Mark Shepard | Restoration Agriculture, Wild Profit, & Nature’s Intelligence

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01:24 There's clearly maybe something there beyond the realm of man And until we've thoroughly tested every last closed chested view I find the more we think, we know The less we really do Where would be without TAE? Because we know they're lying to us Just don't know what without THC The highest side-chats show great Carl Wood and company Well, it is a beautiful day in the neighborhood people from the Sunshine State. I'm Greg Carlwood and where some people see progress in our bright friendly suburban communities tucked in tightly with small consistently manicured grass patches all nestled under the loving wing of a whip cracking HOA dictatorship

02:10 I see the fruits of a long running program aimed at engineering society to find comfort in system dependence and take pride in obedience while being blissfully ignorant of both. A nation brainwashed into outsourcing the fundamental necessities of life, to an industrial monstrosity churning out the lowest quality chemical coated crops barely passable factory farmed meat and an endless array of well-marketed frankenfood that oftentimes even insects won't touch." They destroy the natural ecosystem, kill the soil, pollute the water and extract any and all value at the expense of basically everything and everyone.

02:48 And it's a set of problems that seems almost too monumental and ingrained to even begin unraveling. But today's guest, Mark Shepard is certainly making a big dent! He is the CEO of Forest Agriculture Enterprises founder of Restoration Agriculture Development and the award-winning author of the book Restoration Agriculture Real World Permaculture for Farmers Mark has also been a member of the Organic Valley Dairy Cooperative, the world's largest organic farmers marketing cooperative since 1995. But he is probably most widely known as the founder of New Forest Farm, the 106 acre perennial agricultural savanna considered by many to be one of the most ambitious sustainable agricultural projects in the United States located in southwestern Wisconsin

03:36 A living example that it's possible to work with nature and profit too from the front lines of the food sovereignty fight and showing the rest of us a better way. The agroforestry educator, restoration agriculture advocate and certified nut man Mark Shepard welcome to The Higher Side! Thank you very much! Of course What else is there to say after what you just said? Well that is an attempt at summarizing the wild. Career you've had and the long road you walked, can you probably get a sense from that intro that were not really a permaculture audience per se where more just of the mindset that we see the problems with either damage to the conventional system. And we don't have faith in this so-called leadership industry on which are dependents has been nurtured and we want out

04:23 i think a lot of us are past and we want better and that's really your whole mission giving people a true assessment of the broken system and providing a model for a better way right. And what's interesting is, If you think about where human beings have gotten their food for the past 10,000 years it's from annual crops agriculture. You know hard seeds that you plant in the ground three or four months later the plant dies your harvest these things now you have to protect them with soldiers so you started to have this class stratification. You had to have people who were willing to work because it takes work to grow all those annual crops The rice, the wheat, the corn, the beans potatoes those are like the big five

05:06 It sucks growing those crops, it really does. It's a lot of work whereas it was a lot better deal hanging out in the woods waiting for a deer or an elephant to go by and then poking with a sharp stick and then hanging out partying with all your friends neighbors forever One of the things that you had said just really got my attention is people don't have faith in the system anymore That's what it is. The whole annual crops Civilization is a faith system You have to believe that it works and once upon a time our ancestors could say well screw this It's not working for me anymore I can't afford to

05:44 pay for my home, I can't afford to buy food and you're not paying me enough in the first place. Why bother go to work anymore? Once upon a time we could go out into the woods and get by! There's no place left to run anymore We have to create the resource base of the future. And we have to create it in front ourselves in time and walk into it as we walk away from Rome as it collapses on its ashes Well said and you know around here i have a pretty wide range of gas but when i have someone here who research is ancient civilizations. And some of the earliest writings we have from the samarians they talk about all these big changes like mathematics and sciences and agriculture, ask if from the gods and it seems like

06:32 If there's any truth to those sorts of terms, you would consider this agricultural knowledge and this move away from hunter-gatherers as more of a time released curse than any kind of gift. Is that accurate? All right I think that was programming by the machine in air quotes. That's programming to make us think that it was horrible living as a quote unquote savage out in nature, it's like you know what? Nobody who has ever actually attempted to grow their own food will think that it is a better deal. It was a better deal through all those years since the advent of annual crops agriculture was based on some sort of slavery either other human slaves working for us animal slaves working for us or machine slaves are working for

07:23 If you're living in Florida, you go to a store and buy food. Who actually does the work of growing that food? Well in a large percentage of the cases if you're eating any kind of vegetables it's people usually that speak Spanish as their first language that are not necessarily entirely here legally or they're only her temporarily and we get to send them back soon there is another election comes along It's all based on slavery And if you actually tried to grow your own food, you would starve. So that's the dilemma we find ourselves in is that the system has told us agriculture is a better deal was based on enslaving others to give the dominant society the better deal. The people who did the work for the mega machine are the ones who benefit from it and slave class doesn't and didn't.

08:16 And so one of the things that has persisted since before human beings were around, during the dawn of humanity when we were possibly not as conscious as we are now and we were hunter-gatherers etc. And then once we went into this agricultural mode and we went to war against nature, the one thing that has been working continuously since day one is nature itself. The natural plant communities and associations of insects and antelids and birds and all that kind of stuff—all the plant-and-animal fungus archaic community has created the soils of this planet, maintained the fertility of the soils of this planet

09:03 and they are adapted to survive the disturbance of their location. And if you're in Florida, where tsunamis might be possible because you're near an ocean all the vegetation can survive that. You're in Florida hurricanes and tornadoes all of the natural vegetation could survive that so all that restoration agriculture is mimicking the natural plant community types of area cherry picking the foods fuels medicines fibers you know useful materials etc. And planting ecosystem and then allowing it to show its own evolution, its own emergent properties and then to manage it for its optimal function not necessarily maximum production but its optimal functioning through time

09:54 is we're gonna set up ecosystems and where in the process of doing it setting up natural ecosystem again all over the place that are food everywhere. I mean you make a great sales pitch and say a lot of things that most people probably don't hear that often i know your use to be on the odd man out or the voice on the outside of the box and That's great i guess give us a little bit more about your story for people who don't know i heard you talking about growing up guessing what color the river was gonna be as a kid do to the pollution and now you have this gold standard hundred six acre model system that is still bucking trends even in like, permaculture spaces so you really are doing some unique stuff talk to us about how you went from polluted river color guessing to where you are now.

