ASH CLOUD

Ash Sweeting
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  • Earth Sciences
  • Fortnightly

This is series of conversations discussing global food sustainability with guests who bring a deep understanding of the environmental and cultural challenges facing our society and creative ideas on how to address them.

  1. 3 days ago

    The geopolitics of climate change with Arthur Snell, RUSI

    We are living in a time of greater geopolitical disorder, and that disorder is “coupled with and feeding off” climate change. During the green revolution following WW2 agricultural productivity grew steadily. In the last couple of decades, that has no longer been the case. Farmers across Europe and North America have just come through another year of extreme heat and drought. Meanwhile, the trade systems that move food around the world are being strained by conflict, tariffs, and the weaponization of trade routes. Today I am joined by Arthur Snell, a former British diplomat who spent two decades in the Foreign Office. He served in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, led the UK’s global programs countering violent extremism, and was High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago. He is now an Associate Fellow at RUSI and a geopolitical consultant, writer and podcast host. He is also the author of Elemental: The New Geography of Climate Change and How We Survive It. Food has always been traded globally, from Egyptian wheat feeding Rome to today’s commodity markets. Arthur argues the lesson from history is that “functional and relatively free-flowing world trade is absolutely crucial to a functional food system.” When barriers and dysfunction are introduced, whether through tariffs, geopolitics, climate shocks or war, food systems can break down. The impacts are felt most keenly where resilience is lowest. In Egypt, for example, subsidized bread is a key element of social stability. Climate change is also redrawing the map. In the Sahel, the Sahara is advancing. In Russia’s sparsely populated far east, Chinese workers are moving north to expand agribusiness on land that was once too cold to farm. Coastlines are eroding, and Pacific atoll nations face losing theirs entirely. At the same time, long-standing norms around borders and territorial sovereignty are weakening, from Ukraine to Greenland. We also discuss asymmetric warfare. Cheap drones, together with a willingness to absorb suffering, can now challenge the most sophisticated militaries on Earth. And when ships no long pass freely through the Straits of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb, the effects are felt globally.  Arthur’s central message is one of urgency, not despair: “The technologies that are needed for us to get out of this mess all exist already… We are already starting on that journey. What we’re not doing is doing it quick enough… It is not that it can’t be done… We have the ability, we just need to get going a bit quicker.” Send us Fan Mail

    The geopolitics of climate change with Arthur Snell, RUSI

  2. 3 days ago

    Regenerative agriculture at scale with Shawn Tiffany, Tiffany Cattle Co.

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  3. 20 Oct

    We don’t need a perfect answer. We need a reliable answer with Tom Sturgess, Methane Mitigation Ventures

    Consumers will pay a premium for climate-friendly red meat, but not the way you’re thinking about it. This premium is not a mark-up on any single purchase. It’s customer loyalty to the retailer selling the product. A brand with integrity keeps customers coming back, and the retailer, the real customer, captures that lifetime value. Today I am joined by Tom Sturgess, who has been involved in red meat production since 1985. Thirty years ago he moved to New Zealand and taught himself sheep and beef farming. Today his farms produce around 70,000 tope quality lambs a year that earns a 40 to 50% market premium. Tom has also spent over a decade investing in to reduce the carbon footprint of livestock production includeing funding a team developing a low cost feed additive with a target price of 1.5 to 3 cents per animal per day. Tom acknowledges that ruminant maths is challenging. That said, he also agues that research system is too often its own worst enemy. The combiantion of the cost and need to conduct many large in vivo trials is crippling to many innovtaors. Rapid, small-scale animal trials that give a reliable, roughly 80% answer, are needed so researchers can learn and iterate before committing to expensive formal studies.  Tom sees the California dairy industry as the standout success story. The combaination of  legislation and state funding behind them have enable California dairy farmers to cut emissions by close to 50% in around seven years. He also praises Australia as offering the most supportive research and regulatory pathway he has experiinced. We discuss when innovations are ready for venture capital, and why funders need to monitor closely rather than impose rigid milestones. Tom also explains why genetics, feed, forage and husbandry solutions will stack together, and why, in the end, it all comes down to people and teams. Send us Fan Mail

    We don’t need a perfect answer. We need a reliable answer with Tom Sturgess, Methane Mitigation Ventures

  4. 28 Sept

    Profitable climate solutions for small holder farmers with Devdut Dalal Mitti Labs

