Peter Allen | Mastodon Valley Farm, Permaculture, & The Wilderness Myth

00:00 Embrace yourself, because you're about to dive into another free first hour episode of the Higher Side Chats. And we just want to let you know that whether your looking for a companion through your paranoid insomnia, entertaining yourself through one of life's mundane activities or trying to ward off the internal screams from all those sad smothered souls around the office THC is here and you should know that every episode of the higher side chats has an entire second hour for PLUS members Sign up at thehiresidechatsplus.com and you'll get years of Plus Show archives, lifetime forum access, a special invite to Greg Carlwood's monthly joint sessions MP3s of THC music bonus episodes tour videos and 10% off t-shirts grinders and whatever else ends up in The HireSite store It's $8 a month that you won't miss so become a plus member and treat yourself in these troubled times always action packed and commercial free

00:51 Which means you'll unfortunately never hear my voice again. In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times. But from 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire For a new era of worldly frustration we offer a fresh conversation... I'm Greg Carlwood These are the higher side chats. Back in the saddle and ready to ride, dear people from sunny San Diego I'm Greg Carlwood and we have spent a lot of time talking about how we've been screwed by this system how our leaders have led us astray and just how backwards our current lifestyles really are

01:43 We spend most of our time at jobs we can't stand just to get enough green paper to get us through another 30 days. We spend most of it on cheap pre-made food because we lost the knowledge to cook for ourselves and some of us even pay for gym memberships to simulate the use of our body, we used to just call living. We grow and mow useless patches of grass instead of anything we could use or eat and we perpetuate the cycle of suckling at the teat of a tyrannical system out of ignorance convenience and complacency Yes the puppet masters the western world dangled that quarter pounder carrot in front of us and we wandered right into the trap of microwaveable TV dinners pill popping and hypnotic nightly news. But it does take two to tango maybe we didn't ask for the rockefeller rothschild debt based system rule but we definitely embraced at all with open arms and i think

02:32 people are finally realizing how fascinating, beneficial and downright magical our natural systems really are. And the prospect of a pivot back to simpler life is sounding better all the time." So maybe it isn't as sexy as secret space programs and CIA mind control but permaculture, a reintroduction into nature, and empowerment gained from shucking off the slave system are useful tools for the long game that I don't think should be overlooked i'm sure these feelings are shared by today's guest peter allen who is an ecologist turned farmer focused on restoring functional and productive savannah ecosystems.

03:08 He owns and manages Mastodon Valley Farm in southwest Wisconsin where he runs a successful all-natural meat subscription business. He also runs Savannah Gardens LLC, an education & consulting company focused on permaculture, restoration agriculture, holistic planning, ecological design So let's stop bitching and start living! The land management magi Oak Savannah Sage Permaculture pimp and master of his Mastodon Valley Farm domain Peter welcome to the higher side Hey thanks great great intro is always i try but man i am really psyched to be doing this thanks for being here i think it's gonna be a lot of fun, where people are probably don't know you are plus member who reached out after hearing me mention the desire to focus on a few shows that could be about permaculture things that are really your expertise and we are i gotta say that.

03:59 I find this exciting because in the same way we learn about cars that used to run on alcohol, flying saucer technology free energy devices light therapy holistic medicine natural cancer cures all these Things i consider really powerful tools that were once there in the past we don't have many more they probably been suppressed i think engineered abundance and bio dynamic agriculture i think they qualify as things to put under the umbrella of suppress knowledge and lost technology when you really think about it even that's fair to say. Yeah me nature itself is magic i mean no process of photosynthesis is a magical phenomenon so

04:41 all of our technology in modern times is very mechanical and sort of based on chemistry, and manipulation of the physical domain. With genetic engineering we're starting to get into the biological domain but most of biology has not been penetrated by our natural sciences so we've got a lot of work to do to figure out how to reintegrate ourselves within the natural world but fortunately there's a lot of techniques that are even developed and we just have to plug in and get to work i agree so do you use your own journey and. Developing interest in permaculture holistic thinking as a sort of template, i'm curious to know about some of the early things that you learned about engaging with the natural world maybe surprise you and let that fire to learn more

05:39 Yeah well it really started for me when i was in college. I ended up getting a degree in environmental science, but it didn't start out that way. I started out in the business school and didn't like that, floated around for a bit and I ended up having to take a biology credit so I took a class called Plant & Plant Communities and all it was was a week-long trip to the Smoky Mountain Park. And basically every day we got up and spent the whole day in a different kind of plant community learning about plants. We would learn 20, 30 or 40 species per day. So I learned hundred plants plus in a short period of time and I'd spend a lot of time outside growing up. I grew up hunting and fishing with grandparents, and stuff like that... And always enjoyed being outside was into backpacking and stuff like that but to me the outside was just green nature when i would go for a hike it was beautiful but it was just green and beautiful and then when I learned the plants

06:30 it's like a whole new world opened up. And so, it really started me on a journey of now when I went outside and went hiking taking my dog for a walk, I would try to recognize the plants and try to identify them. If I didn't see one, it was like a challenge to figure out what it was. That just sort of led me on this lifelong pursuit of basically reintegrating back into nature first starting by figuring out what is there to begin with Yes i was gonna bring up that very class it made me think about, that book and documentary the secret life of plants and. That i think its mainly about how maybe they do have this sort of conscious intelligence and we seem to generally overlook it maybe they do have some language in communication that isn't english obviously but doesn't mean it's not intelligent i mean is that kind of your impression of the plant world now

07:28 Yeah, I mean that's a very complicated subject but there is more and more research showing how plants communicate both within members of the same species but also between species. And then especially using fungus as a sort of communication medium. There is a lot evidence showing that basically what's going on under the earth is that there are symbiotic fungus that lives literally like inside the plant roots and then they connect multiple species together. And so that can serve both as communication channels, but also as highways to move energy and materials around. So when one plant needs extra energy because it's flowering the fungus can pull energy from another species that's not flowering right now and doesn't need it

