Abenteuer Reportagefotografie – Podcast über visuelles Storytelling

Kai Behrmann: Visueller Storyteller und Fotograf

Since 11/2016 426 Episoden

Interview with George Steinmetz at the photo festival "La Gacilly – Baden Photo"

In this special episode, Phil Mistry from PetaPixel interviews renowned photojournalist George Steinmetz about his stunning career and current project "Feed the Planet".

25.02.2024 48 min

Zusammenfassung & Show Notes

In this special episode, Phil Mistry from PetaPixel interviews renowned photojournalist George Steinmetz about his stunning career and current project "Feed the Planet".

There is another interview with George Steinmetz on this podcast:

George Steinmetz: "Feed the Planet" – Woher kommen unsere Lebensmittel?

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Mit neuem Konzept ist der GATE7-Podcast nun der Podcast der interaktiven Lernplattform “Abenteuer Reportagefotografie”. Hier dreht sich alles um visuelles Storytelling in der Street- und Reportagefotografie.

Thomas B. Jones und ich helfen dir, mit deinen Bildern spannende Geschichten zu erzählen - ob in der Familie, in der Freizeit oder auf Reisen. Lerne, wie du die Bilder machst, die dich und andere begeistern.

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Transkript

Music. Yes, welcome to another special episode here in the Gate 7 Podcast. This is a supplement to the interview that Pia Parolin and I with George Steinmetz at the end of the Open Your Eyes Festival in Zurich last year in 2023 were allowed to conduct. This conversation took place a few weeks before, also at a photo festival, will stattgefunden und zwar bei La Gacely Baden Foto im Rahmen der Langnacht der Fotografie und ich freue mich, dass ich dir hier diese Aufzeichnung auch präsentieren darf. Das Interview dort auf der Bühne vor großem Publikum mit George Steinmetz hat Film Mystery geführt. Film Mystery ist Journalist aus den USA. Er schreibt für die Webseite petapixel.com und in dem Gespräch der beiden geht es um George Steinmetz's current project Feed the Planet. He has looked at the international food chains and made fascinating things visible. So it's a very, very outstanding. Photojournalistic project that he is talking about here and of course also tells a little bit about the story of how he got to build his own paraglider and how wie er damit noch vor dem Drohnen-Zeitalter es geschafft hat, spektakuläre Luftaufnahmen zu machen. Ich hoffe, du genießt dieses Interview mit George Steinmetz, einem faszinierenden Fotografen. Wenn du seine Bilder zu diesem Interview und zu den Worten sehen möchtest, dann geh auf seine Webseite www.georgesteinmetz.com und wie gesagt, es gibt noch ein weiteres Interview, das Pia Parolin und ich mit George Steinmetz geführt haben. Auch da kannst du gerne nochmal reinhören. Why did I choose and ask George Steinmetz to come? Thank you. The area we are talking about in the exhibitions is mostly broken down into four countries. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iran. It sounds so quickly said, but it's 500 million people living there. And if you take India in account, which is in the center, like the heart of this all, and caused the situation there to a big deal upon the departure of the British, when they had to leave the subcontinent. Then we talk about 2 billion people. And George did research and photographed for the last 10 years how to feed the planet. What does it take that we can survive in a world with more and more people, having 10 billion people? So, this is what will be discussed in the next half an hour or so. Welcome, Phil Mystery. Welcome, George Diamond. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Lois, for inviting us to Baden to celebrate the 184th birthday day since Mercier Daguerre made his daguerreotype on a beautiful silver plate and now we have a beautiful digital sensor from there and it's great to be in Baden with photographers, press and journalists from so many countries. George and I are from the USA and we seldom see in a room so many different countries represented. So this is great. George has been, or rather has done, over 60 assignments for National Geographic and Gale in his lifetime, and that simply deserves an applause right in the beginning. About 10 years ago, George wanted to capture overhead views. And when you are doing large vistas like farms and landscape, you can't see much of the landscape from the ground. And you had to see it from the air. A helicopter rentals, etc., are very expensive, not practical, and when you go to countries like Iran, where George is shot, you're not even going to get a permission to fly a helicopter. So, he created a concept of a powered paraglider, something like an airplane propeller attached to your back. You will see it later on how it works. and he got excellent aerial views. So the editors of National Geographic said, hey, George, why don't you use this technology and your knowledge for a project? And the world's population is increasing. We are going to have to feed 10 billion, with a B, people. And as developing countries grow, the need for food, richer protein grows. And George has created this project of Feed the Planet for the last 10 years, and he has been to over 40 countries in his year, in his career, I'm sorry. So let's start with Feed the Planet from George Steinmetz. George, here we see a lovely pattern of a desert. What is this? This is, can you hear me okay? This is camels in Oman, in the empty quarter of Oman, looking straight down. And here? This is not that far from the last photo. This is in the empty quarter of Arabia. This is in Yemen. It's migrating sand