the environment and so on of that approach are being totally ignored. And also, a lot of things are totally misrepresented. Unfortunately, if you look at it at pastoralism, they are actually the most efficient protein producers that we have because they use very fiber cellulose, which forage and it’s not grass, actually, you know, we obviously in the west, or in the north, we always talk about grass, but it’s actually shrubs and trees and thistles and weeds. And so what the livestock is eating? Very rarely grass, I mean, grass is only in a few countries. And so they basically they convert this waste into highly nutritious food, I mean, mostly milk and but also meat. And very importantly, also the manure, which keeps the crop cultivation growing. So they are actually FAO data showing that in countries which have big pastoralist populations like Ethiopia, and Kenya, the animals produce, like 10 times more protein than they are being fed. Whereas in the US, it’s exactly the opposite. I think the animals are, you know, fed with two times as much protein as you actually get out of them. So it’s a totally, this feedlot thing, feeding animals with crops that have been grown elsewhere, with, you know, added with fertilizers and pesticides, and I don’t know what, bringing them to the animals. It’s actually… it’s a totally destructive process for protein, it’s nonsensical at all. But from the animal science perspective, it’s the most efficient because they just measure, you know, the amount of meat that comes out at the end. And they don’t… they also… they don’t even look at the composition of the meat. The composition of the meat from animals in feedlots is totally different from that, that have been raised on pasture. So it’s a very simplistic view that animal scientists have been adopted. And through that they have actually… they have kind of, maybe not even willingly or knowingly connived with all these industrialized production systems that are the cause of the ire of a lot of the people who go vegan or vegetarian. I mean, that’s one reason I think, you know, why people are so much against livestock because they see the cruelty that’s involved frequently. The other reasons, of course, I think, as you know, I’ve just heard you write it somewhere or say it somewhere that there are massive commercial interests behind artificial meat and dairy. And so those players that want to… that just focus on the climate, negative climate effects…
James Connolly
Yeah, you know, I think for us, it’s people who have actually been involved in this argument for a long time, when the conversation became the single-minded conversation about emissions, specifically carbon and methane emissions, one of the things that we said was how nimble the industrial agricultural system was that they would, in essence, just create methane digesters. And so they would say, their answer to everything is to consolidate more and more. And so they’ll put more animals into a more compact confined space, because they say, well, we now we have to deal with this one single element.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Narrowing everything I mean, and they forget at this time, okay, they might have less methane per unit of livestock products. But what about the biodiversity loss? And what about the pollution and all these other the antibiotic resistance and all these other aspects are being totally ignored? If you talk livestock sustainability, in the animal science circles, it is just about climate, climate, climate. Nothing else.
James Connolly
Yeah. And I do think like, when we look at some of the things I actually marvel at sometimes are the efficiencies that kind of happened within industrialized livestock, you know, you kind of talked about it in the book about bringing animals back onto the land after harvest, their agricultural harvests, to eat a lot of the roughage, and the agricultural byproducts that are left on the land, and then the manure, and the urine is then used to bring back fertility to that land. Part of the after effects of the Green Revolution was that India’s land wasn’t actually suitable for the level of industrial fertilizers, and all of the pesticides in agricultural like insecticides that were there… that are put onto that land. And it really exhausts the land very quickly. And so I think one of the things that I kind of find interesting about that is that like, in the industrial side, they will say, Well, we take distillers grains, we take agricultural byproducts, we take all of this stuff, and then we feed it to ruminant animals specifically. And the efficiency of that is one of the problems that I worry about because we’re always looking to efficiency. The thing that is constantly thrown out is the morality of the situation, like what is a moral world that we want to live in. And we’re so focused on this one thing, sustainability and efficiency that these guys have, in essence, kind of co-opted the conversation, and are just taking all of this stuff, and then moving into these single metrics to say that they’re sustainable. And we’re finding this in the fossil fuel industry. We’re finding this everywhere. I don’t know if there’s a question in that. But I do think that there’s an interesting aspect of the degree – one of the things that you kind of talk about is the degree of knowledge that is among pastoralists communities, that can’t be quantified, right. And the way that they think about sustainability is so different from the way that we think about it, that we almost don’t even have a language for the way that they talk about it. So I wonder if you can kind of elucidate on that.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