08:21 basically send it along the superhighway, shoot it up to the plants that need it. And so in an ecosystem there's different species that flower throughout the year. So every species has its own one or two week window where it's at peak flowering and fungus underground seems to migrate that energy and material between the plants when it needs the extent that energy and material routes also serve as a communication in a form of consciousness is obviously more speculative but it certainly wouldn't surprise me. Yes fungus and mushrooms are really a rabbit hole on their own right i've heard little anecdotes about the fact that they seem to be able to survive in the vacuum of space and maybe they are some weird alien intelligence that has kind

09:10 contributed to the terraforming of the planet if you want to talk about speculation there we are but no for me. What this whole section a material when i read some other descriptions of what north america look like before the europeans arrived that's kinda what blew me away and set me off i mean descriptions that mention things like so many fish in the river that horses are crossing almost without touching bottom. And just the change in understanding from thinking Native Americans just lived off the land to seeing how they actually worked with nature to amplify the resources they had, I mean it starts to sound like a paradise and I've heard you refer to this as The Wilderness Myth. Tell us a bit about that and what the land looked like before The White Man came if you could? Yeah so...The Wilderness Myth

10:03 is something that's sort of subconsciously programmed into all of us in North America. We think that this continent was a natural wilderness when the first settlers arrived, and yeah there were humans hunting and gathering and eating berries and fruit and stuff and maybe hunting deer here and there but they were living within a wilderness kind of more passively That notion permeates how we think about nature. I mean, we assume that nature... Sort of the definition of nature means a place sort of without people so if you say something is all natural it means it hasn't been corrupted by people and there's this assumption that humans equal somehow not-natural and a corruption of nature

10:50 When you look at the historical landscape and all of the evidence that we can pull out of data in terms of pollen records and soil course and stuff like that. There is massive evidence that ecosystems across the continent are not organized the way they would have been if there were no humans here. If there had been no humans present in North America when the first Europeans came, it would've been a much different continent and it would've been densely forested at least in the eastern half and there would've been much less diversity of both plants but also herbivores specifically bison and elk and deer which

11:35 We're in eastern North America, especially at huge massive numbers even to the point where North America produced more meat in terms of pounds of say meet from a bison or from a deer from an elk than we produce today. In our industrial agricultural systems so You talked about the Native Americans and how you could walk across the water on fish. Some of that, we've got to be a little bit careful there because- Poetic license? Well, there was an abundance of biological diversity here for sure but there was also a massive genocide of the indigenous peoples preceding the first settlers coming in and writing accounts of it. Basically if Native Americans were managing the landscape

12:25 eating a lot of animals, and then all those people die. Then all those animals are going to explode in population numbers so the fish in the seas, the bison out west and say passenger pigeons which were a hunted species may have been in such exorbitant numbers in the early 1800s not just because they were always like that but because we slaughtered all of the hunters Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's like factory that you flip the switch on and then walked away from it's producing but you're not consuming what it produces That's exactly right And so we got to be a little bit careful with the early settler accounts of things because it's a little inflated Over what? It would have been before but even just looking at the landscape itself The fact that it wasn't closed canopy forest from sea to shining sea means that there were

13:19 active people here shaping the landscape for their own benefit. Essentially, Native Americans were practicing advanced forms of agriculture creating ecosystems that produced an immense amount of food It's hard to say whether they're comparable with what we produce in terms a food today but just looking at the amount of herbivores present on the continent tells you that because there was more meat produced back then than there is now clearly There was a lot of food being grown their most common tool for land management with fire so most areas were burned most of the time like most years. Most areas would get a fire and these fires weren't like forest fires they were small groundfire so anytime

14:08 a grassland does not get fully grazed by the end of the year it's got a lot of dead brass and material biomass hanging out. And if you can burn that off you massively increase the amount of production that piece of land can produce and so By burning, they were able to essentially move animals around because following a burn the grass that grows is extremely high in protein and sugar. It's like candy for a cow or for a buffalo so by burning patches of ground they could essentially move herds of buffalo around A kind of rotational grazing that farmers do today was practiced back then but using fire instead of fences

14:58 Yeah i love that was something i picked up from those chapters you sent me of your soon to be finished book and in there you mentioned that there were hundreds of reasons that they used fire and we have talked about that biochar process, in the past a little bit but this idea of moving mammals around what is really like an eye opener to me as well as just. how important oak trees were an acorns and that they would burn under the oak trees prior to a corn harvesting because it clears the ground to make the harvest easier you can see them and also kills insects and pass that would have, otherwise compromise some of that crop and is just like man we really have a.

15:48 Pretty racist look at these people as maybe savages or just kinda dealing with what they had but i mean these are human beings to and they have just does much intelligence is anyone and this is how it manifested in their environment and clearly the list me its better than, what we do when you can see the results of where our system has taken us. Absolutely. One of the things that a lot of people don't realize is to the extent which humans evolved with the oak tree, acorns were a staple crop for indigenous North Americans but they were a staple crop for our ancestors too you just gotta look back prior to the Neolithic, the agricultural revolution so in Northern Europe

16:34 The old oak groves, I mean it's not even just northern Europe. It's pretty much all of Europe had chestnut and oak groves or savannas across the continent that our ancestors closer to 8000 years ago in the same way that was their staple crop and so Oak trees are amazing because they've got so many different varieties that grow in so many different conditions. There's the white oaks that grow in eastern North America, they grow all the way from Manitoba down to Mexico and then where you're at in Southern California and all the way up the West Coast there is different varieties of acorns that produce

17:11 very edible and very high quality nuts pretty prolifically. And so when you have a savanna type landscape with widely spaced trees, these trees can produce an enormous amount of food . And it has been a staple crop that humans have relied on for survival for tens of thousands of years Well said and i wanted to talk a little more about savannah verses forest because that is the evidence that we know the landscape was engineered because if you leave it alone, we get forrests and forests as you said were not the dominant ecosystem across the midwest of bananas where n.

