5 Questions I Would Answer If I Could Afford To

For a writer-researcher like me, questions are my stock in trade. Everything I do is driven by questions— framing them, understanding them, and answering them— and the best stuff I do, the best essays, podcasts, reports, whatever, tend to be driven by the most interesting, unusual, important, and plain old “good” questions.

I’d like to say I’ve developed something of an ear for really good questions about food and farming— though I haven’t always had the freedom to chase them. In order to gain that freedom, and answer the juicy questions in the way that felt honest and complete to me, I became a freelancer. I knew I’d have to give up the security of a regular paycheck and health insurance, but to me, this felt like a reasonable cost to work on the best questions.

The problem with being a freelance question-answerer— in other words, an investigator (a researcher, a reporter, whatever), is that you can’t really be a freelance investigator (haha). Or maybe you could be, if you also have a trust fund, a very rich spouse or, you know, have earned eight figures on crypto or something. This is because investigating is expensive, especially if the question is interesting. It involves months of effort— desktop research, interviews, and tracking down the right people, sometimes even in real life. It requires materials— books, private data sets, things like FOIA (freedom of information act) requests (which cost money) and tasks like visiting county courthouses to review paper files that have not been digitized and never will be. It requires painstaking searches of bottomless data bases, learning very niche and archaic things, and staying on the trail long enough (months, maybe years) that people trust you enough to tell you the truth, and that you become astute enough to know the truth when you hear it. And then, once you have the goods and are ready to share your answer (the technical term is “publish”), you better have a good lawyer, because anyone who isn’t pleased with your reporting will absolutely come for you— even, and maybe especially, if what you’ve discovered is true.

That’s how you answer good questions, by do world-changing, justice-creating, “speak truth to power”-type investigations. And nobody is paying freelancers enough to do any of this.

I’ve accepted this reality. I may have started freelancing thinking I would do food and ag investigations for major mastheads, but I’ve found other ways to do the work. It turns out, there are still some who will pay to get interesting questions answered. And now, a part of what I do professionally is this exact kind of mercenary research.

Do you have a gnarly question that’s standing between you and the food system you’d like to see? Does your organization need to know the lay of a certain patch of the ag industry before they can chart a path forward? Have you sensed there’s a barrier, an issue, some unseen force just out of sight that’s preventing progress towards your food/farm goals? Well, you can hire me, and I’ll collect the evidence and provide you with an analysis. Private investigations: food and farm systems edition.*

I love doing this work. It’s a fascinating puzzle— the kind that require you to amass information, fit the right parts together, and create a picture that makes sense and, more importantly, is useful.

But over the course of the seven (!) years I’ve been doing this, I’ve come across some really good questions that I haven’t had the funds to be able to answer on my own. I wish I could simply tackle these topics here in the newsletter, and share them with you gratis. But the reality is, as an independent writer and researcher, I don’t have the time or resources to do that (if only I didn’t have to eat!).

So, I thought recently, why don’t I just put these questions out there?

Who knows, maybe you, dear reader, care enough about one of these questions to pay to get it answered (or more likely, maybe your business/non-profit/etc. does). Or maybe you know the answer already, and you can just tell me. Maybe you have ideas about collaborating to get it done. Or hell, maybe you’ll take these questions, my framing and scoping, and hand it to some other smart, thoughtful person out here hustling in the world of research for hire.

Honestly at this point, I don’t care. What I want is answers— public answers. Answers that move this old, gigantic, under-observed industry forward. Answers that change the way people think about the challenges we’re facing, so that we stop getting trapped in the same circular arguments and pointless conference panels. Answers that you, yes YOU; regular people, industry folks, academics, consumers, advocates, farmers, chefs, anyone can use to say, “listen, that question is asked and answered. We don’t need to drag our feet on this anymore. It’s time to act.”

With that being said, I’d like to formally welcome you to my first ever Questions Market. Feel free to come in, look around, and hey, if you’re interested in what you see, you know where to reach me (you can always “reply” to this email). Or hey, if you have a question that you’ve been thinking about, and you don’t see it here, you can always drop me a line and I can work you up a proposal.