10:44 How much time do you have and maybe we should pour a cup of coffee. One of the things too that i want to address is in the intro, use the line from one of the if u do a search for me and it look for bio its like the top hit just because it's the most popular bio doesn't mean it's the most accurate means more people hit it and then the more people hit at the more people hit the next time and one other things was that this is like the most ambitious project is like well This farm is only part of what the actual ambitious project is. The ambitious project is revegetating the planet in 15 years at a profit, that's the ambitious project and it's farms like this that are going to look different whether they're in Wisconsin or Florida or Arizona or Serbia or whatever, it's gonna look different no matter where you do it. That's the ambition of the project just to revegetate the whole entire planet

11:42 Now, how did I get here? Oh my gosh. Went to school at the polluted river. I was 12 when the oil embargo of the 1970s kind of hit and we were put on gasoline rationing. You could only get gas like if the last number of your license plate was an odd number you could only go on odd days and you could only get like 10 gallons at a time then it went down to five gallons at a time At one point in time, the gas lines were crazy. You'd wait for hours in line to go get 10 gallons worth of gas and this one gas line it was probably a half mile long when the car ran out of gas

12:24 I was 12, my next younger brother was 10 and had a baby brother in the front seat. After awhile he's throwing Cheerios all over the place and screaming and hollering so mom makes me and my brother get out and push the car on gas line now i don't know if you've ever had a little brother but older brothers typically think that the younger brother never does anything So that was my impression at the time, I was the one doing all the work and he was slacking. And it was while I was doing that I realized how vulnerable we were, that we depended on this car for transportation so my dad could go to work to get the money to buy the bread, to get the money to put gas in a car, to go to work to get the money. It's like what the hell are we doing? And then one little political disruption happens and the whole thing can come crashing down

13:14 My dad started to garden in earnest. He actually had quite a history, it's too long to go into here but he was only one degree removed from Ernfried Pfeiffer who was a student of Rudolf Steiner and so he learned how to make compost biodynamic style when he was a little boy working for a doctor because back then doctors were botanists and you don't put poison on your medicine blah blah blah And so he started to garden in earnest. Being the oldest boy, larger than most of my cohort actually—I was one of the biggest kids in school—it fell on me to do most of the work, the slave labor out in the gardens. So I was the family slave

13:55 And I would make compost and you pile all this stuff up, you turn the compost. You put it in wheelbarrows, you bring it out, you throw it on a garden as like a couple of black crumbs fall on the top. It's like what the hell good is this doing? All that work for a couple of black crumbs and all we're doing is growing tomatoes and carrots and amazing vegetable gardens at one point in time. I think he probably had an acre or so of gardens in the backyard. We had a pretty big suburban backyard. And when I was finished with my chores which involved growing food that kind of really didn't feed us much, because we still went to the store to buy meat. We still went to the store to buy vegetables, important things like coffee and sugar simply because we didn't have enough maple trees to make enough maple sugar I would go down in the woods cause i'm now off my slave duty and run down in the woods and there was more food out around me as started becoming incredible forager

14:52 And I started to realize that, well why should I just go to where the berry patch is? Why don't I dig up some berry plants and put them over here. Why don't I put some nut trees over here and I would go around collecting plants that had the highest yield, most regular yields etc., and I amassed quite a accumulation of genetic material from all these perennial plants and not all of it was even on our land. It didn't have to be! There were these high tensile power lines going down, whatever you guys call those... So I put them underneath there everything from blueberries and hazelnuts one of the largest concentrations of hazelnuts in central Massachusetts right now is on those power lines in Central Massachusetts And I know where they came from but what I realized is running around the woods

15:43 Getting your livelihood from being a free human being was a lot less work than working in the garden And it was a lot higher quality food is a lot higher in protein A lot more, you know really wild and crazy flavors The berries were not necessarily as big and not as bland. And so I pondered why on earth did humanity choose to start planting the garden like that? And why did they walk out of the Garden of Eden in order to do that? Then doing enough historical research, you come to learn that it was all coerced. The big bad guys who wanted to have all the wealth and power in their tribe get a gang of you guys together and then you can run roughshod over all the other people who are just peaceful people wanting to live a happy life. It's no different today! So yeah, it was the oil embargo on gardening that got me into that, that started me on this path

16:37 And that's when I discovered this book by J. Russell Smith called Tree Crops, written in 1926, I believe it was and in his day 50% of all annual grains and legumes went to feed livestock and was grown on hillsides and stuff like that and the hillside were eroding It was when the whole soil conservation service first got started and erosion was a big deal The Dust Bowl was a few years before it had happened And he proposed, why don't we grow the animal feed from the seeds from trees and shrubs? And why don't we save the flatland for human feed. He proposed a system where we grew tree crops up above grassy pastures so wide open savanna type silvopasture system

17:25 and let the pods and the berries feed the animals, then we can eat the animals in a milk and eggs and all that kind of stuff. And then we can grow our staple crops are grains and legumes on the flat ground." That was the first time I ever heard the words permanent and agriculture next to each other which later on Bill Mollison abbreviated into permaculture Yeah i mean that's a lot of the cliff notes to the story to along long story and things seem to set you apart because we have talked about food forest and permaculture before because we spend so much time staring at these massive problems eventually i want to talk to guess who. Have some solutions to such problems otherwise what are we doing here but when it comes to your approach to agroforestry permaculture,

18:12 Use your buzzwords kind of situation the things that are different as you talk about mass selection. And you talk about perennials over annuals perennials over annuals make sense to plant fruit trees they yield every year they yield more is they go on rather than this scorched earth start again every year cycle but there's a lot of buzz and ag tech in the genetics and all this kind of stuff in the lab, and you're just like, look. You don't need that nature will do that for you talk to us about mass selection as a simplified process that shows nature's intelligence

18:51 So, I'll do that and also contextualize it back with more of my own story. There was a hill in north central Massachusetts where the river that looped around the bottom of the hill—you go down the road this way you got to cross the river that way, get across river this way so no matter which way we left the house we had to cross the river—that was the one that would turn all these different colors from chemical factories that were upstream Well, on one side of the hill on the south side of it was the birthplace of Luther Burbank. And Luther Burbank was a plant breeder who worked with the technique that sometimes is called burbanking but it's mass selection which you just put out like a metric shit tonne of plants and then you select the ones that have traits that you want and go plant them somewhere

19:44 and then you crossbreed them with themselves, then you do the same thing again with their seed. And you keep selecting for what it is that you want and you can rapidly accelerate genetic change in a population. And Luther Burbank is responsible for more plant varieties than any other human being ever period even to this day now was like in the early 1900's That was before we even knew what a chromosome was, let alone DNA. And he did all this incredible breeding work so that was one side of the hill This is part of my upbringing He was a hometown hero and somewhat notorious Then on the north side of the hill Was the birthplace of this gentleman who it's a lot earlier in history John Chapman

20:29 later on better known as Johnny Appleseed. And what he did is, he would go around gathering up all the seeds from apple cider operations Now we have to remember back then Apple Cider Mint you squish the juice that's called apple juice Well there was no such thing as refrigeration so two things would happen If it was exposed to oxygen, it would turn into vinegar. Which is fine because you need vinegar for preserving a lot of your foods and it's a great household cleaner. So you would let some of it ferment with oxygen and turn it into vinegar while the other stuff you seal up so no oxygen gets in there and it turns into what we call hard cider. He actually got seed from the booze industry

21:13 And what he did is, he would take the seeds and go out in the Ohio River country where it was the Western Reserve. He would claim land and make nurseries with all these apple seeds. One of the ways that you as a settler could prove to the federal government that you have intent to reside on your claim is by setting up an orchard And so he would set out all these seedling orchards, and if you've got like a hundred different seedling apples not all of them are going to taste good. A lot of them do! A lot of them are going to be pest and disease resistant So the ones that are great You go ahead and cut off a branch and graft it onto the root of the ones that don't taste really all that great Over time you eventually have an orchard of pests and disease resistant plants that are adapted your place to produce great fruit

22:01 Their primary use for apples was for vinegar and hooch. Then what happened as the internal combustion engine was created, if you had your hard apple cider that tasted terrible you would rectify the situation and rectification is a chemical process also known as distillation so you'd make serious moonshine out of your apples and then you would use that as fuel in your internal combustion engines So, homesteaders were growing their own fuel by distilling their own alcohol from squished apples. But the innovation that a lot of people leave aside and don't talk about it—one, Johnny Appleseed was planting