17:56 I think we're started such a base level i don't know if people have a mental construct for what is the van is there how it's different from a forest but can you break down some of those important differences. Yeah, definitely. So you know there's a spectrum so we can start with a grassland which is like some pasture or prairie that it's just open no trees and full of grasses and then we all know what a forest is where there's a closed canopy of trees if You go into a forest It's pretty dark not a lot of sunlight actually gets down to the ground And then a savannah is a place that is a grassland so it's a continuous cover of perennial grasses on the ground but then have scattered trees

18:36 And so if you're to take a piece of land and let it go, and don't do anything with it. Say it was plowed as a crop field and then you just abandon it... If you're in the eastern United States where we get plenty of rain first grasses are gonna grow and weeds thistles and stuff like that will come in and go and then the grasses will get established pretty quickly you're gonna get trees starting to grow, fast growing shrubs and trees. And generally within 20 or 30 years you've got trees growing pretty quickly that by year 30 you can get to the point where you have kind of a closed canopy where the ground starts to get shaded out and then once the ground gets shaded out you lose grass. Grass needs sunlight so once there's shade over grass it basically goes away

19:25 grass is what holds on to the soil so when it rains if there's grasses those grassroots hold on to the soil and if there's not grassroots your soil washes away. So in crop fields every time it rains, soil washes away. In forests you don't lose as much because you have tree roots that hold onto the soil, but they don't hold on to it as well as grass roots. And so the beauty about savannas is that you never have enough shade to shade out the grasses—you always have grasses! but you also have the trees and all the benefits that they provide. Trees are like the sweat pores of our planet, they transpire. An oak tree will pull up hundreds of gallons of water a day out of the ground and transpire it into the atmosphere just like our sweat glands pull moisture out and then that evaporates on the surface. Trees do the same thing but at a huge scale. And obviously they produce food and do a lot of other good things too, photosynthesize

20:22 Having a savanna means that you have a continuous layer of grasses on the ground with scattered trees that aren't close enough together to then shade out the grasses. And in the eastern United States, we get enough rain that if you let a piece of land go it turns into forest really really quick You never get a savanna they just don't happen naturally They're very unnatural ecosystems when you define natural as being in absence of humans. So if you take humans out of the equation, you don't get savannas. You know we were in the ice ages 12 thousand years ago and it seems to be about the same time that the ice ages ended is when Native Americans sort-of in earnest conquered North America and South America and Central America. And following the Ice Ages once the ice melted we basically turned into a

21:12 a boreal forest and then as it warmed up, Native Americans came in and pretty quickly like within a few thousand years they went from forest to an open oak savannah. You start seeing oak pollen and grass pollen in the pollen signatures about 8,000-6,000 years ago which is pretty remarkable because neither grasses nor oak trees can grow in shady conditions. Oak trees cannot grow, cannot generate an acorn will not sprout and turn into an oak tree if it's shaded at all so once a forest turns shade you basically say goodbye to the Oaks So the fact that we had oak trees so prevalent in our ecosystems for so long Is a dead ringer giveaway

21:54 Something was going on to set back the forest and it was clearly native americans with fire. Yes, and with this wilderness myth something i hadn't thought much about is how This affects much more than our ideas of pre-colonial america It's still affecting us today even people whose hearts and minds are in the right places like these ecological communities And conservation movements they're all backwards too because they still have this Presupposition that we need to just leave nature alone and let it get back to how it was and its not gonna be what you want because your already starting off of a false premise in is just interesting to see how even now. That still affecting even people who are trying to do the right thing oh absolutely it's permeated specially environmental ecological communities i mean

22:52 I spent a decade at University of Wisconsin doing ecology and restoration ecology where we would try to go restore an ecosystem but they define restoration as returning it to its natural state like it was before we got here. Which is so ironic, it's just absurd when you really look at it but nobody really sees the problem there the contradiction in that If you wanna restore the landscape to the way it was before Europeans got here, that's fine. But we've gotta realize that wasn't natural at least how we define natural so like the wilderness myth has made its way into our definition of what natural means realizing that the planet hasn't been the same since humans evolved as a species especially since we got the use of fire tens of thousands of years ago

23:46 If we define natural as meaning without humans, then we've got to go way back and we don't have any idea of what that might look like anyways. And what's the point? We know that we had really diverse ecosystems here before Europeans arrived that produce a whole lot of food. So when I was at university doing restoration work, we would restore a prairie and then they would want to burn it all the time, but even when you burn prairies all the time the trees start to come in. And the trees will get kind of used to getting burned after a while and it will start to degrade quality over time without herbivores like grasslands need grazers

24:23 they co-evolved together for 20 million years. They absolutely need each other, so you can't really have a grassland without a grazer and so when I would try to convince a university or conservation project to let me bring in cattle to flash mob graze a prairie restoration just like the bison would have, I got laughed out of the room because A cows aren't native and B that's why we ever do that because we know that Indians burned, so we should just burn. So they did burn but they burned in order to bring the bison and not just to burn for the heck of it. The contradiction in modern ecological restoration community especially in the eastern United States is pretty intense and once you look at the historical record and what the Native Americans are doing it becomes blaringly obvious that we can't restore our historic ecosystems without

25:16 playing an active role in the management and maintenance of those systems. I think that makes a lot of sense, and i also want to ask you about water a little more because i got from those chapters that you let me check out that there used to be 250 native types of freshwater shellfish before algae started consuming everything but In your area, you say Madison, Wisconsin sits nestled between four lakes surrounded by a large watershed filled to the brim with urban development and farmland. These lakes therefore continually receive huge inputs of nitrogen and phosphorus from the fertilizers spread to keep

