Dr. Temple Grandin on Living More Sustainably

It exists to continually promote the Scottish and American Highland cattle breeds and to provide information and assistance to those who are interested in the Highland breed. The HHCA is also an open registry for Scottish and American highland cattle, which means breeders can compare their Highlands to the breed standard and register their Highlands as foundation stock.[00:01:00]

To learn more about the HHCA and Highland cattle, Visit www.HeartlandHighlandCattleAssociation.org, and stay tuned to learn more about the benefits of being an HHCA member later in this episode.

Hello and welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. For our very first episode of 2023, podcast team member Kenny Coogan chats with a very special guest to kick off the new year: Dr. Temple Grandin. Dr. Grandin will be chatting with us about how to live sustainably in the new year. So however you find yourself living right now, we hope Dr. Grandin’s expertise will be an inspiration to find new ways to live well with people, profit and planet in mind.

This is MOTHER EARTH NEWS.

Kenny Coogan: Good day [00:02:00] everyone, and we appreciate you for joining us on another exciting Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. I am Kenny Coogan, and joining me today is Dr. Temple Grandin, and today we are talking about how to live more sustainably in the new year.

Dr. Grandin has become a prominent author and speaker on both animal behavior and autism. She has been a professor of animal science at Colorado State University for over 30 years. Dr. Grandin has also spoken at our MOTHER EARTH NEWS Fairs and we have her book, Temple Grandin’s Guide to Working with Farm Animals, in our online store.

Welcome to the podcast, Temple, and Happy New Year.

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, it’s really, really great to be here.

Visual Thinking and Sustainability

Kenny Coogan: We are so excited to have you, and we’re gonna be talking about sustainability and one definition of sustainability, the balance of people, profit and planet. [00:03:00] And in order to be sustainable, we must take into account those three aspects.

And I’m currently reading your newest book, Visual Thinking: The hidden gifts of people who think in pictures, patterns and abstractions. So Temple, how can diverse non-linear thinkers help us become more sustainable?

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, in my work with cattle handling, let’s just start with cattle handling where I started, cuz I think this will help you to understand visual thinking.

Everything I think about’s a picture. There’s an HBO movie, “Temple Grandin,” and that shows exactly how I think. So when I first started in cattle handling, I’d get down into the chutes. I would see the shadows and the reflections and the things that the cattle would see that would make them stop. And nobody had thought to look at what cattle were looking at.

Now at the time that I started this in my twenties, I didn’t know that other people thought verbally. They thought totally in words. I’ve since learned that there’s kind of three different kinds of specialized thinking, [00:04:00] and in my book titled Visual Thinking, I’ve got research to back it up. There’s my kind of thinker who thinks in pictures and the things that my kind of mind’s good at is working with animals because they’re not verbal based. Photography, art, and, but also mechanical things. Also, I can just see how to make things work. It’s sort of like a good mechanic can just take an engine apart and then see how it works and put it back together again.

Now, another kind of thinker is your mathematical mind, visual, spatial, mathematical mind: your computer programmers, your degreed engineers. And then your word thinkers who think verbally, who tend to overgeneralize, “so we gotta be sustainable.” Well, something that might be sustainable in Arizona, not gonna work somewhere else. You see, this is where things have to get more specific.

Now my kind of mind absolutely can’t do algebra, and I’m getting afraid that a lot of my kind of mind’s just getting screened out. Now, I spent 25 [00:05:00] years with the big packing plants, installing equipment, designing stuff, working with construction crews, out on the job, supervising, uh, stockyards, restrainer systems and things I had designed and I saw a very interesting division of labor. All of the clever mechanical equipment was made by individuals who, just high school graduates, who had taken a welding class. And then the power requirements, uh, refrigeration and boiler requirements, that was done by degreed engineers. So there’s the mathematical part, and then there’s more visual part, and some of the most innovative things I’ve seen on small farms to get, you know, better regenerative agriculture are the visual thinkers. That’s that kid that didn’t do all that well in that school, but they can just figure out how to make the best pasture rotation system to work in their area.

Kenny Coogan: Joel Salatin also talks about how people sometimes think that farmers are the C and D students, but today they’re educated and [00:06:00] vocational skills, and of course they’re contributing a lot to society.

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, and the thing is, a lot of things in farming that have been very innovative. Little people innovate. Companies copy. But the little guys innovate.

Kenny Coogan: In your book, you exclaimed a few times, “We don’t make it anymore,” referring to the fact that a lot of materials and machines are made overseas.

Dr. Temple Grandin: That’s correct. Like for example, if you wanna get it, let’s say you wanted to build a great big pork processing plant, even a small pork processing plant or a poultry processing plant, one that’s something bigger than just having it on a trailer, you’re gonna be importing the equipment from Holland. I visited three of these places right before COVID hit, and I was shocked. All the equipment’s coming from Holland. We are paying the price for taking out the shop classes because the people I’ve worked with, they’re all retiring, they’re not getting replaced. Why don’t you check out the people that are fixing escalators and elevators? You’ll find a lot of gray hair. They’re not getting replaced.[00:07:00]

And this goes back to taking hands-on classes out of the schools. I had a student last year in my class that had never used a ruler or tape measure to measure anything. I’ve had students that have never used a tool, well, that’s just atrocious. How can you find out whether you’re good at tools if you’ve never tried them?

And I think this is a big problem of skill loss. We do not make the state-of-the-art electronic chip making machine. It’s from Holland. Now this goes back to their educational system. You can go the university route or you can go the tech route. We tend to stick our nose up at the tech route and look at it as a lesser form of intelligence.

I can tell you I’ve worked on big, complicated projects. Like I was like living at Cargill plants in the early nineties, and let me tell you, they are smart, but it’s a different kind of thinking. They just see it, where the degree engineer calculates, and you need to have both. Where we’ve lost the skill is what I call the clever [00:08:00] engineering department.