22:41 Hooch orchards, he was planting alcohol orchards. And two, he was also claiming land! He was a real estate investor—he had real estate claimed all up and down the whole Ohio River Valley and he could go from place to place not having to stay at other people's places, he could just stay in his own places It's actually the real estate investing side of restoration agriculture that has the greatest return on investment of what we can do. We go ahead and acquire a really degraded piece of real estate, eroded clear cut you name it, played out no more nutrients left in the soil now we help this piece of property to go through natural succession

23:25 And if you've ever seen like a parking lot somewhere that eventually grows up with weeds and eventually bushes and brush, and then trees et cetera. That's the process of natural succession or ecological succession over time that will turn into the mature plant community type that's local to your area with tall trees medium trees short trees some of them because of lack of moisture will be wider apart or because of extreme cold So what we do and what Johnny Appleseed did is he would go into a place, plant these systems and let it grow to maturity. And how the real estate works on the restoration agriculture, the D in development is we take properties that are below market value because they're really degraded. We put an ecological system in place and an ecological system by definition doesn't really need us in order to thrive so it now turns into this park-like setting

24:22 I already mentioned that we front load the system with all the food, fuels, medicines and fibers. So by managing our long-term – call it a timber resource – we're harvesting agricultural yields in the meantime. We have cattle that are grazing grasses so the weed control for our trees is coming from the cattle The manure and the urine is now fertilizer for the cattle. They're also eating diseased leaves and stuff like that, getting rid of a lot of disease pressure. Pigs can come in and eat all of the fruits and nuts that have weevils and other types of worms and insects in it so you reduce the pest problems by eating the larvae with pigs. I don't know if you know anything about

25:12 beef and pork is they're for sale in every state of the union at a pretty good price. And if you all of a sudden have no expenses, because we're not buying grain to feed these things—they're eating from the ecosystem—when you have zero expenses… I like this line behind me, all's I have to do is earn $1. If I got zero expenses that's an infinite rate of return on investment because it had no expenses in Now there are little expenses and stuff like that but nowhere near the expenses of what it would require. So if I am raising cattle and hogs on a piece of property,

25:47 Take care of the property it's like having a guy downstairs in your triple decker apartment building who is a maintenance guy he gets a reduced rent. Can you fix up your apartment building so you owner of the apartment building your asset increases in value disproportionately because somebody improving all the time for cheap So, that's what my animals are and that's what the trees and shrubs are. They're the maintenance program making my asset more valuable for me and they're delicious! If the cattle and hogs are paying their own way now I've got all these trees so what do I do with the treecrops?

26:26 Well, before the animals go in – because for food you have to have a certain set aside when the animals aren't in there. So we'll harvest from the trees first for human consumption then send the animals afterwards and clean up. If there's an apple with a blemish on it that I can't sell at Whole Foods, I just throw it on the ground. I just pick the perfect stuff. And when I throw it on the ground after I'm done, I walk out, move the fence, and the pigs come in and they clean everything And so they're the natural sanitation. So, the apples that I got were picture perfect. I didn't need a packing shed with a sorting table with five different people trying to figure out which ones are the good ones and which ones are bad ones. I only picked the perfect ones. I may only get 1 bushel of picture-perfect fruit per tree but what will my expenses? My mowing and my fertilizer, my pest control, my disease control was all taken care at a profit!

27:22 Apple maintenance was profitable, it wasn't an expense. It was a profit so I don't have to make a ton of money and I don't have to get high yields off the apples because there was no cost really in producing those fruit. And so one of the things that some people like the big ag people will complain about is that oh but you're just not getting the yields and that's true! You know? I may only get possibly one bushel of picture-perfect Fruit per tree. Sorry about that, so I'm teaching you how to get lower yields but the cost of getting those yields is it's a negative cost taking care of its out-of-profit So my return on investment is infinitely incalculable It's imaginary numbers. You can't use it

28:09 And so anything that I do with the apples, it's a freebie. Or the chestnuts or the hazels all the other crops that are in there...I don't have to sell as much because the expense of taking care of them was actually a profit and my real business is the real estate investment I buy a piece of property, I make it better and it disproportionately outperforms the real estate around it because I built a house. Now it's worth more. I can refinance to go either do more improvements until that farm is fully improved then I go ahead, I borrow against it to buy the next one and rinse repeat, rinse repeat, rinse repeat." One point in time I was up to 13 different properties that was being managed this way

28:51 And now that I'm about to turn 62, whoo-hoo! I've started to divest of properties. So now my job is like Sell real estate that's outperforming the market. That's pretty cool too Yes, it is and that's one of the things that I liked most about The first presentation of yours i heard as i wrote it down you do earth repair work as a real estate business And she's so smart and you really bucked the perception that we've been given that the farm life Is not only extremely hard back breaking daily work but your

29:27 But you're also prepared to be poor forever that's the two things were always told that's why i like you are so. Incentivized against that it doesn't even seem like an option because that archetype is so burned into our heads but the mass selection thing is just so smart, i don't like this show to be necessary about me but im just getting started on the first sizeable piece of land i've ever been able to have And the process is you go to the nursery, you get a couple of things. You want to plant and you put them in the ground and they don't all last. And some of them go better than others. And it's kind of dumb to do that. To scale your mass selection process down to like a typical homeowner with a little bit of land if you want to plant five apple trees while you should plan maybe 20 or 30 and then keep

30:18 the five best ones that survive. And now you're working with a little more pest resistance and climate resistance, and that sort of cold resistance kind of thing. I think that's just so smart when a tree produces seeds it doesn't produce one seed it produces 1000 seeds and then a couple of them grow. You're just doing what nature has already tried to hint at us should be done I'm just doing it a little more directly i think that's really smart what are the things about your system thing i want to interrupt but you really hit on it were really close ok so instead of planting five trees which you can afford you really should plant fifty maybe a hundred trees.

31:00 Then all of a sudden you're like, oh my gosh the price goes through the roof. Well here's what to do! You contact Forest Agriculture Enterprises, the nursery say hey I'd like to order 1000 trees. What? Wait I only need 100. Exactly right now you're going to get them at discount So you only pay x bucks per tree and then now you find groups of friends that will buy their own homestead scale amount from you. Now the profits from selling them trees, you put out the financial risk, you bought that rootstock or the trees You brought them to your place, you repack them and sold them to friends and neighbors. You took on a risk so yes, you expect a little bit of profit as thank-you because they can still get it at below catalog prices because you're such a nice guy. And then what happens if you can't sell them all? Now you have extra trees that you have to stick in your backyard. So now your trees go into your place at a profit instead of at expense. That's one thing

31:57 And then one thing that most people never think about, it's like oh yeah an apple tree lasts 500 million years or whatever. It's perennial! It'll last forever well how about saving your seed? What about the next generation because when these apple trees pollinate one another these chestnut trees or breadfruit or whatever you're using when cross-pollination happens you have a new genetic combination that has never existed before and that's why sexual reproduction is so successful on this planet is because of the variability we don't want uniformity we want very ability because you personally might have genetics that's immune to some kind of next bug that hasn't come by. Like doggy parks or whatever it is and somebody else wouldn't have that resistance gene now if this doggy parks comes along everybody who susceptible to what guys