No, it’s… you’re absolutely right. So they take a holistic view, they take so many factors into consideration. If you look at animal science, you know, you have specialists in each little discipline in nutrition, and genetics and pharmacology, and I don’t know what and pastoralists have, they have a holistic view. They consider all these things, they can exactly see the relationship between the animals and the vegetation, and they know when it’s time to move, or actually, they listen to the animals. That’s the thing. I mean, so in animal science, the animal is an object, it’s composed of metrics. And here the animal is a living being, which you trust, or with which you have a relationship, you listen, you know, to what they say, and you try to make their life easy. So it’s a continuous dialogue between animals and people. That’s one thing. So and they’re very passive. Also, they have great powers of observation. They can… they know each of the animals very well that the different behaviors so they treat each animal as an individual. And it’s, I don’t know why I mean, it bears no relationship to the animal science and that’s why I like it so much, because the animals are taken as they are on the same level. It’s not like human dominating the animal and so this is actually the overarching problem is this, you know, of the technocrats, believing we can change the world as we like or as we want and the indigenous view of the past was true is we are part of, they’re part of something bigger and we need to align ourselves with it meaningfully are part of nature, and we have to adapt to nature. We have to humor nature. Nature, sometimes it’s cruell. It’s terrible. But then if you adapt to it, then after some time, nature can also be bountiful. So you arrange yourself with nature, rather than trying to dominate it. And then this is what we have to learn – relearn.
James Connolly
Yeah, and, you know, I do think that there’s a lot of scientists who are trying to reevaluate Darwinian evolution, from the perspective that there was… there is a hierarchy between predator and prey, and all of this stuff that sort of happens that nature is red in tooth and claw. You know, because I think it’s so much more cooperative than than we’ve ever given it credit for. And I think the way that we studied evolution, the way we studied, you know, civilization was always through the lens of people who were educated within these sort of realms of aristocracy and hierarchy. And, you know, you kind of talk about and they’re sort of wolves relationship to pastoralists, and how they view wolves is integral to, in some ways, sort of the management of sheep, and, you know, other animals. And if you can kind of talk a little bit about that.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Yeah, that’s also I mean, what I see, this totally relaxed view if animals are taken by a predator, that whether it’s wolves or whether it’s… I’m in my area, it’s mostly leopards that prey on livestock. And it happens regularly. And if it’s within certain limits, it’s totally accepted. And they say, Oh, the leopard also has to eat. And wolves, yes, this wolves also. So there’s a in central India, on the Deccan Plateau, they are pastoralist cultures. they’re the Kuruvas and the Danga, and in that area wolves are quite frequent. And they actually worship the wolf. And because they think the wolves keep the herds healthy by eliminating the sick animals, and they actually, some people I talked to, they were worried because the wolf had disappeared. They need them. Of course, you know, it’s a nice, idealized situation. But we also have to see I mean, in like, in Germany, we’ve had massively introduction of wolves, and people are not used to it – a shepherd. So the wolves can also cause a lot of trouble. So I mean, you need, we need to balance it out. In a way, there are some wolves who are killers. I mean, he will just go into flock and kill lots of sheep. And that’s also not acceptable. So, but the thing is, I think here also people have forgotten maybe earlier, they had skills, how to deal with wolves. So for a century or so there haven’t been any wolves. So I think the knowledge of how to deal with wolves is there. Even I mean recently in India, so one in that area of where I live, there’s talk about reintroducing tigers, and that has us actually up in arms because the tigers are… they kill people too. Leopards, they don’t. Wolves also, they don’t but tigers kill a lot of people. So we are definitely not keen having the tigers re-introduced into our area because actually tigers also, they are not… I mean, they are less threatened than the wolves in India. Wolves are they’re less wolves in India than tigers. The tiger is kind of the national emblem also. So we are personally we are very scared of the tiger being introduced. But we went to visit another pastoralist group in the Himalayas, the Gujars, who have buffaloes. And they have also a uniquely intimate relationship with their buffaloes, and they walk up and down the Himalayas. And in the summer, they go really high in the alpine pasture. And they were saying they have no problem in these highlands.