All of the, think packaging equipment, even a fairly small packaging machine. Some of those are coming in now from Italy, and it’s very good equipment. It’s super nice equipment. Yeah, getting spare parts has been a gigantic headache.

The other thing is our maintenance departments are losing skills. I was just out in one of the big hog plants and uh, well they’ve got equipment in there for stunning pigs that’s been around, oh, 25 years or so. Patents have all run out. We used to have people to fix that equipment. Well, we’re having problems now. They’re calling up Europe to figure out how to fix this thing that we knew how to fix 20 years ago. This is something I just saw last week, that’s a concern.

So at the age of 75, there’s two things I’m really interested in: sustainability, and the other thing is seeing kids like me. That’s why I did my book Visual Thinking and they’re gonna go out and fix those elevators. They’re gonna go out and figure out the best regenerative agriculture because they can see it and get into good careers, and we need [00:09:00] their skills.

I do a lot of talks to big businesses. I just got off a Zoom call this morning with a bank. Yeah, they’re gonna have the computer people and the computer people, but you still need me. You’ll make sure that your interfaces on your ATMs are not terrible. So there’s still a place for me.

Visual Thinkers and Bringing Back Industry

Kenny Coogan: Aside from education, do you think there’s other ways to bring back industry to the U.S. That still balances people, profit and planet?

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well you see a lot of the people that I worked with took a single welding class, started a tiny shop, and then they grew. I know a guy, he’s got a corporate jet and he’s building really big stuff. He’s older now. He started little tiny jobs in the beginning and then that shop grew. But you see what’s happening now is this new small shops are not forming the way they should because a lot of these kids gotta be really good at what I call clever engineering department.

They’re playing video games in the basement, autism diagnosis, because I’m gonna estimate 20% of the people that either laid [00:10:00] out entire factories or built ingenious equipment were either autistic, dyslexic, or ADHD. And they’re playing video games in the basement rather than fixing things. And I’ve been on some elevators really in need of, um, some servicing, like skipping floors in a fancy hotel, and that was in September. Doors making weird sounds, scraping in the shaft. They haven’t been serviced. That’s right now.

So let’s get back to the things you’re interested in. You know, sustainability, regenerative agriculture. It’s gonna be, you know, some of these kids that are different, that think differently. The ones that are gonna come up with integrate grazing with crops, crop rotation systems.

I’ve been in the beef industry for 50 years, you know, and people are bashing beef saying beefs, it’s horrible things. They just wreck everything they put out methane, everything else bad. And I have been out in the rural areas of every part of the U.S. Winter and summer. And I’ve seen really good ranchers where they really care for the land. I have seen people wreck land with grazing, but I’ve also [00:11:00] seen some of the best stuff and I, I’ve seen people do really good rotational grazing. And what people forget is that 20% of the habitable land in the whole world can only be used for grazing.

Let’s take Eastern Colorado. You can’t crop that. It’s not enough water. Sandhills in Nebraska, you can’t crop that. So what are you gonna do with this land, not grow food on it? Only thing you can do on that land is graze it, but you gotta do it right. So I’ve got a new paper out that you can get free online. It’s called “Grazing Cattle, Sheep, and Goats Is an Important Part of a Sustainable Agricultural Future.” “Grazing Cattle, Sheep, and Goats Is an Important Part of a Sustainable Agricultural Future,” and you can usually find it using my name in the Google Scholar and “2022.” So I looked up all the scientific papers I could find on rotational grazing, also on grazing, uh, cattle on cover crops that are grown every third year with [00:12:00] soy and corn. And by doing that, you can improve soil health. You can actually improve the lands grazing animals if you do ’em right, they’re part of the solution. In fact, the best farmland in the U.S. was formed by herds of bison: Come in, graze an area, fertilize that area, then move on. And that’s why I did this paper. It’s got about 90 references about every scientific study existed, I found Now there’s a lot of good stuff out there that people are doing that never gets written up. And this is a shame. There’s a lot of good articles on the Stockman Grass farmer, and you can’t even search ’em online. They don’t come up. I’ve taken their titles, I can’t even get, get it, search it, and hit the paywall, and I can’t even find the paywall online. And there’s a lot of good stuff in those articles. We need to be getting this information out there on how to do things.

Kenny Coogan: We asked our social media audience for questions, and Dr. Jennifer [00:13:00] Velvo says, “It’s challenging to get people out of the mindset of ‘this is how we’ve always done it, and it works.’ What strategies have you found most effective at convincing industry farmers that taking steps to improve animal welfare will benefit both the animals and the farmers?”

Dr. Temple Grandin: Let’s, uh, some minds I can’t change. So let’s look at how I made changes in cattle handling. When I designed something, I wrote in all the cattle magazines how to do it. I wrote articles on cattle behavior, just how to do it. But remember little people innovate. And I think a lot of things are gonna happen where things that just, you were considered fringe kind of, um, alternative stuff. Fringe becomes mainstream.

Let me give you an example. Probiotics and chickens. 15 years ago, the industry stuck their nose up at it. Everybody’s doing it now. No longer fringe, it’s giant banners hanging over [00:14:00] the escalator at the big trade show. So I think the way to do it is we’ve gotta work with the innovators.

The other thing that’s really important is, let’s say I’ve talked to a corn and soybean farmer in Nebraska and she also raised chickens and, uh, we were talking about cover crops. Well, some consultant came out there and gave her this complicated cover crop that she’d have to mix in a cement mixer. Please don’t do that to a beginner. How about some wheat? Then you grow it for wheat after you let the cattle graze it. Let that beginner do something easy that she could easily do. Or there’s a seed mix that she could just buy. But I don’t want this beginner out there with a cement mixer trying to mix 20 different kinds of seed they put in the seeder. Because it’s very important when you are implementing new things that early adopters are successful. That’s really, I. because if early adopters fail, then it spreads through the industry and it sets things back. [00:15:00] No, that’s not the thing to do. Let’s start the beginners out with easy stuff and then people gradually will do it. Now we gotta get the livestock and the plants back together again. It will improve soil health, but it’s gonna take five years to show it.