25:58 lawns green and crop yields high. In the heat of summer, the city of Madison has to monitor the lakes for toxic algae blooms which they typically publicly announce in order to keep people and their pets from swimming in the poisoned waters i think that's just crazy you write the book a little bit about clear water versus this up like pea soup light covering that happens, how does this affect our water what was the better way to manage natural water systems have done before. So in lake ecosystems, there's two states that can exist and they're sort of like one or the other. There's not much in between. One is a clear water state where there's relatively low amount of... Phosphorus is the main kicker in aquatic systems and phosphorus comes in via runoff when it rains from soil. It sticks to soil particles so if you put phosphorus fertilizer on a crop field and then it rains, it runs into the waterway and now you've got phosphorus in your water

26:58 And basically what happens is when you have a clear water system, you have sunlight getting to the bottom of the lakes. So in our area we've got a lot of these glacial lakes that are basically leftover melted glaciers that turn into these lakes and when you read the historical accounts of the first settlers specifically these ones in Madison they would go out on a canoe and they could see 250 feet down to the bottom of the lake and see the white clay lake bottom and they could see all the plants and fish in between. And so these clear water lakes, you know you can think of it kind of like as a forest. So there's sunlight filtering through the water that supports plant growth especially around the edges where it's not too deep. And these plants produce a whole lot of oxygen which then gets dissolved into the water. These plants produce food for people like wild rice and lotus which produces an edible root, cattails and the like

27:51 And so these plants are in there producing both food for humans, but also food for fish and habitat. And so these clear water lakes were super filled with fish because of all the food and oxygen that the plants produced It supported a huge fish ecosystem. So there was like the little fish, the panfish and then the little bass and then you have a whole food chain on up to your big giant five foot long lake trout which were predators that ate other big fish. And this was sort of like... I talked about acorns being staple crops for Native Americans they would harvest those in the fall and that would get them through the winter

28:28 But summertime, people were on the water pretty much across North America. Summertime's are spent on the water because we had such amazing aquatic resources in terms of fish and shellfish. And so basically what happens when you put phosphorus in the water whether that's directly in terms of sewage or indirectly in terms of runoff from either crop fields, or from urban development. You start putting phosphorus into that water and it reaches a threshold where basically there is enough phosphorus to spawn an algae bloom. And these algaes are really really ancient cyanobacteria they were the first species to evolve photosynthesis that releases oxygen as a byproduct so they were the first ones to do photosynthesis as we know photosynthesis today

29:12 a long, long time ago. But anyway once they get enough phosphorus they bloom and they shade out the plants and they consume all of the excess oxygen so the shade kills the plants and consumption of excess oxygen kills the fish And then once you kind of have that for a little while, you lose your plants which then doesn't allow you to rebuild your fish populations because of the lack of oxygen and the lack of food and habitat. So you get a eutrophic system in which there are some fish like Asian carp that can live in these really murky pea soup summer waters feeding on the algae. So you can get algae feeders that can survive, but pretty much all your other fish and then all the plant resources go away too

29:57 we call that eutrophic, which just means over-nutrified. And so now we're at a place... Eastern United States especially in the Midwest where all the ag land is, all of the waterways are eutrophic even the rivers and lakes you can't really fish in them, you don't want to swim in them people's dogs die every year because they go swimming in the lake when there's an algae bloom The cyanobacteria produces a neurotoxin which is toxic for mammals and so it's pretty ugly It's just so weird to even think about the intelligence of nature almost. Like responding in a way that's like hey you give me poison you get poisoned back i don't know it's just stuff,

30:40 What do you think about the environment is conscious and there's this relationship regardless of if we're treating it right or wrong there is a cause effect relationship that comes right back to us i mean what separate from nature but we have this idea that we are, no just interesting to see that dynamic at play on negative side of things. Oh, that's exactly right. The landscape is sending us signals all the time telling us we're on the right track or the wrong track and if we ignore those and were on the wrong track it just gets worse and worse to the point where you can't grow food anymore and your polluted out of house at home

31:19 Indeed and it's interesting and definitely new to me to hear about the engineered savannahs of america i wanted to try to squeeze in a little bit about the amazon is obviously the most complex and. Biodiverse landscape on the planet and i think the wilderness myth might play it as well cuz you told me that its pretty clear, did it was engineered how do we know what are the signs and clues that kinda show us that essentially, when you exclude humans the plant community it's the same exact phenomenon as we're talking about for North America in that when you have humans managing a system for themselves to produce food those are the type of species that are going to persist in your force in your ecosystem whether that's a savannah in the Midwest or the Amazon at the equator and so

32:14 When we look at the species composition, the way it was when we can first have any data on it. There was a lot more species that produce food for humans in that species composition than there is now so as humans are removed and less active in this system It goes to a less diverse state and a state that produces more trees that don't produce food for human So there's obviously wide spectrum of different species some of them are more valuable than others from a human perspective The ratio of non-productive trees has increased over the last hundred years as humans have been less active in the ecosystem. And so what's really interesting is if you read about the indigenous people of the Amazon, we call their practices of agriculture slash and burn which is a very derogatory way

33:06 gaining your existence, slashing and burning sounds so bad. And we look down upon them for it but when you actually go down to the Yucatan which I have not done but I've spoken to several archeologists that have spent a lot of time down there trying to figure out the old ways of growing food and essentially they would go into an area and clear out say an acre of forest and then they would burn that and they would burn the biomass in a very low intensity way like you mentioned biochar it creates a lot of charcoal Down in the Amazon, they don't have the thick topsoils that we have thanks to our grassland ecosystems. Grassland ecosystems create topsoil. That's like one of the byproducts of a grassland with grazers is thick topsoil and so we have that up here down there in a forest all the nutrients that we have in our soils They have locked up in their giant trees and plants And so they really don't have a soil