James Connolly
Yeah, you know, I think that one of the things that I’ve been thinking about and was thinking about a lot when I was reading your book was the so the last time we had a climate crisis is it that at the turn of the century, and it was centered around bringing nutrition back to the soil. They had gone into the Atacama Desert, and we’re trying to get as much bat and bird guano as possible. But prior to the haber bosch method being invented in Germany in 1906, the world was running out of nitrogen. And it created a real crisis. There was a lot of the colonial land grab that happened, the scramble for Africa, a lot of the movement towards more colonization was to build new farmland and new farm spaces. And so I’m trying to build a parallel between the love of this stuff that happened in the early 20th century, especially in the States. You had guys who were the sort of original anthropologists like Madison Grant, who was highly racist but was also involved in the saving of the bison, the American bison. And he created some of the first zoos, he created some of the… and he was the one along with another a number of different scientists who convinced Teddy Roosevelt to create the national park system. And so when the national park system was created, you know, they kicked off indigenous people who had been living there for, you know, hundreds and 1000s of years. And so the methodology at the time, and the thinking at the time was to rewild these landscapes and to bring… to sort of excise people from them. So that the, you know, you could hold on to these pristine landscapes – totally racist, totally, without any knowledge of how a lot of hurting communities and indigenous peoples were stewards of the land. They farmed in a very different way. They farmed communally. And so I’m wondering if he’s like, you see a lot of parallels because I see you talk about this a lot within the landscape of the 30 by 30, which is 30% of the world green, you know, sort of fortress colonialism, kicking off indigenous peoples, and then also the closing of the commons. It’s happening within many pastoralist communities that are happening. I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about that.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Yes. Fortress conservation? Yeah, it’s very concerning. And this? Yes, I mean, it’s a big issue at the ongoing COP of the COP15 there that is 30 by 30, that’s 30% of the landmass, landmass and oceans should be conserved or kept pristine. I’m actually not exactly sure what they mean by that. It’s not totally clear to me. But actually, I mean, these places, the 30%, I mean, they’re totally, you know, differently distributed. There are some countries who have a lot of them and other countries who don’t. So I think there’s no clarity at the moment also how this would be implemented. But one thing is for sure, those places which still be present nature, or they seem like nature, they I like that, because they have been managed by indigenous peoples. And by among whom pass was a big proportion. So, I mean, I would be okay with 30% was 30 by 30, if the management was actually given to the pastures and to the indigenous peoples, if it was handed over to them. I don’t know if that’s practical, but I mean, basically, it’s prevention. We have to prevent commercial interests coming in and exploiting and mining and I don’t know, destroying the landscapes. So I know that would be controversial truth, you know, because some indigenous members of indigenous peoples also, they want development. So it’s a very tricky situation how to handle. Yes.
(LMNT Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD
Do you often suffer from headaches, muscle cramps, fatigue, or sleeplessness? It could be from an electrolyte deficiency. Drinking plain water may not be enough to replenish lost electrolytes, which is especially important for athletes, kids, breastfeeding moms, those who are on a low-carb diet, and it can help regulate appetite. LMNT was created by my co-author and good friend, Robb Wolf. And is free of artificial ingredients, food coloring, gluten, fillers, and sugar. To put it simply, LMNT is a drink mix that has everything you need and nothing you don’t. Even U.S. Olympic athletes rely on LMNT, and I personally recommend it to everyone in my nutrition practice. I love the raspberry and citrus flavors, and when you buy via my link, you’ll get a free sample pack of a variety of flavors for you to try. Plus, they have a convenient subscription program that makes it easy for you to keep your favorite flavors fully supplied. Head over to sustainabledish.com/LMNT to give it a try. That’s sustainabledish.com/LMNT
James Connolly
Yeah. I mean, I do feel like some part of it’s a false promise. Right?
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Oh, it’s a false promise. Because yes, if it is implemented, as government’s also envision it, it will be fortress conservation. Exactly.