Dr. Temple Grandin on Regenerative Grazing

Kenny Coogan: Speaking of that, we have another question and comment from Ana. Her handle is @DeepRootsCommunityFarm. She says, “We raise beef cows in addition to sheep, goats, and pigs, and rotationally graze them through one to seven acre pastures. Currently, each species rotates alone, but we are interested in mixed species grazing to better utilize the available forage. Do you think mixed species grazing puts these different animals together in situations that makes them uncomfortable, or as long as there is sufficient space in the pasture rotations, do you think each [00:16:00] would seek out the appropriate space?”

Dr. Temple Grandin: Animals that are raised together are just fine. Sheep can get along with cattle just fine as long as you’re not in a competition at the feed trough, because obviously the cattle are gonna beat the sheep off.

But one of the ways you can do is make a creep feeder. Cattle can’t fit in. As long as there’s enough pasture out there, um, you can put sheep in a with cattle. The thing I wanna emphasize is local conditions are extremely important. I recommend somebody that’s thinking about getting into this, get very good local advice cuz something that works at one place doesn’t work somewhere else.

And some of the county extension people have good local advice. I, I recommend to people to go to meetings. You know, this is where I’m seeing young people coming into farming, they’re getting interested. I wanna encourage this because we need to be getting a livestock and the crops together and farming got specialized and they go, well, we don’t wanna mess with cattle.

Well, when fertilizer prices got really [00:17:00] high, then having, maybe doing a cover crop with cattle gets a lot more attractive. One of the things that pushed the chicken industry and the probiotics is they have to reduce the antibiotic use. And when they had to reduce the antibiotic use, they what they felt was fringe before with probiotics, they started doing it.

But the other thing that helped me improve cattle handling is the amount of writing I did about it. There’s all kinds of people out there doing wonderful things and nothing’s written up, and it needs to be written up, put on websites that people can access, and that’s how you spread it around. You tell about what you do.

One thing, Joel Salatin has done a good job of that. He’s got a lot of books that describe what he does. I’d recommend that people that subscribe to the Stockman Grass Farmer, I read it every month. It’s got lots of good stuff in it. I wish that there was better online access to that stuff.

Sustainability in Backyard Farming

Kenny Coogan: You were talking about backyard poultry. Do you have any tips [00:18:00] for those who raise maybe, you know, a dozen backyard chickens? How could they be more sustainable in the new year?

Dr. Temple Grandin: You better put ’em in the coop at night or the fox is gonna get ’em. Sometimes we’ve just got to talk about basics. Okay, let’s get back to like sustainability, of course, environmentally sound. And the business does have to be a business that makes money. And you also look at, you know, the welfare of people. Uh, when I have done, uh, McDonald’s audits, checking out the slaughter plants, and I’ve gone to farms. I, if the people are living there, I make sure that’s not some completely disgusting, dirty mess because you’ve got to treat people right.

Uh, when it comes to just improving something like large slaughterhouse is a thing that, that made the biggest change. Now worked on this was, uh, big companies like McDonald’s and Wendy’s inspecting them and holding ’em to some standards. And I’m very proud of the standards I wrote though. Very simple, absolutely clear.

I don’t [00:19:00] like words like “prevent avoidable suffering,” and I don’t know what that means if I have to hold a, a, a farm or a meat packing plant to a standard. Now, I had it very clear things like during handling, more than 1% of your animals fall down. You got a problem you need to fix. Whether it’s a facility or it’s whether how you’re handling, it’s an outcome variable.

The trend now is to do what’s called “key welfare indicators,” what are the really important things to measure?

Kenny Coogan: In addition for backyard poultry, people are raising in their backyards, like maybe in the suburbs. They have to protect them from predators. But in regards to sustainability, in the U.S., it’s estimated that we’re wasting about 30% or 40% of food in the food supply.

And when I think about backyard chickens, I’m thinking that they’re great at eating food scraps and kitchen scraps. Is it a problem that people are buying formulated foods from, you know, many states over to [00:20:00] feed their backyard chickens?

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, we wanna make sure that chickens get a balanced diet, so it’d probably be good to feed a little bit of the commercial feed that you can feed some of the other things. I’ve read statistics on the amount of water that lawns use that’s not very sustainable, but the amount of food waste is terrible.

And let’s just start about what we can do about it at home. Reducing food waste. One area is supermarkets. When you get something that goes past the sell by date, that food’s still edible. That needs to be distributed to, you know, we just can’t be throwing all this stuff out.

Now the thing is, you’ve brought up some very broad concepts. Being a visual thinker, I’m thinking about something much more local, like maybe all the bread that the local supermarket throws out. Some of those are going to, you know, soup kitchens and things like that. You know, now you have meat and we have more of a food safety issue there. But the amount of stuff that’s wasted, the clothing industry is absolutely disgusting. [00:21:00] What they call the fast fashion industry, totally disgusting on the, on the, on the amount of waste. You know, you wear something a few times and then you get rid of it and you know, this is a lot of things we need to be a lot more sustainable, but we’ve gotta do stuff that works.

Like I was just reading an article today in a new nature about biofuels. Now there’s situations where that’s sustainable and situations where it’s not. See, the problem with biofuels is, let’s say you get paid a subsidy to put ethanol out there or some other biofuel, then you might start growing it on land where you shouldn’t even be growing it. It’s sustainable up to a point.