dunes. And this is in Peru, on the coast of Peru, with migrating dunes. I spent 10 years looking at all the world's deserts. And deserts are not just in the Sahara. You also find coastal deserts. Antarctica is a desert, and I looked at all of them. It was a rather ambitious project. And here you're hovering over flamingos in your powered paraglider, I suppose. Not hovering, but I was flying hands-free over a flock of flamingos. This is at 14,000 feet in the Bolivian Andes. Okay. And this is over the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. It's the world's largest expanse of edible salt. And back to camels in the Sahara. Yeah, this is one of the first pictures I took with my motorized paraglider. And this would be a kind of picture that's almost impossible to take with any other aircraft. You could do it now with a drone, but at the time, this was taken in 1998. And with a helicopter, if there were any available, the camels would all flee. A plane would be going too fast. And this kind of low and slow perspective, like a flying launch here, let me see the world in a totally new way. It was a very exciting time. Well, let's show them what a paraglider looks like. Oops. We lost her screen. We lost the screen, Martin. We need our digital wonder kid. Wonder. Yeah. If this pointer is dangerous, I will use the laptop in the future. Martin. Martin. A big round of applause for Martin, who's the savior. Should I not use the pointer? It should be no problem. Okay. You heard it from Martin. There should be no problem again. I just made this to get my applause. Okay. Wonderful. Thank you again, buddy. So this is in Iran in the Dasht-e Lut Desert. And I usually, I did most of my desert flying with another professional pilot. This is my wingman, Alain Renaud, who's the world champion. And it's a very remote place. I mean, it was, to fly in Iran as a foreigner, I think I was the first foreigner to get permission to fly in Iran. I couldn't use an airfield, but I could use my crazy flying lawn chair. Oh, okay. Okay. It's not moving, Martin. Okay, okay. I think I can figure it out. I can figure it out. Okay, I think I can figure it out. I figured it out. Okay. All right. So, George, this looks like a selfie in the air, but I don't see the iPhone. Where is the camera? I put a camera on a pole near to my shoe. So then that becomes the first shoe selfie. So after photographing deserts for about 10 years, I ran out of sand, and the geographic asked me to photograph a story about how we're going to meet the future food demands of humanity. And I told him I thought that would be interesting, but to do that, I thought it would be interesting to look at mega farms, kind of the freaky farms. And not just because they're interesting visually, but also it would communicate the concept of how you're going to feed so many people. And the first place I went was Kansas. And this was a picture of one of the largest farm operators in Kansas, the Volgamores. And Brian Volgamore, he had a small plane he let me fly to look around. And you show the next picture. And this is a cattle feed yard nearby. And we were in the plane. It was too fast. I went back the next day with my motorized paraglider. And while I was flying over the feedlot taking this picture, my flight assistant came on the radio. And he told me that the feedlot owner was very upset that who was this crazy guy flying with a red parachute over his cattle. And he explained what I was doing. And the guy said, well, I want to talk to you. He wanted me to come down and explain what I was doing. And I said, well, I'm sorry. I'm taking pictures. I'll come down in an hour when I finish. He said, no, no. He wants you to come now or he's going to call the sheriff. I said, well, if he wants to call the sheriff, tell him to call the sheriff. It's a free country. And about two hours later, I was in the Finney County Jail. In the jail? And that's the booking photo? It was me with my flight assistant, Zhang Wei. And it was very strange to me because I'd flown in. I mean, I was detained three times for spying in Iran. I was held at gunpoint in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. I snuck into Libya during the time of Gaddafi. I was never thrown in jail except in Kansas. And how long did they keep you in jail? It was, I was there for about three or four hours and it was, you know, it was clean. It was air conditioned. And when I got out, I got a copy of my mugshot, sent it to my wife. And then I asked them what I was being charged for. And they said it was criminal trespass, but they really had no case. They said that criminal trespass means you had to like jump over somebody's fence or go through a no hunting sign. And I was just taking off from an empty field in Kansas that happened to be owned by the feedlot owner. And so they had no case, but they could still harass the press. But it made me realize that there are parts of our food supply that some people don't want us to see. And when you're a journalist and you ask a simple question, people get weird on you. You realize maybe you're on to a deeper story. So I started looking at farming a little more deeply, trying to reveal the parts of where our food comes from that most people haven't seen before. So you're going to get an insight on where your food comes from. In fact, I had a friend's daughter in New Jersey. And when she was asked, where does milk come from? She said, from ShopRite. And the next place I went after Kansas was the Brazilian Amazon, which is being rapidly deforested and mostly for food. And this is what the Amazon looks like from a small plane when it's on fire. And