And for those not in the market for big answers right now, I think a little window shopping below might be enlightening for you, too. If you’ve ever wondered why you don’t so more edgy, interesting, revelatory reports about actors or issues in the food and farm system— here’s why. Because somebody has to pay for that work to get done (and pay to defend it too), and the people with all the money are too often the very people who’d prefer these questions remain unanswered.

Say more: When I say, “corn is ten cents under the July board,” what do you think that means?

Tell me, what would you guess are the elements of the cattle complex?

If I were to ask, “what’s the basis like for HRW wheat in the Manhattan area this time of year,” would you even know which Manhattan I’m talking about?

And if I were to brag that “I like to hedge my risk in the onion futures market,” would you think I’m very smart, or very stupid?**

If you can make neither heads nor tails of these questions, welcome to the club. Very few people (even smart people! who’ve been around!) have a good understanding of how agricultural commodity trading works, let alone the effect it has on farmer decision-making, what gets grown in America and how, who buys it, and what happens to it after that. This is critical to understand if we want to be able to have thoughtful discussions about risk, finance, and those players who rule the middle of the ag supply chain (i.e. elevators, grain buyers like Cargill, meat companies like Tyson).

How I’d Do It: This topic lends itself to a lot of different formats, but I’ve been hankering to do a podcast about this for years. I actually already have a 7-episode limited series outlined for WORKING TITLE: Farm on the Hedge: The Cost of Futures Trading in 21st Century American Agriculture (but who knows, maybe a YouTube series? An interactive digital report/tool? So many possibilities). Whatever final form this takes, I think it could become bread-and-butter reference material for everyone from college kids in ag programs to journalists covering the industry to practitioners trying to help farmers understand the financial tools in the market.

Estimated Costs: $$$ | This is a big project. For context, a 45 minute podcast episode (as seen in The Only Thing That Lasts, for example) usually starts out as dozens of hours of interviews and research, then becomes a ~30 page script, and then after multiple rounds of edits and recordings, becomes an enjoyable, informative episode. Realistically, you’re looking at 40-50 hours spread out over the course of a month, per episode. But in the end, we’d also have, like, 80% of a book! So much content!

Say more: I know this has been done before. In fact, one of the first things I ever published on the internet about agriculture was on this topic. But I propose that it’s time to do it again, for two critical reasons. 1) I think the odds are very good that we will never pass another Farm Bill in its current incarnation ever again, and that’s not been true until the last year or two. 2) I’ve always seen the “write an ideal Farm Bill” exercise done from a pie-in-the-sky, “let’s dream of a food utopia” perspective. And that’s why I’ve never read one that ever felt realistic to me.

Being a lifelong policy nerd, I know one thing to the very core of my being— policy doesn’t lead, it follows. The fatal flaw in our perception of policy is that it will ever be able to disempower the strong while raising up the weak. But the fact is, policy doesn’t really reverse existing structures, but it can (sometimes) create space and opportunities for new things to emerge. Imagining a new Farm Bill with these realities in mind— not one that’s going to magically right every wrong and correct every flaw, but a Farm Bill that creates a more level playing field while opening up pockets of opportunity— as far as I know, has not been done before, at least not recently. This will not be a Farm Bill that will “save us” (and also, then, will never get passed), but a Farm Bill that will give alternative models a fighting chance to grow big enough to take their own seat the policymaking table.

How I’d Do It: My vision here is actually for a pretty small project. Maybe 3-5 pages, organized as a memo or something similar. It would cover the biggest pain points in the current Farm Bill, round up and evaluate some creative but realistic alternative policy options, and then offer analysis of proposed political strategies and coalitions that could get the ideas across the finish line. This would be intended as a practical document, an organizational framework around which people could discuss, organize, and move.

Estimated Costs: $ | Listen, this could definitely be a Magical Beast (something that grows to fill the available space). But I think even the shortest version would require dedicating some 20-40 hours to a mix of research, analysis, interviews/fact-checking, and then some resources for design (people prefer to read beautiful things!) would get it done. Of all my proposals here, this would probably be the least expensive.