32:49 You can now propagate and that dog epox resistance spreads through the gene pool. You've basically cured the species of that disease by allowing it to be infected by the disease so only the genetic variants that can survive that disease will survive instead of what annual crops, agriculture and a monocrop mindset does Whenever a pest comes into an orchard or disease comes into an orchard, it's a problem. Now you fight against it human beings have never fought against Pests and diseases in one we've not been able to do that So why bother? And I'm going to use chestnuts as an example there are chestnut orchards all across the USA The popularity is increasing and people are being encouraged to buy cultivars which our genetic clones of one another

33:41 plant them out 30 feet apart, you got to spray for this prepare the soil a year ahead of time. You know all these different things your expenses getting wired into the system ahead of time look up Michigan State University chestnut enterprise budgets and read about it and after five years you have yet to produce a single chestnut in your $150,000 in the hole how are you going to get profitable after that? Well good! It starts to pay back and 20 years later you've paid back Well, what if you all of a sudden got all those chestnuts and put them in seedlings—not cultivars. You can put them in some cultivars because we want their positive traits—you put them in the ground and when the pests and diseases show up, you don't do anything about it! You let nature sort it out. The ones that are going to die are going to die. And then there are some that actually

34:30 die and then re-sprout again, I was just picking this tree. I took pictures of it today." This is the third cycle that this diseased chestnut tree grew and started producing seeds within three or so years. So I'm harvesting its seed and it becomes more trees. That really fast reproduction is now in my gene pool it's slightly susceptible to chestnut blight because it'll grow for five maybe seven eight years, gets chestnut blight and dies to the root but it's already started to sprout back and the next trees are right there in place. It's the same tree and I know that after seven or eight years is going to get blight and fall apart again but the next suckers are coming up again and so I have a really hideous

35:14 Probably 50 to 60 percent dead material out in my chestnut orchards. It's not an orchard it's a forest and Orchardists will see this in the stomach turns I actually had one guy who was an apple orchardist that was apples He literally threw up at the end of my tour because I had a successful Apple business And he was barely making ends meet Because he had this image of perfection of what it had to be. So now I'm producing chestnuts commercially and hazelnuts commercially for 20 plus years using trees that are diseased and dying, it doesn't have to look perfect. This pests all over the place. Welcome to planet Earth my friend! Yeah. This is how it rolls right? You're basically talking about herd immunity for fruit trees

36:01 And exactly right it's funny cuz i've listened to you give ninety minute presentations breaking everything down and then when you open up for questions people still ask so what's your cash crop. You gotta say again its not about a cash crop is the cash system and makes money in aggregate talk was about profitability and the creative array of income that comes from these very little inputs compared to the standard process things that might not be obvious to people Well, and let's go back even one step further is on the whole agriculture does not pay. It has been designed that way most of the big farms that you're seeing are all getting government subsidies even if they're calling it an insurance program. Agriculture in the USA is subsidized by the federal government everybody who's taking government payments is on welfare

36:54 Period. Hard stop." Okay, so that means that type of agriculture doesn't pay! So the conversation about economics is not valid because they can't make it pay why should we be forced to make it pay and why should we beat ourselves up if it doesn't? The agriculture doesn't necessarily pay and I'm using hazelnuts as an example this year...I couldn't find people who harvest hazelnuts to get it done And if I was dependent on that for my income, i would have been screwed because I only got as much as a couple friends could pick in order to sell. Well my expenses we've already mentioned are so low that it still ends up being profitable because the cash outlay was less than the cash income and then when you start doing me flip around and if im putting trees on the ground at a profit because i'm selling trees other people now i've got no negative expenses

37:53 There's that line behind my head. All I've got to do is make a plus one at the end of the year, and that's profitable." I didn't make $50 million and I didn't make all of my money from one crop. Now there is a principle that the agroforestry community uses called the land equivalent ratio. And I'm going to use apples and black walnuts because you can do some research on that The PhD candidate a number of years ago named Kevin Wolves did his thesis on basically the land equivalent ratio with walnut and corn. If you take an acre of corn, that's one acre it's 100% corn that's one if you have a acre of walnuts you can put these many walnut trees in there you get an acre of walnuts that's 1 well if you take your acre of corn and now remove

38:47 20% of that land in strips you get lower yields of corn Oh No Because you took twenty percent of the land away and now let's put the walnuts in on Those strips of the twenty percent that you took away because they're widely spaced. You can put more trees in the row They'll get the Sun on either side and they could be touching one another here. You now have 80% of a corn crop That's point eight Now, you have 50% of a walnut crop that's 0.5%. On one acre of land, we've got 0.8 plus 0.5. You've got lower yields of corn and lower yields of walnuts with more total yield. Basically what they have figured out—and this goes to ecological research

39:33 photosynthetic yield per acre, the total quantity of photosynthate that occurs on an acre is absolutely related to the number of species present. The more species you have there, the more sunlight you're capturing and turning into biomass. Well now as a farmer, the challenge becomes How many species can I manage for one? And then how many species Can I put on a piece of land before I've got too many and I don't have enough volume to access the markets that I need to Access. So what's ended up with me is, I can basically handle three or four above-ground species and I prefer only three species of animal because after that I just get too busy so let's say we get

40:24 I'll use an example in my book Restoration Agriculture, there's actually a picture of it. My son was maybe 10 at the time and he's holding a green pepper. We shipped green bell peppers wholesale like pallet quantities a week and also acorn squash so there is an acre of acorn squash on the same acre as an acre of peppers on the same acres as an acre of sunflowers on the same acre where there is an acre of chestnut trees And I got half a yield of squash, half the yield of peppers, half the yield of sunflowers and half the yields chestnuts. That's how many total yields that's two total yields but i got half the yield of everything and then what were my input costs? The produce, the squash, the peppers and the sunflowers they required work their annual crops it required a certain amount of weed control you know more fertility so I had some mineral amendments that I had to put on the soil

41:22 But as the system got more mature, I became less and less dependent on those alley crops in between the rows of trees. But that's part of how we can do the economics of it is try to have our inputs become revenue streams and have more things happening on the same acre so you'll get a higher land equivalent ratio and plant species that are part of your natural plant community type in that area, so they're already adapted to the climate and the disturbance regime of your area. And those things right there are really helpful. They go a long way for profitability. Once again, profitability is a plus one at the end of the year!

42:04 Yeah i just think you do such a great job of flipping the conventional script on what it means to tend land to be a farmer. It's really great and I didn't expect you to mention, acknowledge your loose connection to biodynamic agriculture in the steiner stuff we've done whole shows break it down rudolph steiner really interesting guy and a whole host of subjects i do think that farming stuff is some of them most interesting You know you hear stories about planting a spiral cow horn of manure and that increases yields just very kind of so teric applications of his work to increasing yields in.