it's all smoke. Early in the morning, the smoke lays down in the forest. And much of the southern Brazilian Amazon is being cut down for soybeans. And you can go to the next picture, Phil. And this is the more tropical parts, which are being deforested for cattle ranches. And in the Amazon, it's illegal to deforest too close to rivers. There's a river buried in that primary forest. It's harvesting soybeans. So is there a river nearby? Yeah, there's a river in the middle of those trees. And in Brazil, it's very different from farming in Europe or the U.S. In Brazil, they have mega farms. This farm is 30,000 hectares. The company that ran this farm, they had 12 farms like this. They're the biggest farmer operator in Brazil. Brazil is the world's biggest producer of soybeans, and most of them are destined for China. And I suppose this is the soybean being unloaded in China? Correct. This is the largest soybean port in China. And there are three on the right, that black cupboard thing, that's a ship. It's a bulk carrier. So what's China doing with all these soybeans? Most of it, well, they make soy sauce, but most of the soybeans are being used for pig and chicken food. Oh. And it's China in China is you have rapidly increasing. Well, people want more protein in their diet. They want more of a diet like we have in, in the United States or in Europe. And it's not there. So they want to have schnitzel, but they just want to have, they want to have that much protein, particularly they love pigs. They, they're the biggest pig consumers in the world. So why are the pigs lying on their sides? This is a European standard pig breeding farm. And almost every piece of pork you've ever consumed was raised in a farm like this. Including today? This is European standard. They can export this quality of pork to Europe. And in fact, like I say, if they let you into an Austrian pig farm, it would look quite like this. So the pigs are on their sides so that the little piglets don't get crushed or something? Well, the pigs are on their side because they're, you know, they're very, they're weighed down and they're exhausted, but they can't, they can't, they have these cages on their side so they can't roll over and squish the piglets. This is the biggest pork slaughterhouse in the world in China. There were about 1,700 people on the cutting room floor. And this looks like some rich people in China having a rich feast. This is a Sunday lunch in Shanghai. In China, with expanding wealth, they want more protein in their diet. They also want more exotic food, more imported food. And they were taking social media posts and sharing them with their friends about all the fancy food they're eating. And what do we see here? It's a crayfish eating festival in China. It's really interesting for me to find mass feeding events because it communicates the challenge of feeding 10 billion, and they're kind of difficult to find. This is one of the largest I could find in China. And did the aliens land here on these white strips or something? This is a chicken farm in Brazil, a fertile chicken farm for breeding more chickens. And when you have a million chickens that are genetically identical, if one gets sick, they almost all get sick. And so they built an artificial—they planted an artificial forest around the egg farm so that there were no airborne diseases getting in. So this is the egg farm, and all this is artificially planted for disease prevention? Well, yeah. First, they took it on the Amazon forest, and then they realized, oh, we've got a chicken problem. We've got a disease problem. So they built—and they planted an artificial eucalyptus forest around the chicken farm. And when I went there, they had to wash—they went through a car wash first. Then I got into a Tyvek suit. It was like going into a clean room in Silicon Valley. It was very strange. And I suppose these are the chickens inside the farm. This is a non-fertile chicken farm. This is eggs that they would sell commercially in Brazil. This was the biggest one in Brazil. It had 4 million chickens, 2.7 million eggs a day, and they never touched a human hand. Not touched by human hands, so I suppose they're using conveyor belts like this. All by conveyor belt. And why are these people dressed like chickens? This is the chicken, this is the lunchroom in the chicken slaughterhouse. Okay, and I suppose chicken is not on the menu for lunch. You know, it's funny, they never serve the same stuff in the slaughterhouse that people are slaughtering. Like they don't have beef in the beef slaughterhouse and chicken in the chicken slaughterhouse. It's kind of funny that way. They don't sell fish sticks in the fishing boat. I'll be back in China. This is one of the largest chicken slaughterhouses in China. They do all the stuff for the fast food restaurants. And these lovely pattern landscapes? China's become the biggest food importer for two reasons. One, they have rapidly increasing demand, but they also have diminishing amounts of arable land. And a lot of their land is very difficult to farm. It's very hilly. It's very dry. And this is an area that they've terraced so they can grow food on it, but it's still very challenging. and you can't get like big harvesting machines in here. It's hard to irrigate this land and it's hard for them to get people that actually want to do the hard work now to farm it. So with China's increasing population, how are they going to feed all their billions of people? Will they be the biggest food importer in the world? They're definitely the biggest food importer in the world. I mean, it's kind of interesting. Like if China ever, let's