James Connolly
And, you know, I interviewed somebody recently, he was talking about the insect crisis, specifically in places like Denmark, but anywhere it’s studied, we’re finding, even within places that have been protected areas for, you know, for 50 years. El Yunque Park in Puerto Rico have found massive declines in insects. And so the trophic cascade that happens when insects are gone, is just like, I don’t even think we can comprehend it. It’s one of the scariest books I’ve read in a really long time, but the idea that you can create this conservation area that would then create these safe harbors for insects, it just isn’t true. You can’t build these bubbles on the planet and then continue to do everything else you’re doing in the west and in the Global North, you know, forever. And I think that’s one of the biggest push backs that Survival International and Amnesty International – they were just talking about this literally at the beginning of the month. If I may, just want to read a passage to get your… So this is Fioretti Longo, who was Survival’s Decolonize Conservation Campaign. “And so that the idea that 30 by 30 is an effective means of protecting biodiversity has no basis in science. The only reason it’s still being discussed in the negotiations is because it’s being pushed hard by the conservation industry, which sees an opportunity to double the amount of land under its control. Should it go ahead, it will constitute the biggest land grab in history, and robbed millions of people with their livelihoods. And if governments are really meaningful about protecting biodiversity, and the answer is simple, recognize the rights of indigenous peoples.”
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Absolutely. I totally agree. Yeah. I totally agree. And I mean, coming back to the insect crisis, I mean, we need. So for insects to thrive, also we need animals, you know, large animals in the landscape. We need the manure from livestock is a hotbed for insect creation and development. So, in fact, I think, what did I read recently that, I mean, it’s a disappearance from animals from the landscape of livestock from the landscape that has majorly contributed to the insect crisis. So and there are also some people saying that. So I mean, in nature, we have that relationship, you know, we have the plants which synthesize the energy by means of photosynthesis. And then animals, they can’t do that. So they have to move around to capture that energy. And then after some time, they die and everything… so there’s that cycle. I mean, where plants are sedentary, and animals move. And we need them both together in the landscape. I mean, we can’t just have – this is the huge problem with this agriculture is that it’s also split into plant expert into crop people and into livestock experts. And they don’t talk to each other. They don’t see that they really they need to interact, they need to create agro ecosystems where animals and plants are together. Yeah, and some people actually, there’s… I’ve heard some scientists say that we do not have because we have had such a loss of wild mega fauna. And the wild mega fauna is really important and that in to fill in for that. Actually, we need livestock, at least for the time being, we have to have animal livestock in the landscape because there are no other option. And I can confirm that also from India, that those leopards I was talking about their main diet is sheep and goat. Yet the sheep and goat tassels are not allowed to go into the forest where those leopards are being conserved. It just doesn’t make any sense at all.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, it’s very concerning because I do find the Food Summit, the UN Food Summit, the level of protests from indigenous people who actually boycotted that, yeah, they said, we’ve been the plenaries sessions were all governed by Nestle and Unilever and these most large multinational corporations, who have had, you know, 100 years to convince us this is the only way that humans can learn how to eat or feed themselves. Yeah, go ahead.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
No, but you know, at the land food system, there was also… I was involved in one process or so it was on rangelands and pastoralism. And we had a few events. Have you heard of the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists that’s coming up in 2026. It’s going to be… it’s an a UN year. And it was spearheaded by the Government of Mongolia. And there is a huge movement in Mongolia is one of the few countries that the takes pride in its pastoral heritage because they never were any farmers basically. But there’s a huge civil society movement behind it. Also they have a website, i y r p.org. And very active. So we all have our hopes that something will happen in that year of international year of arrangement and passes. So that was a good part of that food system summit. I mean, we had some events, and we were quite pleased. But there’s also the livestock people also had events, and they were really upset because there were a lot of these representatives of the industrial livestock sector, the International meat Secretary, Indonesia, deer Federation, and so on. They were trying to project themselves as being sustainable and net zero and all that. And then. So it was going along like that. And then the Secretary of the food system Summit, they put in place a new chair or So Philip Lymbery from the Compassionate World Animal Farming, and he didn’t want to have any of that. So finally, so that process stopped, actually.