Say more: Whenever someone asks me, “what can we do to make small and mid-sized farms more viable,” I give two answers. 1) Raise the national minimum wage/increase worker protections and break up food and farm monopolies. Unfortunately, most individual organizations do not have the pull, resources, or mandate to pursue these goals. Another option then, is 2) Invest in regional food system infrastructure. I’m talking reefer trucks, cold storage, light manufacturing facilities (i.e. to process fruits, vegetables, etc. for freezing, canning, drying, and food service applications), and USDA-certified kitchen and production facilities. It’s these things, not “regen ag” or any other kind of farming “hack,” that extends the usability and shelf-life of farm products, allows farmers to sell goods (and thus, have cash flow) year round, and makes locally grown food more accessible for consumers who can’t come to a market a 8am on a Saturday to buy high-dollar ingredients that will be molding in the crisper by Wednesday afternoon.

Naturally, investing in regional-scale infrastructure is hard. It’s expensive, and someone has to pay (and farmers, who stand to benefit most, almost certainly can’t contribute). Someone also has to own it, but then also facilitate a lot of coordination amongst the people we want to benefit from it. These barriers (and others!) mean this solution is often banished to the waste bin of “high hanging fruit.” But when I look around at places like my adopted home-state of New Mexico, this stuff is the most important stuff that’s missing from our local food system. We have local farmers, we have local food. But the reality is that so many dietary staples, from frozen waxy vegetable mixes to canned tomatoes to dry beans, are nearly impossible to buy from local sources (and definitely not at anything below boutique prices). I know there has been some work done to map existing regional-scale food infrastructure, but I haven’t seen as much around how you could identified what’s needed in a specific region, get it financed, get it built and operate it. I know one case study of a semi-successful example, but I sense there are others, and I think this is a bigger opportunity than many realize.

How I’d Do It: I imagine this project as a sort of blueprint for regional food infrastructure in five sections (could also be published separately as five standalone pieces). Part 1: Why food infrastructure matters and why we don’t have any (anymore)— a mix of history and praxis, a “how we got here and where we could go.” Part 2: Crop Farm Case Study: How processing infrastructure change local food economics for a diversified veg operation. Part 3: Livestock Economic Change Case Study (same as 2), Part 4: Restaurant/Food Service Economic Change Case Study, Part 5: Consumer Economic Change Case Study. Readers come away with a deeper understanding of the transformative role that the mid-supply chain could play for producers and consumers, and why we should be investing in unconventional (maybe public?) ownership of this critical infrastructure.

Estimated Costs: $$ | This is a tricky one to scope without some more specific parameters, but here’s my estimate. To do this really well, you’re probably looking at about 5,000 words for each of the five parts (each the length of a somewhat luxurious “Long Read”). That’s quite a bit of research, I’d guess not less than 3-4 months timeline-wise. It’d be cheaper than a 7-part podcast series, but still a few hundred hours worth of time to get it right.

Say more: I’ve been writing about regen ag economics at lot recently, and it’s got me noodling on the mother of all questions in that space. ^^ This one. Now, disclaimer here, there is almost no chance I could answer this question correctly (there are too many variables and unknowns), but I also think this is one of those questions where you learn a ton by trying to answer it, even if you know from the start that where you end up won’t be “right.”

Someone told me once that good lawyers and journalists only ask questions they already know the answer to, and I’ll admit, I have a suspicion about this one. I think in trying to calculate what it would cost to transition every acre in American to regen ag, we might discover that it would cost something like $100 quadrillion— like, more money than there is in the world. That would be interesting to know if true! There’s also a chance that the answer could be small, like $10 billion, and then someone can just call up Elon or whoever and ask if they’d just do it, and maybe with a little math behind it, they’d agree? Whatever the outcome, having some real (even vaguely ballpark) figures to think about, not just for the whole regen transition overall, but also for each of the steps we might take along the way, would be extremely helpful in charting a course, identifying low-hanging fruit, avoiding land-mines, etc.