42:46 I do think some of the most interesting stuff i've got from listening to you is talking about, the intelligence of nature probably cuz i spend so little time engaging with it that it seems very bizarre and foreign but talk was about some of the stuff you learn just. The intelligence of plants in nature's own processes that u picked up on by engaging with any biodynamic stuff that you could add to that list Well, I'll tie the biodynamic stuff into it right away. I noticed that you went right to the esoteric cow horn and manure and put it in this time of year, bury it, dig up, swirl around a vortex or whatever… That is part of what I call sparkly object syndrome that people are fascinated by the newest tech, the newest technique

43:35 Compost. You put a bunch of stuff in a pile and it rots, that's what compost is! And yet there's the Johnson Sue bioreactor, there's Bokashi, there's this and that… It's like come on you put stuff in a pile and it rots? Well the Biodynamic Agriculture course Rudolf Steiner did all throughout it, the goal was to create a self-contained farm entity that acts as an individuality. Now in modern day, that's called an ecosystem Ecosystems the only things that we know that are somewhat self contained and they don't really require any inputs from the outside they don't require any. Cash outlay in order to function so by saying you're gonna create this self contain system we can create an ecosystem

44:21 Well, then he says we need to have the proper amount of animals present. You know he mentioned bovines, you mentioned pigs. We also need the proper amount of herbs in your meadows and flowers, a proper proportion of trees, shrubs, bushes and vines. You need to have the proper mix of fungi." And he scattered that all throughout the whole agriculture course. And yet people are going like yeah but what's your best cash crop? What's your best cash crop? He is like look If you really need to do that, take a cow horn and shove some manure in there. The whole entire Ag lecture he's telling you to do a permaculture restoration agriculture system but because you want to ask the question

45:03 With the stupid sparkly answer, he gave sparkly answers. Now I grew up within the whole biodynamic community and the topic that has wasted more human mental activity and creativity than anything else is how to make the proper box to store your preparations in. And if you look at lecture four, the discussion afterwards one guy says yeah but okay so if I dig it up and don't use it all what should I do with it? He said oh just leave it on the ground It's like, no but you know the ground gets frozen over the winter time and Rudolph's Tyrant says leave it in the ground. He comes up with another reason and Rudolf Steiner says, look there's absolutely no harm whatsoever. Leave it in the ground and go dig it when you're going to use it next time! And the guy says yeah but this and that and he says fine okay You make a box about this big about this wide line it with this put peat moss you put it in jars you put clay lids your cork and gave him his big huge not really accurate way to make a box for storing preparations

46:05 And so ever since I was 10 years old, I've been at biodynamic meetings over and over and over. The conversation still goes on today how to make the best box for storing your preparations in. Right in here chapter 4 discussion verse 29 or whatever it is Steiner says leave it in the ground he says make an ecosystem and leave the preparations in the ground because all of the different life forces and the forces of sentience and the forces of consciousness that come into our foodstuffs, that's the process of ecological succession as a system changes through time. When you have an ecosystem—a full intact ecosystem—you haven't destroyed the life so if you cut down the forest plow up to ground any life that was here and up with all the plants and animals

46:58 Now all of a sudden it's gone. Well, you need to bring that back somehow." So either go through succession plant all these things and in the meantime you got a sick farm put some manure on a horn swirl it around spray it on it make these compost preps You know the bladder from a buck and all that kind of stuff There's going to be a conference at Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee. Jeff Poppins' place I believe it is the 5th-ish of October? They're going to do a reenactment of the agricultural lectures. It goes for a week and you can come in and out whenever you want but they are going through the same way that the agriculture course did back in 1924 when Rudolph Steiner did the agriculture course. So check it out, Red Boiling Springs Tennessee. Very cool very cool I know i'm guilty of having shiny object syndrome and I was also curious...I just had a guy here talking about electroculture now that's a little bit less maintenance if you just stick a wooden dowel covered in copper into a food forest but

48:03 Apparently, there's some real principles of atmospheric energy and if you use these things it works. What do you think about that? Have you ever gotten into the electroculture stuff? Well one of the things that I'm a fairly firm adherent is that I shouldn't have to believe anything. Sure! I should be able to go out and test and verify let's take gravity It doesn't matter how you describe it. It can be this force that's sucking us to the ground, it could be the bending of a space-time continuum, it could be these little gnomes that take you apart and reassemble you once you hit the floor... I don't care how you describe it as long as accurately describes the phenomena then you described to me in a way that I can observe the same thing that you did and experience the same thing that you did then if I can do it verify it, its true there is a lot of things with

48:56 Organ accumulators and stuff like that. Those are legit electronic devices and one of the things that I find fascinating is if you're familiar with Orgone accumulators, have you ever heard of those? Yeah yeah sure. Orgone accumulator it's an alternating layer of a organic compound metallic organic metallic organic metallic and then you put it out here and it does all this woo-woo magical shit but nobody tells you what kind of woo-woo magical shit it does and no one actually wants you to test that because they don't know what it is either Well, if you take a device and you do alternating layers of an organic in the metal and an organic in the metal and organic in metals called a capacitor.

49:36 and that's been used in radios and televisions for 100 years almost, that's an actual device that has an actual function. It actually does something it actually accumulates a charge between the two different materials and you can actually utilize that charges like a battery in one sense And if you do like the chem busters and cloud busters those are actual functioning electronic devices that if we only studied them and figured out what they do, we would learn a lot more. Maybe we could use them instead people want to go into the woo-woo and all the kind of weird hype and so something that has a potentially amazingly useful application We don't know anything about because the Weirdos have gotten it And I'm going to go back to the capacitor take the cow horn and so cow horn is obviously organic matter

50:30 It's made out of keratin, it's a protein. So if you cut off the tip of it now you have this double spiral cone and if you pour water down The water will spiral down, it concentrates. The temperature plummets It creates a little micro electrical charge at the tip of the smallest part of the vortex Well then as it comes out of the hole Which is real trip to watch this! It comes out of the hole spinning in one direction Then there's a point where it crosses over and it spins out in the opposite direction and comes out as a spray So that's a real thing that you can do at home if you can get a cow horn

51:08 and just check it out. Well then, let's turn this cow horn into a capacitor Let's now take some thin copper sheets and wrap it around that cow horn And then take some wool felt and maybe some hide glue to hold in place Go cow horn Copper Felt Copper Felt Copper Felt Copper And then put two leads up on either side of the outermost shell Now pour water through it We can actually derive how much electrical and magnetic energy will be imparted into that water as we run it through. Because this is a capacitor, it's device that can be measured or you can take its all woo-woo and get all carried away and we can distract about it not talk about

51:52 We can talk about this crazy stuff with clear rational minds. There's something going on, what is it? Let's examine this." Right right and I mean i'm with you like Terrence McKenna said if it's true we can take the pressure like you can study something you know You don't have to hide in the mystique but it is still mystical and at least it is to us because... ...we do not understand it What would our ancestors think of a smartphone Oh my gosh yeah that's magic It's true And in terms of other forms of nature's magic like that kind of what i was gonna get into before the segway and to buy the car crazy or stuff there are things just from observing nature i've heard you talk about, that our modern system of agriculture because it relies on annual plants planted in an array.