    Rice feeds more people than any other crop, and it is grown in a way that is quietly expensive. Globally, a third of all groundwater extraction goes to rice farming. And because those fields sit flooded for weeks at a time, the resulting anaerobic conditions produce methane. Rice accounts for around 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, comparable to the aviation industry, and about 12% of all methane. In India, rice covers some 40 million hectares, a quarter of the country's agricultural land, in a nation that is already deeply water stressed. Today I am joined by Devdut Dalal of Mitti Labs (https://www.mittilabs.earth/), who is working on addressing water use efficiency and methane for smallholder farmers. The practice change is alternate wetting and drying. The challenge is implementing it across tens of thousands of farmers with an average farm size of one hectare. Exposing the soil to air a few times a season reduces water consumption, reduces methane, and does not reduce yield. Their secret to scaling is to do one thing well, focus on that, and keep things simple. "We're going to do one good thing across 100 farms. Get that one thing right. Prove the work was meaningful and impactful and reward worthy. And then you can stack good thing number two, good thing number three, good thing number four." — Devdut Dalal Getting 70,000 farmers across more than 100,000 hectares to adopt a new practice took four things: trust, borrowed from local field agents and NGOs who already have relationships in those communities; demonstrated proof, by asking a farmer with four acres to try it on one; ongoing support; and an incentive. Trust, proof, support and reward. It is simply a matter of creating value for farmers. That value comes from carbon credits. Companies with scope three commitments pay for the methane reductions, and the farmers are paid for the credits. Mitti has just signed an agreement with Google to supply one million credits by 2030, one of the largest super pollutant mitigation deals announced to date. We also discuss the satellite technology that makes monitoring possible at this scale, the delayed and increasingly unpredictable monsoon, and the energy-water nexus that should make state governments the most motivated party of all. Send us Fan Mail

    Profitable climate solutions for small holder farmers with Devdut Dalal Mitti Labs

  5. 20 Sept

    Government policy to address today's food system challenges with Robert Bonnie former Undersecretary of Agriculture, USDA

    Managing and mitigating risk runs through my whole conversation with Robert Bonnie. Since the Dust Bowl, USDA policy, the Farm Bill and especially crop insurance have given US farmers a safety net that shares the risk of growing the nation's food. But farming keeps getting riskier. Climate change, volatile input costs and commodity prices, access to labour, access to markets and geopolitical instability are all shifting more than they used to. Too often farmers and ranchers are left to carry that extra risk alone. Governments have a unique role to play here. "The question from a policy standpoint is how do you drive policy that is focused on the outcomes that folks want and that allow for the type of innovation you need in the private sector, and that de-risk the adoption of many of these practices, recognizing we actually don't have all the answers right now. We need to allow for innovation. How do we do that in a way that works for farmers while it also works for the public?" Robert Bonnie At the same time, new technologies and innovation are opening up ways to manage that risk that weren't available a decade ago. We already know that no-till, cover crops, crop rotation and better grazing make yields more stable through drought and flood. During the Biden administration, Robert tried to design crop insurance that would reward growers for adopting those practices because they reduce yield risk. "It's very hard to do. It's possible, I think, with new technology." That's now his focus at Sage, a startup using AI on soil data to support better insurance products and farm lending. He also draws a lesson from overseeing the US Forest Service in the Obama years. Every year firefighting took more of the budget, and less was left for the land management that stops catastrophic fires in the first place. Agriculture risks the same trap: paying for the disaster instead of the preparation. Robert served 12 years as a political appointee in the Obama and Biden administrations, most recently as USDA Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation. He is now a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Stone Center for Environmental Stewardship. Send us Fan Mail

    Government policy to address today's food system challenges with Robert Bonnie former Undersecretary of Agriculture, USDA

  6. 1 Sept

    Beef sustainability, methane, and efficiency with Tom McDonald, US Roundtable for Sustainable Beef

    Beef sustainability frequently gets framed as something imposed on the ranchers and the industry from outside—regulatory requirements, consumer pressure, climate obligations driven by environmental groups and activists, leaving the industry industry to respond or resist. But this frame misses something fundamental. My guest today, Tom McDonald, is chair of the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef and sustainability lead at Five Rivers Cattle. His reframing is powerful because it turns sustainability from an external demand into something the beef industry has been pursuing for generations. As he puts it: "Sustainability is a journey and not a destination."  The three pillars are simple: environmentally sound, socially responsible, economically viable. But McDonald breaks this down further into language that resonates with producers: efficiency. The beef industry has been working on efficiency for decades. Feed efficiency. Land efficiency. Resource efficiency. When you talk to ranchers about doing more with less, you're speaking their language. "Methane emissions is lost efficiency. Methane is energy that doesn't get converted to pounds of beef… As the beef industry, we didn't start focusing on that when it became a political issue. We've been focused on that for a long time, trying to make the animals more efficient." says McDonald This reshaping of the methane conversation from primarily a climate problem to be solved for environmental virtue to lost productivity is powerful. The insight is profound. When McDonald sat on a methane roundtable with the oil and gas industry, they described their leaking valves the same way: uncaptured gas is money walking out the door. The economics align across industries. Methane capture isn't virtue—it's profit optimization. But there's an important caveat embedded in this philosophy. McDonald is clear about something critical: the beef industry doesn't need to reach zero methane to make significant impact. Complete elimination isn't the goal—substantial improvement is. This reframes the entire conversation away from perfectionism. As he puts it: "Can we improve it? I think so. Can we make it zero? I doubt it." This conversation explores how the efficiency lens reshapes sustainability from burden to opportunity, and why incremental improvements across the value chain, without demanding perfection, matter far more than seeking impossible silver bullets.   Send us Fan Mail