say, were to attack Taiwan, all you have to do is stop all the Brazilian boats going to China and they have a real problem. They have a lot of hungry pigs. Greenhouses Most Chinese cities are in river deltas where there's very good arable land but a lot of that's been taken over for urban and suburban development and here they've built a new suburb for upper class people and it's surrounded by plastic greenhouses, Now we see some land skyscrapers and we see some primitive agricultural methods of 500 years ago go, why don't they have mechanization? Well, this farm's not going to be here very long. They're about to, it's about to be taken over by skyscrapers. So there were just, it's probably the last season they were farming there. That wasn't worth it to put anything in like that. This is in Brazil, one of the largest sugar plantations there. This one was about 30,000 hectares. And a lot of smoke pollution here. Well, it may look like pollution, but it's actually steam. And this is actually a very progressive sugar plantation. They were actually putting electricity back into the national grid by burning up all the pressings from the sugar. This is a similarly sized sugar operation in India. In India, it's illegal to own more than 5 or 10 hectares of land. And so each one of these tractors was brought in by an individual farmer with the shuriken he cut by hand to bring to the factory. So is this a drone photo or you're flying your paraglider? This is a drone photo. And this is one of the reasons I switched to drones. You wouldn't want to fly a glider in this kind of environment. It's not very safe. Now, I'm seeing your pictures and they are very beautiful graphical patterns. So are you kind of, how do you find these graphical patterns? I do a lot of looking. I mean, you know, this rice terrace, Yuan Yang in China, I went here with the paraglider five years before I took this picture, and it was too dangerous a place to fly. But with the drone, it was beautiful. And I could be up on a ridge and see somebody, you know, planting rice two kilometers away and just send my drone down there like a hawk. It was beautiful. And did you bring your drone down close to the subject or are you standing in the mud? I felt kind of guilty sitting there, like, you know, playing the video game with my glider. So I walked like a half kilometer down the slopes with these ladies in the morning to get them when they're planting rice. Well, on my little screen, I see little white maggots, but they are cattle on the big screen. Those are Indian cattle in Brazil. It's a very globalized system. Why on earth would you get Indian cattle into Brazil? Because they're very disease resistant and they can stand in water and not get foot disease. But aren't the European cattle from Netherlands better? They have higher milk production, but they wouldn't be able to withstand the Brazilian environment. It's too hot for them. This is the largest feedlot in the United States, about 150,000 cows. And the guy who started this feedlot, this interesting guy, he was a French fry magnate. He used to grow all the French fries from McDonald's. And he had all this waste from his French fry factory. And he realized instead of putting it in a river, he could feed it to cattle. And he became a billionaire out of a cattle feed yard. Wow. A milking station? No, this is one of the biggest slaughterhouses in the U.S. This is in Amarillo, Texas. In America, it's still illegal to take aerial photographs of, in Texas, it's illegal to take aerial photographs of animal operations. So this is, how shall I say, this is a very difficult picture to take. Now, this photo is making me a little uncomfortable. Were you queasy when you stood there with all that blood flowing? No, I was just worried that the PR person would see me taking that picture. These are the same, this is in Brazil, Those are the same white Naluri cattle that come from India. And this is one of the largest milk operations in China. It's a dairy called Modern Dairy, and they had eight rotaries like this. The cows never leave the building. So do these cows ever see the blue sky? Well, in China, gray sky. No, they never see sky. They never see daylight. So they live their whole life in this warehouse? Well, they have a different warehouse. They have a long walk to here to get milk twice a day, and they go back, and they kind of go from gray room where they're eating gray food to here to go around. on the merry-go-round, and they go back to their place. And these look like animal kennels? Yeah, this is one of the—I like being to the—I usually get the best pictures from like the most extraordinary, the biggest, and this is the biggest kind of cow sorority in the United States. This is in Greenleaf, Wisconsin, and these are young girls who just—they left their mother, and they're pregnant for the first time. They stay on this farm here. So they can't go from one kennel to the other. They're confined into the— Exactly. In animal speak, they call these CAFOs, confined animal feeding operations. And in a CAFO, you have virtually genetically identical animals, and you do not want them to communicate disease. So each one's got her own little apartment. She's got her own little front yard. And this is a very, you might not like hearing this, but this is a very well-designed operation. They've got veterinarians 24-7. They probably have the lowest mortality, lower mortality on this farm than you you would find anywhere in Europe. These guys are really pros. It may look kind of cold-hearted, but the cows, you walk by the cows, and they're out in the sun and getting their food, and it was