52:41 your data ecosystem in vast seas of uniformity actually creates new strains events like that's interesting i've talked to people about why does the amazon have such biodiversity it seems like biodiversity can be engineered and a positive way or in this case in a negative way creating new strains of insects. And i heard you say that the, The vitamins and minerals that are coming from freshly harvested foods, not only do they have better color and they're more vibrant but these vitamins and minerals the content hasn't oxidized. And the produce is actually more nutritious

53:20 that it would be in a grocery store i mean those are things these are real reasons to take action and the system because people think oh well apple looks fine on the shelf like what's the difference, well there is a different here's an actual measurable nutrient difference that's pretty interesting. It is one of things about creating new species Let's look at weeds, for example. Because that is a big problem that is going on right now in conventional ag or chemical ag. If you have an herbicide and spray the herbicide it kills all the weeds. Well, it doesn't kill them all! Some of them survive. Why did they survive? It doesn't really matter. Somehow that one had a genetic predisposition to survive the herbicide that you threw at it. Now the next time you go through its offspring are

54:08 are going to be multiplied and you're gonna concentrate the genetics for surviving that herbicide. Same as with insects, same with viruses... The example I used in my book was the tobacco mosaic virus is that if you use this genetically modified tomato it won't get tobacco mosaic virus number one and you do the statistics and is 99.9% of the time because what happens when a virus replicates It goes into your DNA as it's dividing itself. It inserts itself and it codes off of you, and it goes ahead and multiplies that way. Well sometimes it takes a bit of you with it. And so what happens is that there's a new virus. That's what's going on with the flu virus or with... What do they call that thing that happened a couple years ago? I forget at this point! The COVID virus

54:59 I know, constantly changing. Why is it changing? Because when it goes inside of you sometimes it takes a piece of your DNA with it and that propagates throughout the population as it continues to spread So, by fighting against that we're helping to create more of those superbugs and superviruses. Whereas if we allowed our food crops to coexist with these pests and diseases, we would have to constantly be changing the genetics of our plants. And that's okay because they're changing along with the change in climate weather

55:36 pest pressure, disease pressure. They're evolving along with the planet at the same time instead of us humans having this idea that we have to put this in a place and isolate it from the rest of the world with all our sprays and protective devices and try to grow it because it has the highest yield per acre! At what cost? What cost are we doing that?" The nutrition thing – what does actually concern me a little bit is I do a lot of work with the folks at the Bionutrient Food Association, Dan Kittredge is the founder of that. They've come up with a little mass spectrometer that you can point and shoot at food items or produce items and they have to code it for various different foods and it will tell you the nutrient levels in those foods

56:22 And what happened when they did that, they find out that a lot of the chemically raised food is as nutritious if not more nutritious than like certified organic stuff. And it has nothing to do with the poisons that were used. The poisons were still used on the poison food and not used on the organic food. It had to do with the soil health and the nutrients that the plant was actually taking in And so the organic practitioner, where you got a low reading they actually may not have been taking care of their soil as well as the chemical ag farmer was. Well then what really throws a wrench in the works there is if we get to the place where consumer can now take this little point and shoot and go point gets the one that has most nutrients in it

57:09 that's now going to stimulate farmers to do foliar applications of nutrients directly to the leaves of these plants. So if you've got a harvest coming up tomorrow, the truck is coming two days from now we go out and spray the vitamins on the plants now. The plants take it in through their stomata and it goes right into the food crop boom! Now we zip it over into the packing shed, it's in the cooler and its shipped out. It has more vitamins and minerals because you sprayed it in there So now we can be spraying fossil fuel derived chemistry directly on our plant to get a higher nutrient reading. That's radically different approach than creating healthy soils, healthy soil process, healthy soil life and ecosystem function. There is all kinds of weird stuff

57:57 That is in the process of happening in this culture of sparkly objects ways to game the system. And another thing that people should know i've heard you talk about how plants that are allowed to fight off past attacks often have more vital nutrients and then which help us fight cancer and diseases so their immunity kind of cascades down to the immunity of the person who eats the produce Right, and actually part of what the plants is a lot of more recent research is that if an insect bites this plant. If it has an immune response, it's not the same kind of immune response that we have but if it has the ability to fight off whatever the threat is, it also signals the plants near it and they automatically start to produce more of whatever the internally produced chemicals are that will repel that pest or prevent that disease

58:54 Like a lot of the bold colors and bitter and astringent flavors in food are indicators of more immune system response when we eat that. It's like purple grapes and resveratrol. So of course, what does our sparkly object culture do? We go to find that one thing—that one thing! That makes it work!" It's like now let's eat grapes with the skin on, let's press grapes with the skin on and drink nice red wine—fine red wine. Let's eat really good food in a salad with all the different colors the bitter herbs, the arugulas, the kale and the walnuts. The vinegar on top. Let's eat really well and we'll be healthy." No no no! Let's find one true chemical that helps with this immunity and manufacture it and sell it to you in pills at Walmart.

59:43 Right right that is what they do that's a different approach yes and just to drive home that this isn't something that we should do it really is something we have to do i want to read this quote from your book you say in addition to the curse of ceaseless labor, The adoption of annual plants as staple food crops have carried with them another curse. Every human society that has relied on annual crops, as staple foods in their diet has collapsed every single one. Every human society from the temperate zone to the tropics that is relied on annuals to feed itself is now gone and the rich abundant ecosystems where they're temporary societies once flourished have been rendered into dust

1:00:27 and that is stark but i can't find an example that box what you say there are thought about it, and there's hundred gather societies that still exist today that have a continuity that goes back longer than our history books maybe we should take ahead. And they're probably some that we don't even know about right now I know recently some folks walked out of the rainforest on an island somewhere down in Brazil, that had never been seen before. There are still real human beings alive on this planet but that takes me back to the whole nature operating system since before civilization, since before humans

1:01:07 And during the whole rise of this destructive annual agriculture civilization, nature has persisted. Nature has survived every cataclysm. It's survived ice ages. It's survived global warmings. There is a lot more data out there now studying about way before 65 million years ago—it was like 195 million years When carbon dioxide levels were higher than this, and like 90% of all life on Earth was snuffed out. It came back then like the whole dinosaur myth with the rock falling down 65 percent of all life on Earth was wiped out now that we're in the sixth great extinction right now I don't know how many percent of all life on earth has been wiped out human beings could go away and you know what nature is going to be just fine thank you very much so

1:02:00 The urgency to repair the ecosystems of this planet are more geared towards us. If we want to live a somewhat halfway decent life and have future generations that can sing songs of us around the table as they drink their red wine, we better restore the ecosystems of this planet simultaneously while producing enough healthy nutritious food for people. Indeed! Cheers to that! And the last thing i wanted to bring up before we do that promotional wrap-up stuff. Is demand so i recently moved from san diego to florida and one of the biggest cultural shocks is that consumers in florida don't seem to give a shit about organic at all, they like local we have all kinds of like berry festivals and strawberry festival but im not taking my two year old there because none of it is organic can they tell me that their so many pasts

1:02:54 that it just doesn't work here uncommon for farmers produce stands or grocery stores to have an acceptable organic inventory. It's frustrating to me and it seems like a part of the problem is consumer demand or consumer education how do we address that when people are demanding better it seems like a crucial piece of this economic puzzle will for one thing think about education Education, whether we like it or not ends up getting attached to politics. You can teach something to somebody and they can still choose not to do what they learn and then especially in our toxic environment today, we could be taught something then immediately our first thought is to disbelieve what we've been taught because its propaganda from the left, right, up, down, middle of whatever its all fake news anyways so education part forget it's not going

