What Animals Teach Us About Caring for the Land with Fred Provenza

Our guest today, Fred Provenza, has spent his career listening to what animals can teach us: about landscapes, about food, about the deep intelligence woven into the living world.

Fred is professor emeritus of Behavioral Ecology at Utah State University, where he directed an award-winning research program that pioneered our understanding of how early experience, family, and landscape shape the foraging wisdom of animals. He is the author of over 300 scientific papers and three books, including Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom, Foraging Behavior: Managing to Survive in a World of Change, and The Art & Science of Shepherding, co-authored with French herder Michel Meuret.

In this conversation, Fred draws on a lifetime of ranching, research, and wide-ranging inquiry, taking us from the pastures of Utah to the pre-alps of France. Together we reflect on what we've lost, what endures, and what it might mean to come home to a more intimate relationship with the land.

In this episode, we dive into:

• His childhood in small town Colorado and how it cultivated a deep sense of community that has since largely vanished from American rural life
• Seven years working on Henry De Luca's ranch, and what that experience revealed about the irreplaceable knowledge embedded in intimate relationships with land and animals
• What the concept of epigenetics tells us about the deep, inherited intelligence of locally adapted herds
• The extended family lives of livestock, and what shepherds in France have long understood about nutritional wisdom, plant diversity, and the art of moving animals across a landscape
• What Buddhism, near-death experiences, and quantum physics have in common, and why Fred believes consciousness is our truest nature
• The local food economy as a web of interdependence.
• And much more…

More about Fred:

Fred Provenza is professor emeritus of Behavioral Ecology in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University, where he directed the BEHAVE program — an international network of scientists, ranchers, farmers, and land managers integrating behavioral principles with local knowledge. His books include Nourishment, Foraging Behavior, and The Art & Science of Shepherding. He has published over 300 research papers and spoken at more than 600 conferences around the world.

Find more of Fred's work: Nourishment The Art & Science of Shepherding

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.