a very, yeah. So you mentioned CAFO, confined, what is that? Confined Animal Feeding Operation. So which animals are bred in CAFOs? Virtually all chickens and pigs and cows for different parts of life. This is dairy operation. So dairy cows are usually whole lives around a CAFO. For beef cattle, they usually spend the first year of their life, at least in the United States, walking around outside. In the last six months, they're in a feedlot to get fattened up. And we've been talking of CAFOs and very scientific operations, but this picture looks like it was from 200 years ago. This is two years ago in India. And this is actually the largest dairy operation in the world, but it's all run off of peasant farmers who have two to five cows and water buffalo. Just two to five cows? Correct. On average. This is in India, and it's Banas dairy. Dairy, and every twice a day, the milkers, they milk them by hand, and they carry or go on motorbike with their little cans of milk, and they go to the co-op and drop it off, and it gets scanned. I mean, they test each lot, and they put it in, and they pasteurize it, and they send it off to the dairy factory. So, these women milk their two cows or five cows, fill this jar with milk, and physically carried it to the— Correct. It goes by hand or on head or by motorbike to the co-op. Okay. The village co-op. And this is the center where all of them come together, and they process, they make cheese here, and they put a lot of milk on it. They have a special milk tray, and it goes to Delhi three times a week. And what's this atomic reactor doing? They take the cattle manure, they pay the farmers for the cattle manure, and they truck it to the gas station and they convert it into fuel for cars. So is this methane kind of? But we are hearing bad things about methane in the atmosphere. Is this adding to the problem? This is taking care of the problem, putting it into the car so you actually get mileage out of it. Okay. And here I see some different species interbreeding. Yeah, this is a genetic improvement, as they call it. And they brought in Holstens from the Netherlands, that try to increase the productivity of the Indian cows. But it's actually, this male is actually mounting a male water buffalo. It's kind of like a gay cattle farm. And they have like a sleeve to catch the semen. And they bring them out and they have sex with each other every day and they catch the semen. And then when somebody wants to artificially inseminate their cow, they give it to a guy on a motorbike who goes out to the small cattle farm and he injects it. So is the water buffalo better for milk production in the future than the cow? Oh, well, the cows, these Holstons, they're incredible. There's an incredible amount of milk, but Holstons couldn't survive in the Indian climate. And so they're crossbreeding, trying to get the right mixture. Now, I'm looking at two corns. One is a modern corn, and one looks like a bonsai of some sort of corn. Well, that little scrawny thing you see in the rubber glove, that's one of the oldest husks of corn. That's from Coral, Peru. It's an assignment for GEO. This dates to the first irrigated project in the Americas from 4000 BC. So that 6,000-year-old piece of corn next to corn I got in the local market, and it gives you an idea of how much corn has improved over the last 6,000 years. Okay, hold on. I didn't hear you correctly. You're telling me that 6,000 years ago, Native Americans were doing agriculture? With irrigation. With irrigation? Yes, in Peru. I had no idea. This is in germany this is trying to prop it trying it's like a a living um gene bank there are certain some plants that don't propagate by seed and they're like the creepers like um some of the like the herbs and so they these are ancient breeds and they keep each one a little plot and they plow in between them so they don't commingle and is that wheat this is a three headed uh uh head of wheat sorry a three three fingered head of wheat and it's so heavy that, it would fall over in the ground the rats eat it so they're trying to crossbreed that with something with a thicker stem so you can get turbo production wheat so is this kind of technique going to help feed the millions of the future well i think i think to me one of the the goals in feeding and meeting future food demands is to is to get as much as we can out of the current in agricultural footprints. You don't have to cut down more of the Amazon, for example. And so productivity gains are really important. And a big part of that, I think, is out of genetics, also different kinds of techniques like better use of fertilizer and better use of irrigation. Different farming methods. But genetics are a key element, both for grain as well as for animal food. So do you believe that to feed the increasing population and the world's population is going to become probably 10 billion in 2050, if I can throw a conjecture. Do we have to allocate more land to feed more people or we can use current land? Well, I think the goal is certainly to use current land, but it'd be nice if we could stop deforestation in the Amazon, but there are other forces preventing that. But I think really the goal is to try to preserve the current agricultural footprint. And here I'm seeing different colors of wheat. Why the different colors? This is in Washington state and they're in the United States and they're trying different varieties. This is not GMO. This is just conventional crossbreeding, but they're trying to get ones that taste better, that are more productive, that are better milling characteristic. It's this incredible effort to try to refine