1:03:50 And then the people who don't demand stuff that's better, screw it. Why do you think I grow cattle and hogs? People buy pork they buy beef they buy vegetables and if they don't want to buy organic vegetables that can be sold conventional It's not as good a deal for the front let's just use the dairy portion of Organic Valley one of their metrics when they're looking at the business is how much milk did we have to sell on the conventional market this month or this quarter whatever it is And sometimes you just have to because the organic stuff isn't selling as fast. I think that's in part why the whole term regenerative was invented is that, can we somehow stimulate more sales of our kinds of product? Because get people excited about something different aspect of what we're already doing it's all marketing stuff so if people aren't demanding it So what give it to them when I made hard cider

1:04:45 I can make the most amazing, complex really amazing cider that you can only get over in England and stuff like that. It's really complex stuff." Then you do taste tests after taste test my best cider people didn't like it they wanted the stuff to tasted like woodchuck cider which is like a sippy cup apple juice with fizz in it yeah so you know what? I had to make fizzy apple juice fizz because that's what people wanted or I wasn't in business I suppose so, but we're not holier than thou. At least i'm not just like I gotta sell stuff on the cell stuff so what and if my expenses are super low which they are because i'm in a restored ecosystem and if i've already made my profits per acre on the cattle and hogs don't have to make a big profit off of whatever it is that doesn't have to go certified organic can go conventional like instill do alright

1:05:42 If i borrow the money that i need in order to get into that business in the first place, i get the leverage effect and a higher return on investment because it was all borrowed. You make it all seem so simple but Mark i really just had a great time i love this so people are charged up about the potential to move past just acknowledging we have a huge food problem and actually contributing to solutions in some way. If not as a producer than at least as a disciplined consumer and, people really should go watch you tube tour of your place it's impressive and inspiring remind them of some other specific things you got going on that they can take advantage over utilize

1:06:23 Well, one of the things about the farm I think it's new force farm dot us. I don't really emphasize that because too many people want to show up and do tours and this isn't a carnival we do tours about once a week close to 1000 people have come through on tour is here so what new forest farm dot us So many places I've seen people do a critique of my work. Oh, this is all good theory but it's just not practical! It's like this is not a theory. I don't have a PhD. I'm not a university employee. I'm not a government employee. This place is real and when you come out here, look at some of the videos go see the movie Feeding Tomorrow, the 2022 winner of the Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival got top honors there

1:07:09 and my farm is featured in there. This is a real place, I'm shipping wholesale quantities of product and the one that was featured in there was the pigs and asparagus because it was early part of the season when they did the filming. You know how to ship over a ton of asparagus every single year? That's a large amount of food that's going out the door! This place is real and simple to understand It's not all that complex, you don't have to be a genius brain rocket scientist in order to figure this out. This is how nature operates. All I try and keep striving to do is figure out how can I farm following natures pattern? Because Nature is the ultimate AI!

1:07:51 nature is actual intelligence is survived everything that this planet is thrown at it so far and then will survive us yeah i love when you frame the oak savannah's like its the most resilient system so why not use it why try to invent a new system that has no history abuse or weathering the many storms that come at us so why grow crops that you have to educate people on how to eat this thing i'll just use a ronin as a whipping post. So many peoples like i wanna buy your own iranian is like wait are you currently suffering from an erroneous deficiency for one and two did you know that all those nutrients are available in blueberries okay so not as high quantity but you know what blueberries taste good, no it kinda sucks not even sugar works

1:08:39 So why try to educate people to do something that's better for them when it sucks? Let's grow something that's really good, highly nutritious and fantastically delicious. And it's time for me to fire up the smoker so it'll be ready for me to have my ribs tonight for dinner." Ah I love it! I'm jealous well enjoy that you're the man thanks for your time take care of yourself hopefully I get some of that cider sometime and keep fighting the good fight all right thank sir Rock me like a hurricane people, A return to the agricultural conundrum well and a range of solutions that sound like a dream come true to me. And I do think about this a lot! So happy with the space we have here on an acre land obviously a huge upgrade from where I was and I regularly eat

1:09:30 Things that we've planted that aren't even available in stores. Cranberry hibiscus, Barbados cherry the cherry that has more vitamin c than any other fruit Jabba to cabas that grow on the actual trunk. They're quite weird, kind of like a grape look up at jabba to cava It's odd and then also the moringa the moringa tree they call the miracle Tree because it has so many uses and just its leaves are so dense They kind of taste very peppery But these are the things we just grab as We're putting the kids in the car The kids don't like all of it but that's fine

1:10:09 It's very small potatoes, but it will grow and life is just about making progress in that direction. But you can't go too nuts on a property that is in the neighborhood with a house on it so sometimes I use websites like land.com and lanwatch.com To see what might be available further out. I think there's another website like buyacave.com and you can find places around Appalachia that have streams of clean water and caves on the property, but here is a great example i just look this up before starting this wrap-up

1:10:48 For people who think this is something outside of their reach, which happens every time we talk about a show that involves like property or money in any kind of way. But this listing here is about 45 minutes from my house and it's 10 acres for 175 K with clean water on it And on top of that, the listing reads own a 10 plus acre piece of land in a supportive homesteading community in Panoplia an area Florida I've never heard of but no HOA expert assistance sustainable living and off-grid potential prices start at 175k with financing options available join a community of like minded pioneers

1:11:34 Get done for you help setting up your farm with the support of our experienced ranch hands. Engage in regenerative practices with chemical-free grasses and manmade tilapia ponds for sustainable farming. Tilapia? I don't even like fish, but i will eat me some tilapia for sure! So not only is this place affordable to pretty much anyone with moderately decent credit, but it's part of a community of people looking to do the same kinds of things. You go out there and you just do a shitload of planting seeds and starter trees

1:12:12 Maybe set up some animals to graze or you could even rent the land to an existing rancher to help make dents in the payments and 175k I can't be sure but, i don't think that monthly payment on that is much more than a car payment so maybe rock that 2017 whatever a little longer. Do this instead I know you're not driving a $175,000 car but the interest rates on car loans versus property loans are way different. And in a few years you can have the sort of property people take tours of just to see what's possible for them. Then, you spend those years saving up for a sick RV or modular home and could be living on your own private 10 acres at pretty low cost. These modular homes are crazy! They're like Lego blocks. You can buy them on Amazon

1:13:09 Obviously it's going to be pretty isolated but some people want that. I would probably just take weekend trips with the family to collect stuff like a long grocery store trip kind of thing, but if shit ever got bad its nice to have a retreat that you can always go too and its something that can always be passed down through your family and this place in the example isn't too far from Orlando so there is a good chance Building is going to be going on all around it and who knows what it could be worth down the road. If you're anywhere between Colorado and the Carolinas, you can find these gems within an hour or so of you And this is an achievable dream Don't put limitations on yourself But when we have an episode like this I do keep in mind that

1:14:00 I've been pretty blessed with this show and what it affords me, but I want everyone to realize it's not as far-fetched as it might seem. If you're willing to not live on the land then that makes it so much easier! And I think this was second hour stuff but when Mark would just rattle off the economics of it all man...I wish I could make it sound that easy But still it's something we could be proud of rather than just chunking monthly lump sums into the S&P But before we go too far with this wrap-up, I've got to throw out the rest of his links. We said goodbye a bit too soon but AcresUSA.com is his publisher! It has the largest archive of written and recorded information in the whole biodynamic permaculture space going back to the 1950s and it's all in the process of being digitized and made available online—an amazing educational resource