James Connolly
Oh right. Yeah, you talked about that. Yeah. I mean, I just think it’s just such a narrow worldview that we’re being shuttled into, you know, and I do think when you’re in this moment, where you feel there is a crisis going on the story that we tell us ourselves about what the future looks like. It’s just so important. And there’s so many sort of great stories in your book about pastoralist communities, some of them forced to go into the city to work children who have been forced to go into the city and just realize how much was lost by moving into that monoculture, which is, like livestock for humans. And so it’s just so interesting that the level of disconnection that happens, the level of like, you know, that you’re losing so much of humanity when you move away from that space, and so many of them come back and realize that was it was a false bargain. So there’s so many really wonderful stories in that, you know, not everybody realizes that.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I do have hope that maybe there will be some positive developments, I think, because I mean, those people who support I mean, this pastoralist range land people, they’re becoming strong. I mean, they’re developing a lot of momentum. And I also feel that the industrial livestock sector, it will collapse at some stage or the other because of the antibiotic resistance about, you know, another pandemic… livestock pandemic coming up also, already, I mean, they faced so many problems with mass killings of chickens. And I mean, it’s just, it’s not a sustainable system, it might just collapse on its own. And as you probably, as you know, a lot of those corporates that are in the livestock sector, they’re also now going into the artificial meat and dairy and so on. And I think they are hedging their bets. So my prediction is the industrial livestock production will come to an end at some time.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, my fear is, and I’m sure that this is a sort of bottom line, budgetary reasons to move into it, if you could somehow convince people to eat livestock feed. And that was like, then you cut up the animal is the middleman and you could charge the same premium for it. So I think it was a fiscal response and economic response to that. And JBS has moved away from a lot of the ones that were heavy investors, the plant-based meats, I think, have actually moved away from funding that, but…
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
yeah, yeah, yeah
James Connolly
One of the things you kind of talk about is the sort of the lack of resiliency within the industrial livestock sector, if you want to kind of go into that. Yeah, exactly. Genetic resiliency, and
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
I mean, the value chains also, no, I mean, that wasn’t that happened. What happened during the lockdown that are, you know, these animals couldn’t be processed. They couldn’t be slaughtered anymore because they’d become too big to fit into that chain and so on… on to fit on the conveyor belts or so on. Yes, so a genetic resilience that’s really important, actually. So pastoralist, not just nationals, but also other indigenous livestock keepers, they have developed over it since domestication over the last 8, 9, 10 thousand years. So they have developed this wide diversity of breeds that are adapted to their specific ecosystems and to their specific utilization patterns. So they have actually increased biodiversity, through their traditional knowledge, and through managing people in different environments. And these animals are really, I mean, they are the backbone, that this is what we need for facing climate change of rising temperatures. I mean, this really drought-adapted hardy livestock, they’re one of the biggest assets we have. But what has happened is that, again, because of that efficiency paradigm, only these three, you know, high, very high yielding breeds have been promoted by governments and so on. And so we’ve had this amazing narrowing of the gene pool going on this, like the horse sensation cows, I mean, they have there is no they all descend from I think only two bulls. Like it’s, it’s totally amazing. So that’s another indication of how vulnerable these systems are this industrial system. So we need in order to be able to face the future, adapt to global changes, we just desperately we need that domestic animal diversity that’s been created by bypass stores. But in order to do that, we cannot conserve them or maintain them if we don’t have people who actually have access to comments and to land and we can’t conserve them by decreasing them or so because that keeps them stagnant. I mean, then they are frozen. They don’t evolve any further. They can’t adapt to new diseases. It’s a total totally wrong thinking that we can conserve that diversity by decreasing it. Exito. So this has been for a long time, my organization, we actually focused on that on getting recognition for the role of pastoralsts as stewards of that genetic diversity. And we were very involved at that level. But at that time, we weren’t really heard, or we didn’t make any impact.
James Connolly
Yeah. So, yeah, you talked about the watusi cattle that are resilient to so much drought.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
You know, there are many. And I mean, it’s again, also, they’re adapted, often to specific types of vegetation. And that’s one thing, but this adaptation is not only genetic, it’s also learned. So, you know, young animals learn from their mothers, their feeding behavior and their behavior all together. So if that transmission of knowledge of animal knowledge from one generation to the next is interrupted, then you’re lost. So genetics as such, are not going to help you, you need the learned knowledge as well. And I mentioned, I think, also in the book, there’s this word called hefted, which comes from Britain, where sheep are tested to certain grazing common grazing areas, and they don’t step out of them, even if there’s no fence because they’ve learned this from their mothers. And when Foot and Mouth Disease came, a lot of these flocks had to be culled. And then it’s very difficult to get these systems back in place. And I think, actually, these systems were exempted from culling to some extent, because the importance was realized.