and make our food more productive. So are you telling me that each square is a different species of wheat? Different variety, yes. And they'll find the one that works best, and they'll start propagating that, and they'll sell the seeds, and off we go. And white squares? This is the world's largest extent of plastic greenhouses. They call this the Mar de Plástico. It's in southern Spain, just across the Gibraltar Straits, just across the straits from Morocco. And in Austria, for example, most of the, a lot of the winter fruits, you get, you know, tomatoes, cucumbers, whatever, in February, they got trucked up from the Mar de Plástico. But by breeding plants like this, are you using more resources? We're using a lot more plastic, but they, I mean, the greenhouses actually do a good job of keeping in the moisture. The moisture comes out of this here and about in the background. But you're, I mean, you're using less resources than if you had to fly this stuff in from, you know, from Egypt. And why the colorful greenhouses? These are high-tech greenhouses in the Netherlands, near Rotterdam. And in the Northern, you know, in the Northern Hemisphere in the winter, you don't have very long days. So this lets them grow high-quality produce year-round, particularly tomatoes, and these are microgreens. And they're using different colored LED lights because some are more productive. Plants are green because they absorb red light. So you use red LED, you have a lot less electrical use. Now, I know LEDs use a lot less electricity than conventional bulbs from the past, but isn't this a big strain on the electrical grid to produce food in this way? It uses a lot of electricity, city, but how much power does it take to truck that stuff up from Spain or fly it in from South America? That's a good point, George. And a conventional greenhouse? Yeah, this is a mega tomato greenhouse in the Netherlands. The Dutch are the master farmers. These guys are incredible. What is this? It's a rotary greenhouse. They plant the lettuce in the center and then it turns once a day. And after a month, you get full-size lettuce on the outside. This is in Japan. pan. So are we talking hydroponics here? This is hydroponics. And this facility was right near the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, and they wanted to have local produce. So they brought in hydroponics. It was local, but it was all artificial. For the benefit of people who don't know these techniques, can you just quickly say in two sentences, what is hydroponics? Hydroponics is growing food without soil. And so they have a, it's in a, generally it's floating in a bath of water that's soaked in nutrients. And strawberries on the ceiling. Hydroponic strawberries in Belgium. Now, this looks like vertical farming, and that is fine. But as a photographer, I used to do industrial photography. And my biggest problem was that the white balance on all these various lights would drive me crazy with Kodachrome film. How is it with digital? Photoshop. Oh. Because I'm just thinking if I had to use a Hasselblad with film and get the color right of this pink and yellow, I would have to put whatever magenta filter or whatever in front. You need to find that auto white balance button in your camera. That's it? An auto white balance solves the problem? Wow. And this looks definitely like a studio shot with backlight and this is not in a real farm. I stole one of the shelves from that vertical farm you saw in the previous photo, and I borrowed it for a couple hours. And so I backlit the roots so you can see. I wanted to just kind of show how it works. And this is not hydroponics. This is a system they call aeroponics, where the roots dangle down in the air, and they spray nutrients on them. But it's very energy efficient. I mean, people think, like, this indoor farming is the future, and it's actually a huge energy suck. I photographed two companies that do this stuff, and they've both gone broke. I see. And they spray water to the roots? With nutrients in it, yes. With nutrients, okay. And so I suppose you put lights behind the roots, correct? Correct. And how many assistants do you have doing this for you? I'm the assistant. Well, if you need one, I'm available. And carrots for Bugs Bunny? Bugs America. This is about 40% of America's carrots come through this one building. And where is this building? This is in Bakersfield, California. Okay. So does California supply most of the fresh fruits and vegetables for America? Pretty much, yes. In the winter, a lot come out of Mexico, but California does a lot of produce. Now, I've eaten mixed greens, but this looks like mixed greens growing in the farm. Well, this is the biggest lettuce grow in the U.S., and they sell what they call spring mix. And so you've got a box of supermarket and it'll have six different varieties of lettuce in it. But what's really difficult is to get all six to mature at exactly the same time because they box from the field and they go straight to the market. So they box these mixed greens right on the farm? Right on the farm and they go straight out of the truck and off to the supermarket. Okay. And I see some red light on some plants like some, I don't know what it's happening. This is a research facility at the University of Arizona, and it was about 112 Fahrenheit that day. It's like 40, 45 centigrade. And they were doing experiments with sunflowers, trying to see what could survive heat and drought conditions with irrigation. And that's a laser that's going over the field, and it's making a 3D model of every plant in the field every two days. So there are some scientists reading