1:14:58 RestorationAg.com is his design and consulting business, so they design and install large-scale water management agroforestry systems And then forestag.com is the mass selected edible woody crop nursery, so he sells in bundles as per the philosophy if you think mass selection seems logical then you can kickstart that by buying these bundles that have already been mass selected by one of the best in the game And I should have started that way, but I was buying bigger trees trying to get to fruiting faster and they were super expensive. So I couldn't really even buy or transport five at a time. But you learn as you go like I did with THC itself it didn't start the same way that is going now nothing ever does It starts with action and then A process of continual refinement

1:15:56 But I find Mark to be super inspiring. He says all the right things to get me jazzed up and has a ton of knowledge he's living proof that this model works i love the flip on hunter gatherers and the development of permanent settlements raw egg nationalist was one of the first to really spend time on hunter gatherers being the better way, and civilization coming through force rather than some big aha moment on a never-ending path of progress. But when you fold that into the idea of humans being taught this from some higher being, it just becomes more provocative and it seems like they're fucking with us! But in the second hour like I mentioned we did talk about the economics of buying land using loans and borrowing against assets

1:16:49 A bit over my head, but I will re-listen to that a few times. Leverage does make our system go around and you don't want to get caught over leveraged but a lot of people don't even realize what could be available to you if you took just a little more risk than you do now I also loved that he had the biodynamic knowledge and commented on some of the woo-woo stuff. But he's right, we just need to learn about why these things work adjust our model of reality and get past the mystique of things that we have yet to just accept and fold into our larger understanding And it does get quite granular whereas Marx whole thing is just like let nature take over but there's no reason why you couldn't combine both philosophies

1:17:37 In that plus show, we also got into natural pre-colonial abundance that was here. Fungus and mushrooms foraging partnering investors with land purchasers and people who want to do this kind of thing and how to transform America's food system step by step become a plus member it helps me but it provides you twice as much content that's why you do it And we leave the advertisers out of it as a nice bonus. Hiresidechats.com to make all your dreams come true or you can click those links right in the show notes as the intro song says and higher side news I put out a couple of posts recently Instagram Twitter all that about buying a pig which is awesome! You can see all the meat that buying one full pig provides definitely enough pork for a family

1:18:34 I think we should all be in that game of having a freezer and buying one pig and one cow a year. It actually forces you to eat at home because you gotta get through it, And its so easy these days just look up a recipe for any odd cut of meat your unfamiliar with and experiment! We get better as we go Support your local sustainably raised meat producers...it is important But also I put out a post about how the THC YouTube channel was at 99,900 subscribers and given that i have two strikes. I just wanted to say we hit 100k before it went away and big thanks to everybody who jumped on that! I can now say achievement unlocked and yeah I doubt they're gonna send me the play button plaque that so many others get that you see prominently displayed behind them

1:19:30 But I don't care, it's a nice feather in my cap. I got to 100k with a conspiracy show that is really just audio! Yeah i use it for video clips now and the last year but for 95% of the time its been an audio show on a video platform And I think that adds a level of impressiveness to it Kinda dumb? I know YouTube is such a small thing Barely even worth mentioning when it comes to overall podcasting infrastructure but now if it gets removed I can say that we got there to that sweet, sweet six-figure number. And on those posts there were a lot of comments how I should just move to Rumble or Odyssey

1:20:12 And I don't think those people understand. I'm not looking to replace YouTube, but I don't really care. I've tried Rumble and Odyssey it's not really working because there's not a ton of people there and it's just not important. The Hireside Chats is a podcast. It's distributed through RSS and available on all podcasting apps that's enough! YouTube was fine for growing things but clearly they've changed from where they were when I first started But thanks for pushing me over the top to 100k. In spite of all that, moving on let's do that thing and check in on the last episode rating SSRIs and Predatory Psychiatry with Dr Roger McFillin you already know it was good but how good 4.9 wow I don't think i've ever called a 4.9 since I started doing this Jesus that is great to see

1:21:11 I personally think THC episodes have been on a roll lately. It's been awhile since i wasn't thrilled with one and they are very diverse! Dan Luzadder, Mockingbird Media Matt Roski, Electro Culture and basically everything else Ufology with RomX Yugashift with Bibu Devmizra And then Analog before that! I love all these interviews Become a plus member. That's a ton of good stuff just right there, seven day free trial to get you started. You don't have to be a member forever but throw me a bone if you like this show download some older episodes your curious about and let that be it why not hear a bit more of it? But yeah things are good I'm very happy so lucky to be doing what I do and I've been diving in a lot more enthusiastically since the astro Gnosis conference I still got that charge

1:22:03 But speaking of events, let's do the calendar thing. It has been light probably still is but on deck we have October 14th Galbraiths Ale House in Auckland New Zealand October 23rd Corner Bakery Cafe for a natural law meetup hmm in Pasadena California November 7th, a new one. Montana Tap House in Whitefish, MT They say let's do it again Flathead Valley Cure your post-election blues by meeting with like minded individuals not caught up in the two party duopoly Gotta love that! November 9th Trails Cafe in LA and November 13th another new one Athens Ohio West End Cider House You know I love a good cider It came into play with this interview

1:22:52 And they say not really any details to give I guess. I don't know how many people are even going to show if any at all but here's hoping for some. Well look, I appreciate you putting yourself out there it's great there is a couple new events since last episode life is about just diving in and these events could be the start of something cool with very little downside for you so please don't leave these hosts hanging if you're near any of these areas just go have a drink say hello and talk about your favorite episodes to break the ice. Go to highersidemeetups.com to make an event of your own or RSVP it's nice to let the hosts know they are going to have at least a few people coming

1:23:35 And these are usually pretty small, 5-10 people is what I usually hear. There are guidelines on the site largely ripped off from the no agenda site because they did nail it but there's no need to make it a big thing you don't have to inform the venue that you're coming in and no need to make a huge reservation No need to think its going to be a big overwhelming thing just pick up place with standing room thats why breweries are such a good pick Again, no need to inform the venue or make it a big thing. Just think about a local place you like where 10 people can meet up easily and put it on the calendar and when I call it out any local fans will know A lot of small or local businesses are struggling And sometimes I think about just all the free advertising we've given to local places around the world and the people We've brought in It's not a ton but it's pretty cool

1:24:28 It's got a few stacked benefits and I'm proud to continue doing it, even if it is a rip-off from No Agenda. If Adam Curry really did start podcasting technically we're all ripping him off! Why stop at podcasting? Hi kid, I love that show never miss an episode But that's about it. Mark Sheppard, let him know if you had a good time buy some trees check out his place support Organic Valley Milk if you don't already have a source for local or raw milk You should see it in your grocery store and you can be reminded of this interview when you pick that up And we could even Johnny Appleseed this country. Just plant stuff all over in obscure places! We have everything we need to make this a place of abundance and don't have to wait for some big movement or political momentum, and that's what I love about this kind of solution. Anyway, I'm getting outta here. I've done my part

1:25:23 Your move, unsustainable annual crop engineers big ag corporate consumers and sowers of this sick system. You're fuckin' Shepard leads towards a better day And all that I can say is it's about damn time So many hurrying to wait so many rushing to complain Nearly tried tree fishing for steady attrition

1:26:20 While the system clings Shrinking market share That doesn't see these things We'll re-secure Cause it's about dependency Restore that efficiency To try to claim our health We'll re-secure Our wealth on machine Cause it's about time A dependency From an un-restored natural

1:27:57 efficiency