How I’d Do It: This would essentially be a theory paper. We’d do the research, we’d talk to the experts, we’d explore how other people have made similar estimations before. And then we’d layout our assumptions, show our math, and reveal our results— perhaps a range of results given a narrow range of likely future events. I think we’d want to dedicate some time in the process to take the show pony out, ride it around, and see how people respond to it (“socializing the narrative” as some would say), but yeah, that end product would essentially be a brief but deeply researched theory paper with probably an embarrassingly long appendix explaining assumptions, caveats, and sources.

Estimated Costs: $$ | This is one that, though the end product will be kind of “small,” doing it well will take some sophisticated research and actual technical skills. I think this would take months to bring together in a cohesive and defensible way.

Say more: This is my dream project, and the one most likely to get me blackballed from the industry. It stems from this observation: Over the last two decades, there’s been an explosion in nonprofit groups trying to have an “impact” on the food and farm systems (especially on the farm side). From environmental NGOs, water warriors, and climate hawks setting their sites on “working with farmers” to corporate ag-funded institutes and foundations advancing farm-adjacent “convenings” all the way over to family foundations, impact investors, and billionaires who saw Kiss the Ground— these groups have brought a huge amount of “non-market” money and resources into America’s food and farm system in the last 20 years. The questions, to me, are simple: How much money have they spent, where did they spend it, and what can we determine has been the actual impact?

I mean, imagine what we could do if we had even a little bit more insight on which kinds of nonprofits, and nonprofit activities, are actually solving problems and creating conditions for a more fair, just, and sustainable food system for all involved, and which are burning through untaxed cash laundering reputations, advancing private interests/greenwashing, and astroturfing!

Now, this may well be another, “no real answer, but we learn from the journey” situation, but considering that first-party documents like annual impact reports are the main source of information we have to go on right now, I’d think almost any amount of new, third-party analysis could be transformative. After all, is it possible that all of this “philanthropic” or “impact” money sloshing around in the farm system is actually making things worse? Is it possible that it’s creating such distorted market signals (from the already mangled ones we started with) that farmers or their allies have begun, say, actively doing harmful things to attract these new, non-market funds? (The obvious example that comes to mind— if I can get paid for “transitioning” to a practice I’ve already adopted, I might abandon and return to a more harmful practice in order to, you know, pass Go and Collect $200 again). I’m not saying I’m confident that we’ll find that some philanthropic work is bad! It’s just as likely we’ll find that philanthropic dollars punch above their weight. But the fact is that right now, we don’t really know either way.

It won’t be possible, of course, to do a detailed audit of every non-profit organization operating in agriculture. But doesn’t it feel like it’s worth poking around? I mean, these groups control multi-billion dollar endowments, raise millions of dollars on the promise that they’re doing “food systems change,” and are beholden, almost exclusively, to their donors, which is crazy when you think that they are tax-exempt because they’re supposed to be acting in the public interest. I, for one, would love to see an analysis of what all this tax-free spending in the ag sector “for the benefit of the public” has bought us.

How I’d Do It: This one would be a doooooozy. The core product would probably be a classic report, though it could be chunked out into other pieces of effective content. I’d want to do hundreds of hours of interviews, with non-profit workers, donors, partners and beneficiaries (farmers), and anyone else who has significant interface with non-profit organizations. I’d want to do a landscape scan, and talk to (and potentially buy some hours from) a professional auditor who specializes in non-profit accounting and calculating returns to philanthropy. I’d want to work with at least two collaborators (and possibly more) on the analytical framework, properly grounding “impact” evaluations, and developing final takeways/recommendations.

I’ll add that, if you did this project right, you could really shake the foundations here. The ag industry has, in many ways, outsourced all of it’s “impact” work to directly and indirectly affiliated non-profit partners. These groups work hard to make it seem like they’re saving agriculture (and the world). If we had evidence that this is (or isn’t) true, imagine how clarifying that would be about whether we should double down or try something new.