these laser readouts? Just trying to see like, oh, this variety has better leaf structure. This one's wilting. This one, you know, they're trying to understand them in real time as they grow. But Arizona is a desert. Where is the water coming for all this? The Colorado River. Oh, Colorado River. And some Indian ladies in saris doing what? Well, you know, in the United States and in Europe, most of the research is going into, you know, corn and wheat and sometimes rice. But a lot of the developing world doesn't eat those things. They eat millet and they eat chickpeas. And this is a research farm in India that was trying to make food for the tropical market. Okay. So on a normal working day, these ladies are dressed up this colorfully or you made them do it? No, it's amazing. The women would dress up. These are farm workers. Usually people at farm workers wear like the nastiest clothes with like holes in the knees, like old track suits. And these ladies are wearing like their finest. Every day they come to work like this. It's extraordinary. Indian women are incredibly dignified. And some tractors that you arranged in a pattern. I did not arrange these. I found these on Google Earth. This is the Mahindra factory in India. And they're the biggest tractor manufacturer in the world. It's not John Deere. It's Mahindra. They make a really simple, I wouldn't say printed, but really simple, easy-to-fix tractor. And their motto is to democratize farming so even the poorest farmer can have his own tractor. Why are they red? Any color as long as they're red. It's kind of the Mahindra color. You are twisting the words of Henry Ford who said you can have your Model T in any color provided it is black. And no farm implements, some horses, and manual labor. This is the United States. This is the most productive farmland in the U.S. It's in Lancaster County, which also has the largest population of Amish farmers. And Amish are a religious minority in the United States. And by their religion, they're not allowed to use anything that's mechanized. They can't even have zippers in their pants. They have buttons. And they were harvesting corn one row at a time. It was GMO corn, but they don't use anything mechanized. This is a lake, Loktak Lake in India. It's very shallow water, fresh water for fish farming. These are floating fish farms. So are these for export or for local Indian consumption? Local Indian consumption. And looks like red chili peppers. India's number one in red pepper production. So how long were you sneezing after you took this picture? This was fine. This was with the drone, but the factory was tough. This is the biggest pepper market in the world, red pepper market. And this is where peasant farmers bring their rice in India. And each one brings in his own wagon load. And this is a cashew processing facility in India. Virtually every cashew you've ever eaten in your life was opened by an Indian lady by hand. Really? Almost all the world's cashews come through Kerala. and recently there was a new machine that was developed to open them mechanically and those are doing now being done in vietnam but until a couple years ago almost everyone was open by hand so when i eat a bag of cashews i've never thought that there's a lady behind that bag manually opening each cash when it's sitting on the ground with a metal with yeah with like a little metal anvil pop on each one open that's the reality um in india as you know is there it's illegal to kill cattle, but buffalo are okay, especially if you're a Muslim. This is one of the largest buffalo slaughterhouses in India. And this is a very progressive pepper operation where they're growing in a forest. And on the ground, you can see the little white dots. Those are coffee plants. They only flower one day a year. And coffee is a shade plant. And they were growing pepper as vines on the shade trees. And before the pepper harvesters went out, they had to check the forest for tigers and elephants. Tigers and elephants? So these are the coffee plants in the low grounds, right? Yes, the white flowering or coffee. And then he's up on the pole. He's got a little pole with little steps on and he's pulling peppers off by hand. It's in Bali. It's a seaweed farm. And this is drying seaweed that's grown offshore in China. This is the largest commercial fishing boat in the U.S. fleet. The Alaska Ocean, it's 100 meters long, and it goes after one fish. It goes after Alaska pollock. And this one boat gets all the fish sticks for McDonald's. One boat gets all the fish sticks for McDonald's? In the U.S., yeah. Really? So they pull the sock in. and it's got like a two-kilometer net. It all collects in the sock in the end, and they pull that on board, and then it goes down to the hold, and within two hours of coming out of the ocean, every fish is headed, gutted, filleted, and flash frozen. They go out, and typically like a three-week cruise. So did you have lunch on this boat? I did, and they didn't have any fish sticks. No? How long were you on this boat? They were pretty nice. I was only on board for like a little less than a week. They had a tugboat come out to pick me up. They were pretty near shore. They didn't want to make the journalist suffer. What are these green lights? This is a squid boat in the South Atlantic. And squid boats are usually at sea for about nine months continuously. And they catch squid by putting really bright lights in their water, which bring up plankton. And then the squid come up to eat the plankton. And then they have rotating walls of fish hooks on the side. Here they're changing some of the lines of the fish hooks, and the