James Connolly
I wonder if you could talk about the Spanish the Canada’s, and the…
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
The Cañadas
James Connolly
Yeah, I’m sure. Four years of high school Spanish and
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
So yes, so Spain, Spain actually has a long history of sheep rearing. And Spain is the source of the Merino sheep, which has really fine wool. And actually the Merino sheep, it probably it. It also, the the ancestors of the Merino sheep actually came from Arabia, I think it was Arabian, who created most of that breed. But anyway, so this merino sheep had this really fine wool, which was very much in demand globally. So they, for one thing, they tried to have a monopoly and it was not allowed to export any merino sheep from Spain for several hundreds of years. And I think there was a death penalty if you took merino sheep of the country. But because they also realized in for the wool quality, it was important that the sheep were in good health. And for being in good health, they needed to move from summer to winter pastures. And so the Spanish crown actually instituted this network of the border called Cañadas for the sheep to move between the differences in our pastures. And it’s about like, I think 1% of Spain or so is covered by this network of drove roads. And what happened was when the, at the beginning of the 20th century, when the trains were put into place, people started to put the sheep on the train, to move from winter to summer pastures, right. And that actually had negative ecological effects, because it meant that the sheep were staying in one place longer than they did earlier. And by staying there longer, they actually prevented regrowth of certain saplings of trees. And it was a Spanish, very, now very famous Spanish naturalist Tezuka, so who, who actually found out who realized what the problem was, and then put a lot of effort into getting shepherds again to move on foot with their sheep. And so we’ve seen an amazing revival of sheep migration in Spain, and an amazing revival also of a lot of fauna that had disappeared and a lot of plants as well have come back now. So this is a model actually for the rest of the world. And they actually, we actually managed to get the earlier laws reinstated, which gave the sheep flocks, the right to walk through central Madrid, for instance, on their migration. And so now this is a big annual event where, you know, lots of 1000s of sheep, they go through the streets of Madrid, and it’s a big celebration and it encourages pastoralists in other countries also to think on those lines and especially in India, where people have, you know, imbibed that pastoralism is a thing of the past and old fashioned and so on. Then they see this that you know that it gets so much attention to pain and it starts, it gets people thinking. So there’s a lot of awareness growing at the moment, I’m really optimistic about things understanding the value of pastoralism and even in India now we have. So in India, the pastoralism was basically invisible. Nobody realized that it actually existed when the whole country is full of a pastoralists from the north to the south. And now, I think there are thoughts among decision makers to do livestock census, not just by number of heads of animals, but the production system in which they are kept. And if we have that, then we you know, we will see we will have the data to prove how important pastoralism, we already we have some calculations actually estimates which saw that more than 50% of the milk and more than 70% of India’s meat are produced in pastoral system. India is the largest dairy producer in the world. It’s the largest one of the largest exporters of meat. And it’s enormous, even though everybody always says, oh, so backward, our cows only give four litres of milk and in the USA give 40. So they always complaining the animal scientist, but actually, if you look at it, it’s amazingly productive. And it has all those, it makes so much contribution to the soil fertility. It’s just fantastic.
James Connolly
You know, I think that there’s, it’s said, I remember reading an Indian historian who was talking about, so the green… the green revolution, depending on how you study it, there were trade offs throughout all of it, you know, made us heavily dependent upon industrial agriculture in order to maintain it, and was not specifically bred that way. It was specifically bred to feed a growing population. But one of the things that it kind of ignores, when you study the history of it was that how much… how many of the famines were actually produced by colonial governments. And so when you looked at starvation, and you looked at the number of people who are dying, a lot of it was through intervention through a man in the say, the British Empire, which excised millions of pounds, and created a famine in World War Two, because Churchill’s Minister of Science, had decided that he just wanted to hoard all of this. And so I think the estimates now are close to 4 million people died. So when you looked at the need for a fundamental shift in agriculture, what the scientists were looking at, I think, was the end result of a colonial empire, and agricultural and fiscal policies that left a lot of these colonized nations destitute, and then sort of came in and said, Hey, we have a fix for you. Right, so you had this working system, I think, in India, that was was pastoralist, and agriculturalists. Working together, you have all of these different rules that were set in place for manure that was left on the land versus on the road. There were just all these different tiny, interesting stories. You know, and just like a way of community that actually sounds… it sounds idyllic. It sounds local, it sounds like that, you know, the overgrazing was managed because then there was a cooperative system in place. And then you had this production at all costs that was coming from the British colonial empire that was pushing all of this stuff towards the agricultural system that we see now. Which I just think it’s a degraded landscape. Sorry, I always have like this, like rant I always do. Yeah. So I mean, I do think that, like a movement back to something that actually feels, you know, like, pre-colonial actually makes a lot of sense to me. You know,
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
I agree. I mean, we don’t have… it’s not that I’m against modernization or new things at all. But I mean, we have to respect and understand how things functioned earlier and then build on that. And that’s been the problem. There’s so much science in developing countries, or I don’t like to use that term at all. The global south is that people come from the outside and they have their solutions bad and they don’t understand how things are actually functioning and you can improve, I mean, if you understand how this is at first you need to understand how the existing system works. And maybe you can, after some time, identify certain things where things might be improved, but you can’t just come in from outside without understanding anything and implement something new.