34:01 all of the potential nutrients are used in a rainforest ecosystem. They're all up above ground, they're not below ground and so it's really hard to grow annual crops so vegetables corn grains it's hard to grow that stuff because there is no soil minerals all the nutrients are locked up in trees so they would cut down trees they would slash and burn But they would do it as a part of this much larger cycle of food production. So you'd come into an area, cut down an acre of forest and burn it in a way that produced a whole bunch of charcoal on the ground then plant your garden say so you're going to have a really diverse garden

34:40 80 to 150 different vegetables and plant species and grains. But at the same time, you're also planting fast growing an slow-growing perennial trees for your vegetables to grow between. And so they would plant their favorite fruit and nut bearing trees in their gardens. So in one year they might slash and burn one acre But then that acre over the next 20 years, for the first two or three years it's producing annual vegetables. But then they would stop that and then they would just let the fruit and nut trees come in. Then they have this one-acre orchard or food forest of breadfruit and avocados and bananas and all the things that they have down there. And then they could go do that again somewhere else. So you kind of zoom out and look at that process. It's like a twenty year process by Year 20 its a closed canopy forest of all food producing trees

35:31 and they had immense diversity down there. So we're talking like hundreds of species, and if that had been let go there would have been like the two dozen plant species that would've been there that they cut and burned but that's fairly low diversity relative to what they would then turn around and plant so you look at that scale, the one acre scale and imagine hundreds or thousands of people over time doing all these little patches What that turns into over time is an Amazon rainforest, that's essentially one giant shifting mosaic of food forest. So they were essentially terraforming the Amazon in order to produce a whole lot of perennial foods like fruit from trees you know they had their annual vegetables in there but that was only small part of the cycle The main point is that they were planting lots of trees Yeah

36:22 When you think about the intelligence of the people who set that environment off it's just pretty mind blowing cuz like i said there's thousands of species at live in the amazon and nowhere else send a lot of things we haven't even catalog yet anything about that being engineered You really have to consider the relationship between even dna and some of these processes i think you talk about it in your chapters is a connection between complexity and diversity versus disturbance that there's a relationship there because, obviously we're going to a pretty deep time depth but its almost like conjuring things that didn't exist before into being through a proper setting at the stage so to speak you know.

37:06 Yeah i mean those disturbances are key to maintaining diversity in time because you get kinda static and the same place over time and so. You get these disturbances that can either be a small scale, like Native American burning somewhere or like a slash and burn project down in the Amazon. Or you can get the large-scale disturbances like the end of the Ice Age, The Younger Dryas, The Comet in the Yucatan that wiped out the dinosaurs In order to keep nature going we need these continual disturbances Yeah i don't think people really think about that but it is a cycle it really speaks to that at some order of an occult principle but what are the chaos it seems like.

37:50 As you said there are examples where they tried to do control burns on a schedule and they saw that didn't really work they try to not doing it all in the end of the work it needs someone be randomized to agree and. I don't know what's just strange cuz when u get into the magical mindset of druids and pagans are very out of the earth and thats kind of, Talked down on from like the catholic perspective of course they were obviously genocided in their own right but the Principles are right there and practice when dealing with the natural landscape. It's it's baked into our system, it seems yeah well it's interesting you know you mentioned how

38:33 Clearly, the Native Americans or the Amazonians display a lot of intelligence in the way that they're managing the landscape. But the interesting thing is it depends on how you define the word intelligence so if you were to give them maybe like an IQ test which was developed to measure a sort of Western-centric type of right brained intelligence they may or may not actually do that well on that but In terms of being able to connect with nature there on a whole nother level and so it's almost like. Before we developed the Industrial Revolution and even the Agricultural Revolution, we were all much closer to Earth. We all had this sort of Earth-based consciousness like we were plugged into the biosphere. We could sense with our sensory organs what the landscape wanted and what we should do within the landscape to benefit both the land and ourselves

39:32 and that was just sort of like an inherent sixth sense that we all had. And it seems like the development of the right-brained logic and rational side of things, that has started with the development of agriculture and has sort of plateaued with the Renaissance in the Industrial Revolution, the consequence of that is we completely cut off our consciousness from the earth consciousness. So we have developed this very powerful individual ego But it is divorced, it's separated from the natural world. And so while now we may have very smart people and very intelligent people that can do really amazing and impressive feats of the mind We've lost the ability to connect and to have our consciousness be in touch with the consciousness of the earth

40:22 where I see us having to go from here is like we've developed this amazing intellect and now we have to use that intellect. Consciously go back in reconnect with our ecosystem so you know the indigenous people north america they were consciously embedded in their landscape they were unconsciously invented they didn't know any other way now we come completely divorced from that and it's time for us to consciously going realize The problem which is that were disconnected from nature and then we have to consciously go back and reconnect ourselves. Here's the ad as we have talked about a lot of this does start in the mind if your ideas and philosophy are wrong then you're wrong actions are gonna follow and maybe this is where, social conditioning and control come i'm sure it's both by design and a little accidental ignorance the situation that were in right now but. You write about this you frame up as the organic mine burst the mechanical mine and

41:21 Some of those details will be self evident but talk to us a little bit about the difference and how we can better understand mechanical mind to get away from it and move back towards that organic mindset. Well the mechanical mind is basically how we've all been programmed and I would absolutely agree that it's probably more accidental and incidental than anything else but essentially we've been programmed to see the world through a lens where The machine is sort of the ultimate metaphor you know we think of the universe is being like clock like and that there's so did this deterministic natural world that we fit within everything is random and the ultimate goal of any.