Now here I’ll give you a real horror story of a not sustainable biofuel. You grow trees in the southeast U.S. Chop ’em up and make wood pellets. Put it on a diesel powered boat, take it over to the UK and burn it in a power plant, that’s not sustainable. You know that, that definitely not. You know, you’ve got situations where maybe you’re growing palm oil [00:22:00] plantations where you shouldn’t be, and somebody talk about fueling planes with oil.

I was down at the airport and I watched them fuel a plane and I go, if they put palm oil in that plane, there’s nothing sustainable about that. You see? But as I talk about these things, I see it. Um, see nothing’s abstract. See, verbal thinkers tend a top-down thinker. Well, we, sustainability, I’m thinking about here’s sustainable stuff that’s actually working.

We got out in the field and I’ve seen some very good stuff on small farms. I saw good stuff at Joe Salatin’s. It’s definitely sustainable and he’s raising a lot of food on small amount of land. Pigs, cattle, chickens. That’s real sustainable because you gotta have something in the long run. Okay?

I’d like to tell you, here’s what’s not sustainable. You, you suck an aquifer dry. That’s why you’ve been dying in the Middle East. It, that’s not sustainable. They can’t farm anymore. Got no water supply.

Making Urban Spaces More Sustainable

Kenny Coogan: So speak of saving [00:23:00] water and smaller yards , how do you see backyard gardens fitting into the sustainable equation? Like people who are living in the suburbs, in the cities who are growing vegetables on their little, uh, front porch. Do you think that’s making an impact?

Dr. Temple Grandin: Every little bit helps. I saw somebody attack hotels or telling people, uh, when the hotel says, well, they don’t want to give, they’re not gonna give you new towels every day, for example. Well, the thing is that stuff adds up. And let’s say I’m in a hotel for three days and that’s three less towels they’ve washed. That’s gonna add up. Yeah. The little things do matter. It’s not the biggest thing you can do. Now, after I’ve been in a hotel for a week, yes, I want new towels, but I don’t need them every day. You see, that’s the example of something small. Okay? One, you work with one supermarket, so they aren’t throwing so much food away. See, these things [00:24:00] add up. I read something the other day that a dripping faucet could fill a swimming pool in on a month or something. The things add up. You know what if people were growing more vegetables on their front lawn than just on the little planters? Have a little small greenhouse on the front lawn.

Kenny Coogan: Instead of grass.

Dr. Temple Grandin: Yeah, grass is actually a big waste. You go to Japan. I went to Japan like 15 years ago or so, and the first thing I notice, is they were growing crops on the median strip down the center of the freeway. They don’t have lawns. The land is too valuable. Every square inch of land you could crop has a food growing on it or tea growing on it, or rice something, something you can eat growing on it. And when I tell that to people here, they just think it’s crazy about, I saw that, you know, they starved in the past. That’s one of the reasons why they’re doing that. They don’t wanna be dependent on ships for their food.

First thing, on sustainability is the whole food waste [00:25:00] thing. The supermarket at the home, you know. Then there’s, um, some crop that, well, the apples were weren’t very nice or some other crop wasn’t very nice. They just plow it under, why don’t you let people come out and pick it? And we gotta get serious about food waste.

Kenny Coogan: Like you were mentioning those, uh, best used by dates and sold by dates.

Dr. Temple Grandin: For some things they mean more than others. Meat, we’d have to be really careful to be able to do that safely. But things like, okay, some gnarly looking apples . Yeah, those are still edible. I’ve eaten those. No, they didn’t have to be thrown away. This would help a whole lot.

And the other thing, I’m, just for my waste too. I, I gave up soda. No coke, no, none of that stuff helped me, uh, not gain weight too. Drinking all that sugar. Even the diet stuff, I gained weight on that. I gave that up. Now there’s other things I’m not gonna give up. Dark [00:26:00] chocolate. I got a little bit of that.

Kenny Coogan: All right. We’re gonna take a quick break in our conversation to hear a word from our sponsor, and when we return, we will learn how folks can be more sustainable in regards to livestock and water usage.

Heartland Highland Cattle Association and Registry

John Moore: What types of benefits exist for the Heartland Highland Cattle Association and Registry members? The answer is quite a bit. The HHCA is proud to offer a host of assistance and resources to help highland breeders and marketers succeed. Here are just a few of them.

The association hosts meetings and events for members, including spring and fall, Highland cattle auctions, and seasonal picnics. In fact, they’re the longest running and largest Highland auction in the United States, and in 2022, they sold more than 200 head of Highlands at the fall auction. The HHCA [00:27:00] offers materials such as a membership directory, free promotional information to display at events, and a quarterly Highland journal.

They also offer a free three month ad to members in the classified ad section on the HHCA website, as well as other networking opportunities. If you want to join this growing community of passionate Highland cattle breeders and marketers, head to the HHCA website, www.HeartlandHighlandCattleAssociation.org, and click on the membership application button on the left hand side to apply.

Are Cows Really Bad for the Environment?

Kenny Coogan: We are back with Professor Temple Grandin . Earlier we were talking about how livestock, particularly, uh, cows get bad publicity about their–

Dr. Temple Grandin: –methane. Swamps put out a lot more methane than cattle. Way, way more. Uh, another thing that puts out more is leaking oil field equipment and [00:28:00] maintenance would help, uh, prevent that problem.

We need to be, you know, putting the whole thing in perspective. And then some activists will say, well, cattle are terrible cuz sheep are terrible because they use up all this land. But a lot of this land is land, land you can’t crop. What you gonna do with Eastern Colorado? I was just recently there. There’s a hundred mile stretch or 200 kilometer stretch were the only thing you can do is graze it, it’s too far out of town to build houses on it. Uh, 200 kilometers or a hundred miles of land. That can only be grazed. Now the drought’s been bad. They’ve had to get rid of maybe 30%, 50% of the cattle that’ve been over grazing.