Estimated Costs: | This is my pie-in-the-sky project. I’d want 9-12 months for this at least, and the finish product would be, I’d guess, 50+ pages. There are going to be a lot of professionals (who expect to be paid like professionals) involved in this kind of project. It’s going to be expensive.

Why are farmers so politically powerful in America— and is that starting to change? This is one that I’ve half-started answering but ran out of resources to finish. You can see the start of the effort in this well-received essay I published here back in January. The secret is that this was actually the introduction to a book I pitched last year (WORKING TITLE: Farmers Rule; How Farmers Became a Force in American Politics). Here’s the money-shot from the query, “The “rags-to-kingmaker” rise of American farmers is not only a fascinating story, it reveals a valuable playbook for today’s movement-makers. By understanding how farmers got so powerful in the first place, and how they’ve maintained and consolidated power over time, we’ll chart a path that others can follow to advance systemic change. That fact makes this book not only a must-read for anyone interested in modern agriculture or food politics, or the food system writ large, but also for a wider spread of movement-makers who have a vision for reshaping American politics but have yet to identify a successful way to do it. It will also be invaluable to anyone looking to understand the farm lobby, where its power comes from, and where there might be opportunity to check that power going forward.” I did not sell this book (I got the same feedback I have for years, “too niche,” “not accessible to a general audience,” “doesn’t fit our ‘preferred narrative,’” etc.), but hey, I think it’s still an interesting question and premise. Maybe it would lend itself better to a form besides a book? Who knows. I (hilariously) have a 53 page proposal, including a detailed promotional plan and two full sample chapters, ready to go on this.

How many un-farmed calories are there in a given landscape? This is another one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. So, we know approximately how much food is harvested and sold every year in the U.S. (Thanks NASS!), and we often use these figures as a stand-in for the sector as a whole or “the food system.” But funnily enough, some food grows in the world that isn’t formally planted, raised, harvested, and sold! In fact, we have hundreds of wild and feral species— from marionberries, prickly pears, and pawpaws to wild boar, fish, and deer— that feed people currently, and could feed a lot more in the future, especially if we stopped being so fricken destructive to the ecosystems in which they live. But most of these calories (for lack of a better collective adjective) aren’t really accounted for in our “food system” reckoning. I think it would be fascinating to identify a geographic area (like, say, New Mexico!), and create an estimate of how many wild, human-available calories (or meals, or something) exist there in a given year (with full allowance for not harvesting the whole population, etc.). I personally would love how this kind of project would challenge the idea that “farms” are the only places food comes from. They aren’t. Humans were born, grew up, lived beautiful lives, gave birth, and died for literally tens of thousands of years before the first farm existed. And we didn’t all starve to death. I think this could be a helpful reminder of that fact.

Are carbon markets actually working for anyone in agriculture? A farmer I spoke to recently tipped me off to the fact that, despite the fact that he hasn’t seen or heard from the carbon company he signed up with for more than three years, the checks keep coming. His suspicion is that the company would keep paying no matter what he does on the ground, because they’ve already sold the credits. This is not (by far) the first farmer who’s told me a story like this, and I think there’s a general, unspoken sense across the industry that the whole thing is fucked, but if everyone just keeps their mouth shut, everyone can keep getting paid for nothing.

…I’d like to look into that.

Where are the holes in our food and farm regulation, what harm do they allow, and how might they be closed? This could be a huge project, or a bunch of much smaller ones. There are so many holes in our ag regulatory system (I just wrote about some of them a few weeks ago). One example, I’ve recently been looking into the lax and unenforced rules for grazers on public lands, which I don’t know if people know, amounts to ranchers literally stealing from the public. Then there’s farm labor abuse, food safety issues, ag chemical non-regulation… literally so much. Even just something that brings together existing work on these disparate topics to show how much harm the ag industry can (and often does) get away with would be interesting.

These are far from the only questions on my mind, but I still hope you found them at least somewhat interesting! Again, if you know of something that answers one (or all!) of these effectively, please let me know. I’m hungry for answers, and I don’t think I necessarily have to be the one that finds them.