42:08 Operation or any person is to sort of achieve machine like efficiency and perfection so when you hear some politician saying we need policies that increase the efficiency of this are that we all just sorta passively not our head like well course at a good thing like increasing efficiency is always a good thing will increasing efficiency is a good thing sometimes but it can be horrible idea some other times in so stepping back a little bit weekend see that the mechanical or machine-like conditioning that we've all undergone has allowed us to become really powerful and do things like develop computers and talk to each other across the internet wirelessly, which is amazing. But the consequence of that is ourselves starting to become machine-like. We're losing... Which we've already lost our connection with the natural world but now we're so addicted to our screens it's been shown

43:02 the more time you spend in front of a screen, the lower your empathy goes which is really the fundamental characteristic that makes us human beings. And so as we keep developing in the mechanical world, we lose our connection to nature, we lose our connection to each other and the end point of that basically is humans fully integrating into machines which seems like an agenda there are powers pushing us towards but that doesn't mean we have to go along with it. And so, it's my contention that we need to sort of unplug a bit like let's use technology for good and recognize all the great things about technology but hold back a little bit and lets be mindful about this and figure out what areas of technology should we avoid? How can we use technology to increase our reconnection with the natural world because

43:52 This trajectory that were on with the machine model which applied towards food means that we have factory farms we have industrial agriculture which is, add a fundamental level destroying the planet and what's one of the reasons why i'm doing what i'm doing is cuz. When you realize the extent that we're polluting the earth and compromising basic functionings of the planets ecosystems Humans can't live without a planet that's functioning. And so we're able to sort of buy ourselves a little bit of time with really cheap fossil fuels, but because those fossil fuels substitute for a lot of the goods and services that we get from ecosystems. But that's a band-aid that doesn't last for very long and so we really have to get our ecosystems back going if humanity is gonna survive on this planet. The only way I see us being able to do that is

44:41 get out of this mechanical mindset because the mechanical mindset does not work in the development of an ecosystem. You can't restore an ecosystem with a mechanical mindset, nature will chew you up and spit you out Amen and that's exactly the kind of thing i was hoping we would get into because we can talk about screen addiction in five g and techno surveillance all these things that, the conspiracy culture is really concerned about shaking their fist at the air. What doesn't do anything to fix it i mean you we can say we've been led down this bad path and share is important to see how that happened exactly what manipulations were in place and how bad was but it doesn't do anything to get us off of that path this really is

45:31 the only way off as far as i can see and it really gets to the heart of that personal responsibility element that is also what I think is important about learning about magic. I mean, I think nature personal responsibility magic It's all kind of in that soup The solution soup for getting us where we want to go instead of just bitching about where we've been Yeah, I mean totally. We gotta find solutions not just focus on the problems right? So to me the solutions involve at sort of a fundamental level rediscovering what it means to be human. Like, what does it mean to be a human being? Are there certain things that humans need to go through in order to be healthy, in order to be satisfied, to have a meaningful life and are we missing those things in our modern world? I would argue that we are missing many many things that our consciences need to experience to be complete full happy human beings and so... That's sort of like the place to start but then you sorta realize once you start going down this path

46:34 all of our senses are dulled and kind of retarded. All of our senses, they're like muscles so like our eyes are like muscles and if we don't use them they start to degrade And our hearing and our sense of smell and our sense of touch all of our senses are being dulled the longer we sit in front of screens and all the time that were not out in nature actually interacting with the real world Our senses are atrophying And so that's like the first place to start is getting back in touch with your sense of smell and your sense of touch and your sense of sight, and being able to see birds. Being able to identify a bird in your peripheral vision without thinking about it all these things that our human bodies are evolved to do a whole bunch of things like we should know all of the different sights and smells and sounds of animals and birds and plants

47:34 we shouldn't even have to see a bear if we're walking through the woods, we should just know that a bear was there an hour ago because there's this certain kind of scent left on a certain kind of plant. And these are the kinds of things that all our ancestors knew and I'm not saying like we all need to get deep into it its just... We need to realize what we've lost essentially in order to start finding it back so I'm never gonna be that in touch with nature that I can do these things I am talking about but i can make sure that my kids grow up in a world where they have the opportunities to keep their senses sharp and maintain more of human existence. I thought that was really interesting cuz you kinda talk about how it does take a generation might be, a better pill to swallow because people wanna think they can change themselves but

48:25 We kinda have this slave mentality that suckling at the societal tea attitude we have lost personal responsibility and maybe we are so brainwashed that. We only can correct it by letting our kids be a little less brainwashed in their kids a little less brainwashed and that might be the sad reality that i work on to far gone at this point to save ourselves Yeah, I mean it is sad when you think about it. It's totally possible for all of us to do what we're talking about and sort of deprogram our brains and then reprogram them in more natural way. We can all do that but it takes a lot of work. It takes decades years and years

49:13 And many people aren't going to be willing to do that. So the probably more realistic way is, we need a certain percentage of people to undergo that in this generation and then we need to basically raise the next generation in a way where they're not as programmed. Not that we have to program them the right way but we just got to try to keep them from being programmed the wrong way Yeah, I mean i agree with it's kinda like nature will take its course and the proper mindsets will become apparent. With less manipulation at least i think so yes i agree and just to get back a little bit to what you do i'm sure there is all sorts of little nuances about how complex systems operate that you wouldn't see until your really in it like one example i've heard you talk about us how we know animals like to scratch their butts on trees right but

50:05 but pigs roll around in mud and then when they do it, they're actually packing mud around the base of the tree which protects it and keeps pests away. And that sort of thing I just thought that was really cool cause-and-effect other similar examples you've seen in nature's intelligence that you could tell us about? Oh yeah there is lots of things You know one thing would be that what are the big concerns right now with so-called climate change is methane and cattle are the big targets for that it's like we gotta get rid of our cattle because they're farting in Belgium or comes from their burps.