But there’s a lot of places where grazing animals’ the only way to make food on that land. And if you do it right, you can actually improve land. Really interested in things like grazing livestock on cover crops. Now, of course, bison would be part of that too. They’re a grazing animal

Kenny Coogan: Can you speak about how grazing animals can be regenerative? How can they regenerate the….

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, basically the, [00:29:00] let’s just talk about how what the bison did originally, a big herd of bison, they’d come in to a section of pasture, graze it down to about half, fertilize it, urinating and defecating, and then move on. And that it greatly improves soil health. So to do it in a really regenerative way, when you put the principles of some of the grazing systems down as to use electric fencing to make ’em fairly tight, let ’em mow it to about half, take half, then you move them to another pasture. Now, where people get into a big mistake is they don’t let the roots regenerate. The roots regenerate more slowly than the green grass on top.

So you need to get somebody local and dig up the roots and tell you whether or not they’re regenerated. And in my paper, um, “Grazing Cattle, Sheep, and Goats Are Part of a Sustainable Agricultural Future,” I review some of those studies. You’ve got to do it right and you have to have enough rest time. Also, the reason for bunching the cattle more [00:30:00] tightly is to make them eat all the pasture you want ’em to eat the, uh, celery along with the yummy stuff. Otherwise, they tend to cherry pick all the goodies off the pasture and leave the celery and the stuff they’re not that interested in eating. It’s basically graze half and move them. Looking at some surveys, you know, maybe 40%, 50% of ranchers are doing some form of grazing and there’s some doing really, really good job of regenerating the land, making habitat for wildlife, doing really good things.

And some people wanna just get rid of the ranchers. Well if you get rid of the ranchers, there’s gonna be nobody in these extensive areas to take care of the land. It’s just gonna be a mess. And I’ve been out on very good ranches where they really take good care of the land. Yes. And I’ve also seen stuff where pasture’s been wrecked. That’s not good.

Um, also, there’s people out there doing a really good job with the land.

Kenny Coogan: For those who don’t raise cows and livestock, but they still eat meat like beef, how can they live a more sustainable lifestyle? What should they be looking for at [00:31:00] the grocery store or their farmers market?

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, let’s work on not wasting food.

That’s probably big number one. You know, in the buffet table it says, eat everything you take. Let’s work on things like that. And when I go to hotels, I’ll use the towels, the same towels for four days. Every little bit thing like that does help.

Kenny Coogan: Or when you’re living in your house, you can use the same towel for four days.

Dr. Temple Grandin: Exactly, exactly. So in a hotel, and somebody criticized hotels and called that greenwashing. But when you think about it, that would add up to a lot of water. Yeah, that’d be a lot of loads of laundry that hotel would not have to do. Now I’m seeing a hotel laundry room. Now you see this is not abstract to a visual thinker.

The verbal thinkers, there’s a lot of over generalization. Well, we gotta convert everything to renewable energy. You know, there’s things we’ve got to do, and I was reading an article today on using hydrogen as a clean fuel, and that’s got a lot of good things, but if you do it wrong, you can have more carbon coming out.[00:32:00]

Using Visual Thinking to Organize Sustainable Energy

Kenny Coogan: So speaking of water, when, um, Temple was born, the world population, human population was 2.5 billion people. And when I was born it was little over 5 billion people. And now a few months ago, the world population has reached 8 billion people. Temple, how can we be more sustainable with finite resources like water? Like aside from not washing our towels every day, like what else could we do?

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, what I think we’re gonna have to pick out a specific area. I mean, I just heard, I just read something the other day that really horrified me, that since in the Middle East, they can’t farm, they have dairies over there and they’re draining aquifers in the U.S. right now to raise alfalfa hay for dairy cows to put it in a shipping container to go over to the Middle East, that is not sustainable. Now, I can understand that they don’t wanna have their food supply [00:33:00] dependent on totally dependent on our ships, but right now that was not sustainable. You know, what do we do in the parts of the country where they don’t have water?

Well, the oil industry, everyone says they’re totally terrible. You know what? They might have expertise that could help us. This. They really get creative from our thinking. I went to a ranch this summer and there was a pump jack up on the top of the hill, a regular old thing that goes up and down oil, except it was pumping water.

Well, I had to go up and get close and personal with that pump jack, I was not gonna get tangled up in it. And I said, you’re pumping water. So now I start imagining a big pipeline of water and use the oil company’s technologies right there on the shelf and the expertise to build it. Maybe that’s something we do in the future. We’ll use that technology for water. That’s the kind of thing that a, just a regular pump jack. But when I found out then it was pumping water that really got my mind going [00:34:00] cuz the other thing I’m concerned about is expertise loss on mechanical things. That’s another big issue. You know, we’ve gotta keep power grids operating.

We had, uh, windmills that fell down in Colorado. Some stuff fell off of ’em in Colorado. They weren’t maintained. That’s why you need visual thinkers like me that can’t do algebra. You need us to keep the water systems running and the power grid operational.

Kenny Coogan: Have you seen in some cities that people are building structures where you have like the grocery store at the bottom? And then housing above that. And then on the roof they have, uh, rooftop gardens.

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, I think all of that kind of stuff’s really good. And when it comes to solar power, uh, let’s get it on people’s houses. I mean, down in, in southern Colorado, they did a thousand acres of solar panels. I don’t even know if they bought good ones or not.

But if you put solar panels on lots and lots and lots and lots of the houses, you take a big load off of coal fired power plant. We have one. It’s getting converted to gas right now. That’s where solar panels belong.

Kenny Coogan: The thousand [00:35:00] acres was just on land, not on houses?

Dr. Temple Grandin: No. Yeah. They covered up range land with a thousand acres of solar panels.

Now this brings up another thing. If you space the solar panels right, you can graze sheep under them. Those solar panels need, you need to be growing something under them, that’s gonna make it a lot more sustainable. Not just putting ’em there, but the investors come in there and put this big field of solar panels.