A final note about costs:

An earlier version of this newsletter included actual estimated fees for each of these projects, but I removed them for two reasons. First, estimates can be misleading, and to actually complete projects in a way that fits a potential client’s goals might change the price dramatically, which could put us in a pickle.

The second reason is that I think people would find the cost of some of these projects outrageous. For instance, potential podcast clients often balk at a price tag of say, $5,000 for a 45 minute episode, because that sounds absurdly high when some people just sit down in front of a microphone for an hour of bullshitting and then hit “publish,” making the whole thing for pennies. Realistically though, 5k is bare bones pricing for a podcast that involves, you know, actual reporting. Consider that individual episodes of a show like RadioLab (excellent, top-shelf podcasting) can cost more than $100,000 to create. That’s inclusive of hours for producers, reporters, hosts, editors, technical support, and administrators often for months on end, plus research materials, travel, music and sound editing (and the expensive tech that requires), marketing, and of course, legal support and oversight. I’m not in any way comparing what I do to what’s happening over at RadioLab (I’m not a team of 15+, I do literally all the above by myself), but I do think that the quality of what I can deliver at 5% of the price is pretty damn good.

I write this to say that, yeah, making a high-production value, well-researched, 7-episode podcast series is going to cost upwards of $35,000, and white papers, memos, reports, and even news stories in the same vein are often similar or much more.

One follow-up question I get sometimes is, "Why don’t you just sell ads?” The problem there is essentially numeric— your Simpli Safes and RocketMoney’s are often looking to pay something like $5/thousand listens/views. The reality of all of these^^ kinds of projects, and the questions they answer, is that they will be incredibly useful and meaningful for a relatively small group of people. I’m not exactly making “This American Life” here folks, there is not an infinite audience for much of this work.

A related question I get: “So then why don’t you just start a patreon/gofundme/etc. and let your audience fund you instead?” Though I’ve found success with this strategy before, and it was super validating and cool, it was also a herculean, years-long effort. To do enough projects every year to pay my bills and to fund them at a level to do them well, I’d be asking my audience for money non-stop. And in this economy, the fact is, regular people can’t afford it. With the right people, the right message, and a hell of a lot of elbow grease, could I figure out how to crowd-source these projects? Maybe! But that’s the other thing. I don’t want to spend the bulk of my time fundraising. I want to spend my time asking and answering interesting questions. I understand that that’s my choice, but I say it just to underline that that’s the trade-off. It’s not possible to have my cake (do exactly the projects I want, the way I want to do them) and eat it too (without having to find a way to pay for it).

A note about AI:

Surely some of you are thinking, “Sarah, why don’t you just use AI to answer these questions in, like, an afternoon?”

To that I say this: Claude, ChatGPT, etc. may be okay at rounding up information that already exists on the internet (though I’ve tried to use them for research purposes before, and they are often very bad at doing this, especially if the accuracy of the information matters).

But they literally cannot do what I’m proposing to do to answer each of the questions above, which is find new knowledge that exists in the world but not on the internet, thoughtfully curate what I find, and have enough human empathy to understand what kinds of questions (and answers!) might actually prove useful in the lives of real people and professionals. One day, when I can prompt Claude and then it goes and finds real people to have real conversations with about their real, physical experiences in the world, then puts its little digital boots on the ground on some real farms and food businesses, and thinks and feels like a human about those experiences to draw its own conclusions, and then comes back to me and tell me what it’s learned, then I’ll be able to ask these same questions to Claude and get results worth spending time reading/listening to. In the meantime, we’ll have to keep finding ways to pay real, talented, experienced humans to do it instead.

If after all this, you just can’t get enough, you should take a listen to Dollars or Sense, a podcast after my own heart, where I was lucky enough to be a guest recently. The conversation is edgy. I think you’ll like it.

*Of course, this work is rarely “Spotlight”-like exposes on individual companies, organizations, or people. In my experience, private research buyers have little interest in that kind of story.

**The answer to this last one is, “very stupid,” because due to an incredible not-technically-illegal event that occurred about 100 years ago, it is illegal today to trade onion futures. Just onions. That’s all. Bet you didn’t know that!