A Conversation with David Leon

If people were trees, David would be one of the giant Sequoias, expanding his arms and roots far and wide. He is one of my heroes.

As the co-founder of Farmer’s Footprint, he is a leading force in the regenerative agriculture movement, shifting the needle in the way people think about where their food comes from and the livelihood of those who grow it and the land they tend. He’s changed my mindset, and my business model, in so many ways — proving that good, real food is a political cause worth fighting for.

David’s got big green thumbs but giant middle fingers, and he uses them to tackle difficult issues and toxic practices, all in the name of health, for the people and for the planet alike. He’s not a gentle greenie — he gets shit done. The world is on its way to becoming a much better place because of him.

RICHARD: David, we have so much to catch up on! Are you at home in Hawai'i?

DAVID: Yes. It’s an amazing place. Hawai'i has an incredible capacity to grow, to support human life, animal life, and plant life.

Richard: And because of that, it also has a history of chemical agriculture testing. You became one of my heroes because of how hard you fought the big chemical companies in Hawai'i. What they did was reprehensible and outrageous.

David: Hawai'i has so much potential worth fighting for. It has five growing seasons. This was ground zero to do really efficient forms of agriculture and chemical testing.

Richard: Not just was. This is still happening, right?

David: Still is. At the expense of the proximate communities, largely native Hawaiian communities.

Richard: Monsanto, Bayer, and other chemical companies have pleaded guilty to doing aggressive chemical testing without regulation in Hawai'i.

David: Yes. Yes, and in a place where you’re really close to everyone else. You're really close to people. You’re really close to crucial natural resources like aquifers and, obviously, soil.

Richard: They were finding traces of glyphosate in school fountains, right? Kids are drinking it.

David: Yeah, it’s in almost every product. You’re even seeing it in breast milk. In sperm. And, of course, in food.

Richard: And so you guys sued the government to make sure they had to tell you they were doing it.

David: Yeah, exactly. A lot of the lawsuits are in pursuit of getting enforcement of laws that are already on the books. Because the communities who are most affected have often the smallest voice, these companies act with impunity.

Richard: Glyphosate is not illegal, despite the overwhelming medical evidence that it causes cancer. The lobbyists really won there. But now, because of your lawsuit, rather than chemical testing without any oversight, they require some transparency.

David: Yes. It's not illegal, but they at least know we know what they are doing.

Richard: Since the lawsuit — which you won — has that changed? Have people started to ask the right questions about it?

David: Absolutely. Even in the last five years, I've seen this transformation in Hawai'i to focusing on resilience in the food supply chain. “What is leaching into our food?” also, “Where is it coming from?” have become really important. To get hopeful for a moment, an island is actually a really attractive place for change to happen at a faster rate. There is more of a cooperative spirit on islands, I think out of necessity. Everyone contributes.

Richard: You’ve often told me we all live on islands. Do you want to explain that?

David: Well, during the pandemic, the vulnerability of our food system became very clear. There were empty store shelves in places where people had never seen that before. The built world didn’t fail — there were no bridges bombed or railroads derailed. It was the [workers] who came out and said, “We're either scared or we’re sick.” It showed us that if we take humans out of this relationship with our food system, things stop working.

Richard: The people who transport our food and distribute it?

David: People at every step. There are the people who touch our food, who harvest it, who transport it, and who process it. I’m not even talking about farming at this point. Farming actually continued to happen. That was pretty COVID-friendly. The farmers just didn't have anywhere to sell, so you have vegetables rotting in the field. You have milk being dumped down drains. There was nowhere for it to go. You have Cows and other animals unprocessed because there wasn't anyone manning them. That's the first piece.

Richard: Got it.

David: Then the second piece is sourcing. We need to source where we physically are. Otherwise, [we] start to rely back on that built world piece and go, “If you need to get stuff to Hawai'i, here's how you do it.” But what we saw is that it didn’t matter whether you were in Los Angeles or Hawai'i because no matter where you lived, we were flying food to you. We were shipping produce to you. Our entire food system relies on shipping.

Richard: So that’s why you say we all live on islands, even if you live somewhere like Phoenix.

David: Every city is an island. Ultimately if we’re going to be happy and nourished, that’s where we better start to look.

Richard: In our backyard?

David: Yes, or close by. There’s a time and a place for looking out on the horizon, and then there’s a time and a place for looking down at our two feet on the ground, right? Take the island I live on, Lanai — it was supporting a population double its current size when it was one hundred percent Indigenous native Hawaiians, and no boats were coming to bring food. Right now we rely on a barge every Wednesday, and this is a microcosm of the state. There are pockets of self-sufficiency, but as a state, ninety percent of the food is flown in.

Richard: But why? You have no shortage of beautiful fertile soil there.

David: One is the cost. Hawai'i has embraced the cheapest cost of tourism possible, packages to get you in as cheaply as humanly possible. Instead, I think there’s an opportunity to say, “There is so much value in what is sitting around us, both for the health of the people who live here and for the health of people who want to visit.”

Richard: People need to pay more.

David: Yeah, what are we valuing, Richard? What are we choosing to value? That’s ultimately the intersection where all of us can choose to participate. First, it starts with a question of what we choose to value in that system. I’ll put convenience at the root of all of this. Now, if we start to choose convenience over everything else, we are going to start our race to the bottom.