The other thing I learned about solar panels is some degrade rather rapidly. They’re cheap ones. No solar panel lasts forever. They all degrade eventually. That’s something a lot of people don’t realize, that even if it looks just totally fine, the stuff inside the silicon loses its ability to make electricity and so they have to be replaced eventually.

If you have a bad right battery system or everything, you can power a house, but then you got the issue of all the nasty stuff that’s in the battery.

Kenny Coogan: Wouldn’t it be nice that all those parking lots and cities where their cars are getting really hot?

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well that’s where they, they need solar panels. I’ll tell you another place that needs solar panels. Cattle feed yards. You put ’em 12 foot [00:36:00] high or 3.5 meters high, you put ’em north and south so the shadow will moves, you know a mud pie under that. And let’s cover feed yards with solar panels. Get the cattle some shade. Get ’em on rooves. I go into some airports, there’s lots of solar panels on the roofs of warehouses, and I go in another airport, there’s none. Probably has something to do with a city’s policy. There’s a lot you can see on final approach. It’s also a lot you can see from 35,000 feet. I can see if I’m 35,000 feet where you might have a cluster of five center pivots and two of ’em are turned off. And I do know the difference between turned off and small grains.

Barriers for Visual Thinkers in Sustainability

Kenny Coogan: Do you have any other fields of sustainability?

Dr. Temple Grandin: I think the most successful things are gonna be much more local. Let’s say somebody worked on getting solar panels put on the roofs of houses or somebody in your town and then after you did some things successfully and you gotta install ’em, right? Cuz I don’t want any fire.

That’s something that just, um, listened to a hideous newscast last night of electric bikes that delivery people were [00:37:00] using burning up in their apartments. That’s real bad. They were using the wrong chargers on ’em.

Kenny Coogan: People also get concerned about leaks in their roofing when solar panels….

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, yeah, the way they put solar panels on our, our new meat lab roof and they messed up the roof.

This gets back to installing it right. And this gets back to the kind of, you know, you get the peaceful thinkers like me that can’t do higher math, I think we’ll be less likely to make holes in the roof. It’s gotta be installed right. But I think instead of thinking grandiose, top down things, let’s work on a lot more local things.

Um, you can do it in the neighborhood, but then after you do something that’s really successful, write about it. I’ve got my website, Grandin.com on livestock handling and before the internet, I wrote in Beef Magazine and a whole bunch of other venues just how to do stuff. And there’s a lot of innovative stuff out there. Wonderful stuff. It’s not getting written up so that people can [00:38:00] use it.

Kenny Coogan: Yeah. If you stop using a plastic water bottle, that’s pretty good. But if you tell 10 people about the problems of microplastics and plastics and they stop doing it and then they tell 10 people, that’s how you get a movement going.

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, that’s right. And I think a lot more things are gonna be more bottom-up. Okay. Like right now we’ve got a coal fired power plant. This computer’s running on coal right now. They, they’re slowly converting it over to gas. But the other thing we have to think about is, can we totally go everything solar panels and windmills? What if a big storm takes out a bunch of the windmills or the solar panels? I don’t wanna close that power plant. So one of the things I’d want to ask is what’s the lowest I can run that facility and keep it good? Cuz if I shut it down, it hurts it. Very hard to start it back up again. Can I run it 5%, 10%?

Keep my expertise. People forget about the expertise to run these things. And then if there’s a real [00:39:00] emergency, I’ve got it. You know, I think sort of a more, let say, diversified portfolio. No, we’ve got to get, phase coal out. Natural gas is the bridge fuel.

Kenny Coogan: Right now I’m thinking about is like city planners who are helping offset the cost of solar panels and being more sustainable and water usage.

How can we get more visual thinkers into those jobs like city planner?

Dr. Temple Grandin: Oh, one of the problems is that I can’t grad, I don’t think I could graduate from high school in California. I can’t do algebras. And I’m really concerned. In my visual thinking book, I talk about this problem of being screened out because I see solar panels and I go, man, if they just space us a little further apart, I could raise some sheep under there, or I could put some crops under there because you’ve got to be able walk between them if you’re gonna do something under there.

Kenny Coogan: And right now they’re like two feet off the ground?

Dr. Temple Grandin: It depends. It depends upon the installation. I’ve seen all kinds of things, but what’s happened is the big investors get in there and they slap all these solar [00:40:00] panels up and I’m going, did they buy good ones? I don’t know. See, these are the kind of questions I would ask.

And we need all the different kinds of thinkers because let’s go back to the building, a food processing plant. I need the mathematical engineer to figure out the power loads. Uh, uh, boilers. Refrigeration, my kind of mind doesn’t touch this stuff. You need the minds working together. But the big problem we’ve got , everything’s going, more verbal thinkers in things like politics and government. And I get very concerned that we’ve got, might have somebody who’s never used a tape measure, a ruler or a tool’s gonna make decision about infrastructure. Which is physical things.

And also write about how to do stuff. So you had one community that did a really great, you know, energy program? Write about what you did.

There’s all this innovative stuff out. Nobody writes it up. One of the things that helped make me effective in making change, I’ve also made change, you know, for, for autistic individuals too, I write about stuff.

Kenny Coogan: Where do you suggest [00:41:00] these individuals publish their work?

Dr. Temple Grandin: In academic publications and in publications that the public has access to.

I’m a big believer in free access to scientific papers. Actually paid quite a bit of money in order to have all my papers of free access. Cuz I think that’s important. You know, you write it up in things that people can use. The scientific record puts it on more permanent record.

Another thing is politics, my vote is private. You lose half your audience if you get involved in that publicly. And I don’t wanna lose half my audience. I keep that to myself.

Pairing Sustainable Energy and Regenerative Grazing

Kenny Coogan: So I hear you saying that visual thinkers would be able to identify, oh wow, this solar panel should have been 10 feet higher or….

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, it depends what I’m gonna do under the solar panel.