James Connolly
Yes. I kind of want to leave people with a story that I just found absolutely… tt’s so endearing. Can you tell? Like when you go on an airplane back to Germany, a lot of the right people?
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
They always I mean, they always, I mean, so the question is always, oh, how have the rains been there in your country? And if I say, we don’t have such a problem with rain, I mean, it rains all year. And others say, oh, we should bring our sheep there. No way, you know, so we’ve taken many pastoralists in the past was too many places in India and also outside India. And they always say, look at the vegetation and the grass and the trees. And they said, Oh, we should have brought our sheep. Even if we… once we went to a university, and there was this beautiful lawn, and they said, No, my God, we should have brought out sheep. So yeah, they look at everything through the lens of the animals.
James Connolly
Yeah. Which is so amazing. I remember, there was a if I can end with a story, there was a BBC documentary, where they were working with hunter gatherers, and there was studying hunter gatherers, I believe it was in Sub Saharan Africa. And so the tribe said, this, well, now we’ve shown you our land, why don’t you show us ours? And it was a big sort of argument back and forth. Like, what if we showed them all of the technology and all of the moderization that we have in London? What will they do, and they as apologists like, you have no idea what you’re talking about, you know, like, we’ll bring them. So they went to London, they traveled around in London, and then they went to a few farms, and they went out into the countryside. And at the end of it, none of them wanted to stay interested in it. The only thing that they brought back, the only thing was they had never put feathers on the ends of their arrows. And they thought that that was actually really interesting as a way to kind of guide the arrow. And it was the only thing that they cared about. And one of the questions that they brought up… so they were they were in somebody’s house, the husband was leaving every day to go to work. And they’re like, Where are you going? Why do you leave every day? Why do you leave your family? And he said, Well, I have to work in order to provide this house and food and all this other stuff. He said, Well, how long do you have to work? He said, Well, you know, it’ll be like 30 years to own this house. And just like, when we need a house, we just gather our friends together and we build a house.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
That’s exactly and we believe there’s progress.
James Connolly
But thank you so much. I want you to… if you feel comfortable, tell us your Twitter handle if people want to reach out to you. I want to rename the book. Again. It’s called Hoofprints on the Land: How Traditional Herding and Grazing can Restore the Soil and Bring Animal Agriculture Back in Balance with the Earth. And just thank you so much for writing this. For Maren and Jake and I this is like, you know, we felt heard, and the way that we’ve been screaming about things, and I just really want to appreciate all of the time and effort that you spent on putting this book together.
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
Well, thank you so much. I mean, it makes me feel so good that it was worth it. Spending 30 years, everyone thinks I’m crazy, but I’ve had a very good time.
James Connolly
Yeah. So Twitter handle. Do you want to put that out?
Ilse Köhler-Rollefson
I think it’s Ilse Kohl R – I L S E K O H L E R, yeah. And I also have a website called Ilsa – Kohler – Rollefson .com. And, of course, I have to point out the left side of my organization, the League for Pastoral Peoples, which is www pastoral peoples .org Yeah.
James Connolly
Great.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening today and for following my work. If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. Visit sustainabledish.com/join and become a sustaining member today. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join. And thank you.