    Beef sustainability, methane, and efficiency with Tom McDonald, US Roundtable for Sustainable Beef

  7. 29 Aug

    Feed efficiency on pasture: The next frontier with Matt Beck, Texas A&M

    The beef industry has spent decades optimizing feed efficiency in one place: the feedlot. Genetics have been selected for finishing performance, cattle are placed on feed at lighter weights and fed to heavier carcasses, and the result is measurable improvement in how much feed converts to pounds of beef. Al Rotz's 50-year life cycle assessment comparing 1972 to 2022 documents this clearly—the industry has made tremendous progress. But this optimization has created a misalignment: the most profitable cattle for the finishing sector are not the most profitable cattle for cow-calf operations. Today we are joined by Matt Beck from Texas A&M, whose research reveals a profound inefficiency hiding in plain sight. For every 100 pounds of additional cow body weight, weaned calf weight increases by only 14 pounds. That extra 100 pounds of cow, however, requires approximately 600 pounds of additional forage annually. Simple math: ranchers are feeding 600 pounds to produce 14 pounds of marketable product. This isn't a visible problem. Ranchers can't see the extra 600 pounds of pasture consumption. But it's there, compounding year after year, driving profitability down precisely when the industry needs it up. Meanwhile, herd sizes have crashed to 1950s levels—not because ranchers want smaller herds, but because drought cycles are becoming more severe and smaller cows are more resilient to them. Matt's most exciting work focuses on methane as a proxy for feed efficiency on pasture. Within the herds he's measured, there's 30% variation in methane emissions among animals producing identical output. And separate research shows that 10% reductions in feed intake are achievable without any loss in productivity. As Matt puts it: "Feed efficiency on pasture is the next great frontier, and with advances in technology, we're becoming more and more able to do that." The challenge isn't scientific. It's economic alignment and infrastructure access for small producers who comprise the majority of the US cow-calf sector. Send us Fan Mail

    Feed efficiency on pasture: The next frontier with Matt Beck, Texas A&M

  8. 18 Aug

    Why telling people to eat less meat will never work - and what we can do instead with Bruce Friedrich, The Good Food Institute

    Meat consumption has risen every single year that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has been measuring. Despite warnings about climate impacts spanning over a century, from carbon and methane's  effects to James Hansen's congressional testimony in 1986, to a book called "Diet for a Small Planet" published 52 years ago, global meat production continues its upward trajectory. All available analysis indicates the world will eat at least 50% more meat by 2050. But here's the challenge: human beings struggle with anything requiring self-denial. Energy consumption keeps rising. Miles driven keeps rising. Meat consumption keeps rising. This is not a failure of knowledge or information, it's rooted in human nature itself. Consuming more feels like improvement in quality of life. Today we are joined by Bruce Friedrich, founder and CEO of the Good Food Institute, whose new book "Meat" (meatbook.org) articulates this systems-level thinking. Friedrich offers pragmatic frameworks rather than ideological purity. He recognizes that renewable energy succeeded not by asking people to consume less energy, but by providing better alternatives at competitive prices, enabled by decades of government policy coordinating R&D support, manufacturing incentives, tax credits, and infrastructure investment. He argues that alternative proteins require similar government commitment including: sustained funding for open-source R&D, manufacturing scale-up support, regulatory clarity, and policies that genuinely protect farmer prosperity rather than threatening it. Without government policy as the coordinating force, tribalism, geopolitics, and farmer opposition will likely ensure failure. Friedrich highlights how ranchers and farmers face genuine economic threats that current policy fails to address. Without deliberate government policy protecting their interests, alternative proteins can be seen as an existential threat rather than an opportunity. Ranchers worry about market cannibalization, stranded assets, and unfair competition subsidized by tech investment. These concerns are legitimate and can be addressed by government policy that actively ensures traditional livestock producers share in the opportunities including to where alternative proteins address commodity demand and beef becomes an increasingly valuable luxury product commanding higher prices. The geopolitical dimension cannot be ignored. Eight of the top twenty patent holders in plant-based and cultivated meat over the past five to six years are Chinese companies. China is investing strategically in alternative proteins driven by food security concerns and soft power ambitions, capabilities the West cannot afford to cede. This is not merely about climate or sustainability; it's about technological sovereignty and the future of protein production as a strategic asset. The conversation with Bruce explores how these competing forces, government ambition, farmer/rancher prosperity, technological innovation, and geopolitical competition, can be aligned rather than opposed to accelerate the transition toward sustainable protein production. Send us Fan Mail

    Why telling people to eat less meat will never work - and what we can do instead with Bruce Friedrich, The Good Food Institute
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About

This is series of conversations discussing global food sustainability with guests who bring a deep understanding of the environmental and cultural challenges facing our society and creative ideas on how to address them.

Information

  • Creator
    Ash Sweeting
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    89
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 ASH CLOUD
  • Show Website
    ASH CLOUD

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