Again, I take, the bottom up approach and they call it “agrivoltaics,” doing stuff under solar panels. Why do you have to call it some weird name? “Agrivoltaics” is what they call it. Then I look some of this stuff up and there’s been some good stuff [00:42:00] done with sheep. And the other thing, we wanna make sure that we don’t repeat mistakes that other people have made, and correct it. That’s something you don’t wanna do. And I’m a bottom up thinker, so my approach is I wanna read everything, go visit all kinds of places, find out the whole state of the art, then come up with something better, then write about it. Bottom up approach rather than top down say, oh, we’re gonna convert, we’re gonna rip out this coal-fire power plant and put in, you know, zillions of acres of solar panels. Well, did you even buy good ones? Kind of questions that don’t get asked if you get too top down and too verbal.

Kenny Coogan: I understand everything you’re saying. How much do you think this is visual thinkers versus just people not using common sense?

Dr. Temple Grandin: I think common sense is visual thinking. Okay. Let’s just take a simple example.

There’s a couple of grapes on the floor at the supermarket. You go, I better clean those up before somebody slips on ’em. Now I’m seeing my supermarket, King Supers, with grapes on the floor over by the produce [00:43:00] counter. Yeah, I’ll pick ’em up. You know that common sense. The thing is we need all the different kinds of minds and when they can work together collaboratively, the first thing is realizing that different thinkers exist and a lot of people are mixtures, but the kids who think differently are the ones they call “neurodivergent.”

They’ll might be an extreme visual thinker, or they’re an extreme mathematician or an extreme verbal. They tend more likely to be an extreme visual or an extreme mathematics thinker, but the mathematics thinker doesn’t think about the things you can visualize. Like I review a lot of scientific journal articles and they’ll have all the fancy statistics. They’ll describe every lab test they did and they didn’t tell me how the housed their sheep, for example. It matters. Or what they fed them in this experiment. It matters. Things this basic get left out, but you see, I see it and a lot of the science is going much more mathematical, but I’m appalled at the stuff that gets left out of the method section and I’m like tearing the method section up.[00:44:00]

I’ll leave the math to the mathematicians. We need all the different kinds of thinkers. And the first step is realizing they exist. And a lot of very creative things done with regenerative agriculture are some of the visual thinkers. And they were the guys, ladies that did poorly in school and then they started something on the farm and they’re doing innovative stuff.

And this is where a verbal thinker could help get it written up until you’re doing something really good. And let’s just write about how to. Let’s leave the politics out there. Just write about it. You wanna make a building with rooftop gardens? How did you do it? I know enough about construction and know you don’t wanna overweight the roof of a structure. I mean, you put too much soil up there, you’ll be in trouble. You don’t wanna wreck the roof when you install solar panels. Well, those things are solvable problems. Well then maybe we publish some stuff of the how to install solar panels on asphalt shingles without wrecking roofs. That would be a useful thing to publish.

Finding Resources Through Scientific Publications

Kenny Coogan: When you were talking about picking up the grapes on the [00:45:00] floor, and when you’re talking about referring to scientific papers to make sure you don’t do the incorrect thing, that’s all very, you know, altruism. And my question is, let’s say we have a person who owns one or two acres, they’re not a scientist. How do they find these papers? How do they find the valid papers?

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, I tend to look at scientific databases. You know, there are some good Facebook groups and things like that. If you know exactly, you know who it is, but there’s also so much rubbish online. It’s unbelievable, the rubbish that people will believe.

I love the Google Scholar as that gets you into the scientific things. Now, this good things written in produced of publications that won’t be on Google, but you just search stuff on Google. And the thing I tell people, remember I teach my students how to look things up online. Cattle has six different words.

So let’s say it’s a grazing experiment. There were steers that were grazed, [00:46:00] and if they only use the word steers, and I search for cattle grazing, I won’t find that paper. So you might wanna do “steers pasture rotation.” Then I gotta do another search. Don’t blob the keywords together. That doesn’t work. Then I do another search: “cattle pasture rotation” “cows pasture rotation.” See, that’s three different searches. I might do “cattle regenerative agriculture.” Don’t put all the keywords on there. That just confuses it. I find it works better if you do like keyword triplets. I’m amazed at the stuff I just could find online with regular Google. That’s a really valuable skill. I was very good at finding things in the paper library, and what I would do is I would go to the card catalog, which is, uh, you know, keywords and I’d get a section of books and I’d very carefully go through the books looking for stuff, you know, just getting stuff out.

There’s all kinds of good stuff online. Uh, your state extension service is often a very good place to start. Going to some of the workshops that are put out and you wanna get information from reliable [00:47:00] things.

Kenny Coogan: The extension offices, most of their workshops are free. They’re based on science. I also wrote down Google Scholar.

Dr. Temple Grandin: What that does is it, now it will screen, you won’t get, let’s say Cattle Magazine or something like that. It’s got a nice article. That will not be in there. I also recommend you subscribing to things like the Grass Farmer. Just some of the cattle magazines, sheep things, you can subscribe to them online or on paper, but I like to eat and read, so I’m bad about paper, but they read a lot of stuff and look reputable sources for stuff now.

But on the other hand, you might have an individual person who’s doing grazing says, on my farm, I did this and that worked. You know, you can learn from that too, but you’ve got to separate the BS from the good stuff. Well, I’ve got a pretty good BS meter.

Final Thoughts on Visual Thinking and The Future

Kenny Coogan: So verify the research you do. Temple. I have one last, and this is from longtime Mother Earth News subscriber [00:48:00] Demi Stearns and she asks, “How are you doing? Are you optimistic for the future?”

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, let’s just start working up. Bottom up, something really innovative you’ve done with sustainability. Write about it, talk about it. You’ll need to spend more time spreading the knowledge than you will inventing it. In other words, transferring knowledge actually takes more effort than inventing something.