Richard: Yes.

David: Also, aside from tourists, what are residents here choosing to value? This is a conversation I’m having with my community right now. I’ve started a farm stand here to bring local produce from other islands and this island to market. Does the community actually value that?

Richard: What’s your pitch? Is it, “It tastes better?”

David: Yeah, I think it starts with taste. Like I’ve said before, I think food is the most intimate relationship you can have with the planet, right? It’s something that you’re putting inside your body. And we’re not injecting it. So this is where it intersects with your philosophy that there’s pleasure to be had there. I always thought that your Flamingo Estate point of view was beautiful because we are all tuned to feel pleasure, and we can feel so much pleasure from eating better food.

Richard: One hundred percent. We’re forgetting how important pleasure is, and we’re the only animal in the world that eats for pleasure. Every other animal just spends their whole day looking for food because they need to eat. What a waste.

David: What a waste of a gift.

Richard: It will take a sea change of people to understand that food is luxury and needs to be paid for. Do you ever get super despondent or lose hope about that?

David: Yes. I lose hope when I think people don’t realize that convenience is making their lives duller, not richer. You know what I mean? It’s dulling our senses. It’s dulling the way we perceive color and beauty, and that’s not what convenience ultimately promised. It promised the same thing, just easier to get. But it’s not the same thing.

Richard: Easier and faster to get, so you can spend less time doing the bad stuff and more time experiencing the world. But what we found is people are not experiencing the world anymore. I believe that convenience is the enemy of intimacy, and food is intimacy. If it’s fast, it’s never good.

David: And we lose other things that I think are offshoots of intimacy, which is ritual.

Richard: Yeah. Because there’s no time.

David: There’s no time, and ritual demands time.

Richard: I never thought about it that way.

David: This is super fresh for me. I recently left my job, and then Remy, my son, had Christmas break for a couple of weeks, so I had this deep “dad time.” At this moment of uncertainty in my life where I wanted to get back to work, my son demanded my time. My full presence. I sent zero emails. I let those things just fester away, and I realized that was exactly the medicine that I needed in that moment.

Richard: Absolutely.

David: So when we ourselves regenerate, have kids, create something, build something, we have this invitation to be intimate again with some core part of ourselves. What a disservice to not give ourselves that time. Why cut that gift short and just say, “This is inconvenient?” Real intimacy requires inconvenience.

Richard: I love that. It’s so true.

David: It really is. A significant portion of whatever I do next will be focused here where I’m raising my family, where I have an intimacy with the land and [am] in service to a community that has been nothing but love to me and my family. Hawai'i can teach a profound lesson in regeneration to the rest of the world, and I think it’s imminently attainable.

Richard: Because enough people want to do it? Enough people are asking those questions?

David: Because it takes a minimum amount of people here. We can execute whatever it is that we want to try. It’s using the same playbook, the same advantages, that the chemical companies use for poisons. We can cycle through a crop and test multiple generations of that crop in a year because we don’t have to wait for winter. We just keep growing. We can try stuff and it may not work, but we can move quickly to see the amount of life that is supported in relatively poor soils. It’s not about having the most badass compost. It’s actually how much life is moving.

Richard: I guess the metaphor here is that you need to keep trying and working, be nimble.

David: That’s right. To create change, you need to move quickly. And educate people about the true cost of things. Then I think you can create really powerful vehicles if the storytelling is strong. You’ve been using this line, “Nature is the last true luxury,” and it’s been living in my head. I mean, Richard, that is the work. It is translating what luxury actually is, and in that sentence, you’ve drawn a connection between two things that for most people are as far apart as you can get.

Richard: It’s true. There are only so many Strawberries that one farm can produce, and they’re not going to produce more, and the season will finish, and we won’t sell it out of season. I love that idea because it gives those raw ingredients a preciousness and attention. I can get Watermelon all year round at the supermarket, and I should not be able to. It should be rare, and seasonal, and time-based.

David: So how do we get that across? I mean, people are sort of bewildered when you first tell them, “You shouldn’t be able to buy a Strawberry right now.”

Richard: We need to hero the moment of it. Mother Nature perfected drop culture a long time before Supreme came along. We cannot demand that food get cheaper and become more available and stay committed to the quality.

David: And when I tell people about Flamingo Estate, that’s what I talk about. I talk about the fact that they might never make the same bottle of Olive oil twice because that doesn’t actually happen.

Richard: Right. We need to lean into this idea of natural inconsistency. If that stuff is freshly harvested and it’s in a bottle, it should never be the same season to season. That body wash, the active ingredients in those oils, if they are sourced the correct way, should be very different from one year to another. It shouldn’t have the same scent profile. It shouldn’t have the exact same taste.

David: People don’t value that right now. They value uniformity. We’ve been taught to value that if you go to McDonald’s anywhere in the world it’s going to be essentially the same thing.

Richard: Yeah, no more of that. Where is the surprise there?

David: There is none, and it’s sad. Ultimately, this is an expression of reverence for the place we live and the island we all call home.

Richard: You get it. You really get it.

David: And so the work continues.