squid gets snagged. This is salmon farming in Norway. So is Norway one of the biggest salmon suppliers? The biggest salmon supplier in the world. This one company provides, I think, about half of the world's farmed salmon. And that light boat in the bottom right corner, that's the feed boat. And then they have little pneumatic tubes that spray the fish food into the pens. There are 200,000 salmon in each one of those pens. The salmon are all genetically identical, too, and so they're all filleted by robot. This is the world's largest shrimp farm in Indonesia and the world's largest shrimp processor in India. So when you're breeding shrimp for the masses, what are you feeding the shrimp? Most shrimp are fed fish that come from Peru, the proven anchoveta, which are caught. and then they're baked or into fish meal, and they ship those to India, China, Indonesia, Ecuador to feed the shrimp. So first you have to breed the fish food, then you have to feed the food to the shrimp, and then you have to feed the humans. That's right. So the conversion ratio, so you might be looking at every shrimp you eat might be a multiple of actually live fish to make that one farm shrimp. Seems a little involved to feed the masses. Yes. Does this bring in Bombay duck in India? Do you want to explain what Bombay duck are? Well, Bombay duck is not a duck. It's a very stinky fish. I don't like it, but they eat it. I don't even know what species of fish it is, so I can't tell you anything more about it. But they dry them as fast as they can get them out. It took me about a week to get the stink of the Bombay duck out of my clothes. Really? And why are they lighting the Bombay duck with all these colorful lights? They're hanging out at night. They want to hang out as fast as they can before they rot. These are octopus boats in a harbor in Mauritania during the off season. And this is for Halloween, right? Masks. Shark heads for soup in Nigeria. So did they cut out the fins before they cut the heads? First you fin them. These are really small sharks. So first they take off the fins and then I don't know what they do with the bodies, but the heads were a delicacy or market form in Nigeria. See, in photography, it's very difficult to figure out how big an object is. How big are these shark heads? Well, they're on a little fishing net. That fishing net's probably like one-inch squares. So these are, you know, each head's probably like, you know, smaller than my fist. It's off the coast of Mauritania. Mauritania, a lot of the people think of industrial fishing as being the big scourge, but there's a lot of overfishing from artisanal fishermen, too. And in Mauritania, Senegal, there's really very little regulation of artisanal fishing. On my little screen, these look like white maggots to me. Those are Australian sheep. So, sheep, you get mutton from sheep, right? Well, you get two products. You get sheep and you get wool. And I think about half their money goes to mutton and half was from the wool. So are sheep easier to raise than cows? I think they're lower maintenance. Yeah. This is the sheep market in Australia, shipping day. And what's the helicopter doing? In Australia, they have massive farms. Some of them are like on the order of like 10,000, 20,000 square miles. And they round them up by helicopter. Okay. And these were about, this is about 3,000 cows are coming in for a pregnancy test. And the males, the young males get shipped off to Indonesia for halal slaughter. They're shipped off live. And which country are we in now? This is in Somaliland. This is a new photo that was taken last month with Vincent. It was, Visit Jolly was right next to me when I took this, but this is in Somaliland, which is, Somaliland provides 1.6 million goats every year for the Hajj pilgrimage. They're all slaughtered on one day. So when you slaughter them for the Hajj pilgrimage, do you eat the meat? Well, I don't eat the meat, but it all gets eaten. It's all for, most of it was for charity because they can't eat that much meat at one day. This is the quarantine before they ship them out. How long are they quarantined? A couple days until the ship comes in. And this is herding them through town. They herd them out at dusk because it was really hot there, and they don't want to lose them in the dark. And there are 145,000 sheep going onto that boat headed for Jeddah. This is in Germany, the wine harvest. These fields were planted by the Romans. It's the Mosul River on the right. Is this grapes in a volcano? Grapes in a volcano in the Canary Islands, in Lanzarote. And they dig out pits so that you don't get desiccation from the marine winds. Now, grapes and wine seems to be a luxury food. Where does it fit in the future of feeding 10 billion people? Well, I consider wine a food. Grapes. Okay. It's harvesting organic apples in Germany. And my favorite croissants and croissants most croissants you think you get them from the boulangerie but most of them start in the Bridor factory where they make the dough and freeze it before they ship it off to the boulangeries for baking. And vertical towers of cheese this is yeah all the parmesan you've ever eaten went through this warehouse in Italy and it stays here for about a year as it cures, and this looks like Oktoberfest this is the largest food event in Germany or in Europe. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have learned a little more of where your food comes from. And if you have more questions, George will be here in the next break and he'll be there at the hotel willing to answer more questions. George, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Music.