I found that, you know, with some of my livestock stuff. Keep writing about it, just putting out good information that helps. You know, the Ted uh, the TED talks, they have ideas worth spreading. That’s their mojo.

Kenny Coogan: Yeah. I imagine when you write a book, you know, it takes a certain amount of time. But then you have to advertise and do talks about your book.

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, I’ve seen wonderful stuff where nothing was done, promoted, whether it’s in the agricultural field or the autism field. You know, instead of just complaining about the future or whatever, let’s one at a time, write about it, [00:49:00] talk about it, spend some time spreading the ideas. Um, some people hold onto their knowledge too much.

I’ve had people criticize me for letting knowledge go, and I said, well, I get by solving business even though I write all these how-to articles. But I have seen, I was on final approach going to Denver, uh, about a year ago. I saw one of my facilities, my website designed it.

Kenny Coogan: But it’s also altruistic. If you tell somebody you’re good idea and if they start implementing it, that’s gonna help them, but it’s also gonna help the environment in which you still live.

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, that’s right. There’s certain things, even in the meat industry. You know, we work on animal welfare or we work on food safety or worker safety. These are things where the competitors will share information. And we’re very, very careful about the antitrust stuff and talking about money that where you sell your product to, that we don’t discuss.

But I can remember when they’re working on ergonomic practices in the meat industry, they were sharing all kinds of ideas to, you know, to improve that. And the same thing with animal welfare. You know, somebody comes up with a better, a little flag or something to [00:50:00] move the cattle with. You know, everybody ought to be using that.

I just was up at a pig farm and I saw this wonderful ramp thing of vaccinating piglets where they little piggies just run up this ramp onto a table with a little fence on it, and you can pick it up really nice like this, and somebody else gives a shot and they’re not screeching all over the place and you’re not bending over, breaking your back, picking them. I think every pig farm needs to have this little vaccinating ramp. It was wonderful. It wasn’t that hard to build and you gotta get the right cleats on the ramp. That’s really important. Otherwise, little piggies, you’ll have a hard time walking up that. You see now. I see it. That’s something that was totally new. I saw it a pig farm just a few days ago. That was absolutely wonderful. It takes the vaccinating job with weaned piglets where it’s bend over, break your back, grab ’em by the leg, screaming their heads off, and now one person just picks the pig up really nice like this. Give it the shot perfectly. Really clever, not very expensive.

That’s the kind of stuff that needs to be spread.

Kenny Coogan: That’s good to hear that back in the day, they were willing to share their [00:51:00] ideas and their….

Dr. Temple Grandin: Well, and there’s other stuff that’s really confidential. I mean, you know, future plans for building a new plant. I treat that as totally confidential. Uh, whose trucks are backed up to the plant, where they’re selling to, that’s confidential. But there’s other stuff that we need to be spreading.

Kenny Coogan: Thank you so much, Dr. Temple Grandin, for your insight over the years regarding animal behavior and autism. You are truly inspiring and our conversation on sustainability has been really insightful.

Dr. Temple Grandin: Thank you so much for having me.

Cultivate Kindness with More Mother Earth News and Friends

Kenny Coogan: We thank our listener for joining our podcast and encourage you to share it with your friends, colleagues, and family. To listen to more podcasts and to learn more, visit our website, MotherEarthNews.com. You can also follow our social media platforms from that link. And remember, no matter how brown your thumb is, you can always cultivate kindness.

John Moore: Thank you for joining us and Dr. Temple Grandin for this [00:52:00] conversation about living sustainably in the new year. For links to some of the resources we covered and so much more info, visit MotherEarthNews.com/Podcast. Our podcast team includes Carla Tilghman Jessica Mitchell, John Moore, and Kenny Coogan.

Music for this episode is “Travel Light” by Jason Shaw. The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.

Thanks again to the Heartland Highland Cattle Association and Registry for sponsoring this Mother Earth News and Friends episode. Highland cattle are a beautiful, unique, and hearty breed, and we are thankful the HHCA works hard to promote this breed and help others succeed in breeding their own herds. The HHCA has members across the country who meet, network, and attend events, all with the association’s support, including utilizing the [00:53:00] HHCA’s open registry to compare their Highlands to the Highland breed standard.

To learn more about the HHCA Highland cattle, and how you can get involved and apply for membership, visit their website at HeartlandHighlandCattleAssociation.org. You can also click on the “contact us” button on the website to receive an extensive informational packet on highland Cattle.

Until next time, don’t forget to love your Mother.

Meet Dr. Temple Grandin

Dr. Temple Grandin has become a prominent author and speaker on both animal behavior and autism. She’s been a professor of animal science at Colorado State University for more than 30 years. She also has a successful career consulting on both livestock handling equipment design and animal welfare. She has been featured on NPR (National Public Radio), BBC, and shows such as “Larry King Live,” “Sixty Minutes,” and “Fox and Friends.” Articles about Dr. Grandin have appeared in Time Magazine, New York Times, Discover Magazine, Forbes, and USA Today. HBO made an Emmy Award-winning movie about her life, and she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

Additional Resources

Thank you to Heartland Highland Cattle Association & Registry for sponsoring this episode!

“Grazing Cattle, Sheep, and Goats Are Important Parts of a Sustainable Agricultural Future” by Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin’s Guide to Working with Farm Animals

How to Handle Cattle

Our Podcast Team:

Carla Tilghman, Jessica Mitchell, John Moore, and Kenny Coogan

Music: “Travel Light” by Jason Shaw

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The Mother Earth News and Friends Podcasts are a production of Ogden Publications.

Ogden Publications strives to inspire “can-do communities,” which may have different locations, backgrounds, beliefs, and ideals. The viewpoints and lifestyles expressed within Ogden Publications articles are not necessarily shared by the editorial staff or policies but represent the authors’ unique experiences.