50:46 You can measure it because when they go to a confined animal feedlot operation, a big factory where they stuff cows in a building. They conceal the building and then they can count and measure the amount of methane coming off right? The fact that it's a factory operation makes it really easy to measure the methane okay now you put a cow out on pasture It's a lot harder to measure they just assume that because feedlot cows produce a lot of methane pastured cows must too. But the research that's coming out now is that in healthy pastures where soil is being built through responsible grazing, there are a class of bacteria called methanotropic bacteria that consumes methane and so when a cow has got its head down eating grass it may burp and methane may come out but it immediately gets

51:35 gobbled up by that bacteria, which then converts that methane into CO2 making it much less harmful of a greenhouse gas. So when you isolate components out of nature, you get problems, you get pest disease. All our agriculture whether we're talking conventional orchards or crop fields, you basically take one component of nature say an almond tree and we're gonna plant thousands and thousands of almond trees right next to each other, to keep the grasses down, yada yada yada. You separate something from the rest of nature and when you do that nature doesn't like it and it creates problems for you and your just setting yourself up for a constant fight against diseases. And if you take pigs and put them into a feedlot well then they start getting sick so what do you do? You start giving them antibiotics well now we've got antibiotic resistant bacteria there's this arms race that happens when we fight nature

52:26 The cool thing is when we start to work with nature, it flips the other way. So instead of nature hurting us, nature starts to help us and the example of the pigs is a great example If you have an apple orchard, there's all kinds of bugs that want to eat those apples and many of them crawl right up the trunk of the tree to get to the apples. Well if you've got pigs in there and they're wallowing in mud and scratching their butts on a tree then they seal that tree and now the insects can't climb up anymore so there are lots of examples like that where when you start working natural systems nature rewards you because there is all these knock-on benefits that you probably didn't anticipate by restoring a more natural system.

53:22 Sort of along the same lines and also ties into the rotational grazing that you mentioned earlier but one more can be said about a well-oiled farms ability to Get a little sweat equity out of its animals in holistic and natural ways Yeah, so I guess we could back up a little bit. You know we call it Macedon Valley farm for a couple reasons one is that There was a big mastodon skeleton found after a flood back in the early 1900s, just a few miles from our farm. So there's lots of mastodons in our area but there are mastodons all over Eastern North America along with the rest of the megafauna. There was a lot of megafauna on this continent before The Last Ice Age and they had been here for a very long time about 30 million years and we're talking big horses and big ground sloths

54:08 beavers the size of a Volkswagen bug, really large animals. The bison that were here were much bigger than the bison that we have now which actually came over from Eurasia fairly recently they're like a small diminutive version of what we used to have in the original American bison anyway there's lots of big animals here so we talked about how the role of the Native Americans in managing though savannah landscape with fire to keep things open and maintain this balance between grassland and trees What's interesting is when you look back before Native Americans got here, you see the same signatures. The same savanna landscape happening because we had all these huge animals that were eating the trees to maintain this open savannah landscape so we've had savannas they've been remarkably persistent for the last 30 million years considering their entirely unnatural quote-unquote now

54:59 I think about that a lot and so like all of the plants that we have around us. Evolved in the context of extreme grazing and browsing by large animals throughout their evolutionary history and so we gotta remember that and so We manage our animals in ways to try to mimic the way that megafauna would have grazed. And so when a herd of bison, say would have come through there would've been a whole bunch of them and they would have plowed through the area eating everything in sight and then they would've left and wouldn't have come back What happens when you graze an area really hard and allow it to recover

55:37 is that recovery process is super beneficial for building soil and for plant diversity. So lots of plants really expect that pulsed grazing event, so they really like it when they get it and then you get more diverse pastures that have much better soil We obviously don't have mastodons and ground sloths anymore. The biggest animals I can get my hand on in a reasonable way are cattle, sheep and goats and pigs. We do poultry as well so chickens and turkeys. Each species has its own niche, its own sets of plants that it likes to eat, its own habitat that likes to spend its day in. We try to graze in ways

56:20 are pulsed so an area will grow up it'll be really lush and we'll hit it with the cows, we'll hit it with the sheep. We might bring in the pigs and then we just let it go. And you let it rest for a month or five weeks or six weeks and then at that point its lush and green tall and ready to be grazed again, and then we'll graze it again. And it's that rest period following grazing that's essential to plant health and the ability to build soil. So our big goal at our farm is to build soil kind of as rapidly as we can. It's these long rest periods followed by pulsed grazing that allows us to build soil. We're doing it, we're collecting data... I knew it was possible but until I started doing it, I didn't even really believe how fast you can grow soil

57:05 very cool and so a lot of us probably won't be able to completely dedicate ourselves to a multi acre farm but maybe there's some people listening who are lucky to actually have a small yard or something like that you have any advice or resources for people on how to make the most out of little absolutely i mean this obviously there is no limit what you can do with cattle There's lots of things available if you've got a quarter acre, or half acre, an acre. Ducks are really cool grazing animals like they eat a lot of grass and geese eat a lot of grass there is really cool integrated systems that you can do with poultry or ducks especially they work really well with tree planting so growing in orchard or like a diverse kind of food forest ducks and geese can be integrated into that

57:58 Obviously, lots depends on what kind of land you're on and soil and yada-yada and all that kinda stuff. But it's not scale dependent. You don't have to be big scale. And a lotta times we're on 220 acres which sounds like a lot to most people but in ag land that's actually like a tiny farm but to most people that's beyond imaginably big And sometimes, I mean, I enjoy what I do but i'm working on such an extensive land base that I don't get to really like zoom in and make small areas really... What's really cool about this is that there's really no limit to how much you can produce on an acre. Like you can just keep packing things in because nature wants to be diverse and so if you can find the

58:41 the right species that have these positive interactions with each other, that have symbiosis. Then you can really constantly stack things on top of each other. You can build little ponds that can have fish and you can do all these like little things. You can make microclimates so even if your in a cold region if you bring in some rocks and dig upon it the right way you can then increase the heat that is captured and stored on your land which allows you to grow plants or trees that produce fruit that shouldn't be able to grow there because its too cold Lots of things like that you can do on smaller acreage where you can really be intensively focused instead of extensively focused. That's cool, that's cool I mean that's definitely inspiring for people who maybe think some of these things are outside their means

59:27 and just been awesome man i'm really glad we could do this i think there's a lot of fun stuff to learn about within the realm of permaculture and a lot of it does touch on many other more wacky thc themes that person might not, Think about it first there's probably more connective tissue than they realize and correcting our manipulated history is a big part of that and also taking responsibility for ourselves as well, before we really wrap this thing up i know your book isn't quite done yet but what sort of things should we mention your meet subscription business again your classes. Yeah, so we teach a class if anybody's interested in learning more of this land management ecology integrating back into nature. We teach a class every summer. We're in the process of building a house right now once we get that done we're going to be able to have a few more course offerings. We do like timber frame building. We cut down trees and mill them into big posts and beams and then do the old school joinery type building which is pretty cool

1:00:30 Yeah, follow along on our website on social media and Instagram or Twitter. We post a lot and try to be educational about helping people figure out what we're doing to restore the ecosystems and things that they can do as well right on all good stuff Well thanks for being here man And thanks for being bold enough to actually be the change you want to see in the world hey Thanks a lot Greg You got it take care And so it goes people and so it. Goes man peter definitely knows what he's talking about, it's always nice to give the platform to a plus member too because they know the tone and flow of the show we can know their kindred spirit even if we stick to a semi off the beaten path path

1:01:19 We did get to talk a little bit about the esoteric and magical side of these things, although that's not Peter's forte per se. He is of the mutual opinion that it's in the mix of this kind of perspective and needs to be injected back into our culture and way of life, and I say cheers to that! I think i went back twenty years and told my fourteen year old self that my job was gonna be putting out a radio interview on oak savannahs i might adjust off myself what we grow, and we learn and refine interest in different types of things how like to think that we pushed our permaculture thread little bit farther downfield.

1:02:06 i think the wilderness myth in terms of mine sets is just a great way to encapsulate it all and yes it is a more practical show than talking about what the shadowy cabal's are up to or a deconstruction of symbols on the dollar, what you gonna do about that are you gonna redesign the dollar is its power over our lives gonna diminish because you decoded. Obviously we want to keep abreast of the esoteric toolbox and what the elite are up to. That stuff is definitely interesting, but this stuff is potentially life-changing Take this clip from the first season maybe even the first episode Of Seinfeld it's one of my favorite Seinfeld nuggets a wisdom What is the point of all this? Revenge Oh! The best revenge is living well

1:03:02 There's no chance of that. You know self-depreciation is always funny to me, but do you really want to be a George or do you want to be a Jerry? The one person who has their shit together almost always I'm a big Seinfeld guy and i always think of Jerry's casual attitude and the insane stress levels of the other characters And it's because he's well fortified...and his friends are not That's just a TV show but Peter made a real choice to take a tougher path. But he is definitely more fortified than I am, i'm doing quite well! But my entire empire is built on the shaky ground of the digital world and the network of currency exchange and im just one EMP blast away from total ruin

1:03:54 When i really think about how many steps there are between me and the first hand quality meet that pierre. Produces i do get nervous i think we should all consider our supply chains and how to shorten them, add up the quality of them in the same way a family plans for how to escape their house on fire scar was right you gotta be prepared And one thing I did realize when i did start to have some unconventional success is, oh the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and the Archon attached oligarchs? They aren't literally holding me down. Yeah they built an uphill system that's very difficult to climb they're dumbing us down and they sold us a false dream that it could be achieved by working within their companies but if I stopped one of them on the street said hey fuck you buddy! I made it! They'd probably just say

1:04:50 How cute what a good boy you are and go about their day they are steering cultures and nations and they don't care about outliers or how high you climb if they still have the masses. And there always going to i wish it was different but she can control what other people do so similarly, I'm never gonna get to give the puppet masters a piece of my mind or a piece of anything else for definitely building structures that have influenced my life in a negative way but instead i could better insulate myself, better fortify myself from the tyranny of the system. Succeeding in it is one thing not needing it is even better

1:05:38 So i just keep saying I because i don't want this to be preachy towards you we can just use me as an example but yeah overcame a part of it i got out of the shitty corporate nine-to-five, i got rid of bosses i got rid of economic and life fulfillment stress in god some my time back. But i have done almost nothing to live well by the right standards by the independent standards You know the whole thing of just not needing their system circumventing it and so i'm willing to take a little risk that maybe content wise. This isn't a super exciting episode when you see the title but i really do care about fighting this system and giving the people who listen some tools and resources rather than just some provocative conspiratorial speculation about the capstone cronies are the big pyramid instead maybe,

1:09:40 Also keep in mind that in Hireside News, the joint session is on the 25th at 7pm Pacific this month. Come talk to me and other listeners and share your stories! It's definitely a nice hang. Also keep in mind that the Hireside Overhaul is underway. The free and plus sites will be coming together And the whole infrastructure is getting a big modern facelift in the next four to six weeks Of course I would love for you to sign up for the Hireside Chats Plus and enjoy the second hour of all my shows, I think it's worth it for what I try to bring you every episode. In this one the second hour gets into using nature as a technological template how indigenous attitudes about spirits filter through their everyday lives what independent farmers deal with when butting up against the system the off-the-grid elements of Peter's farming lifestyle

1:10:35 how to make a farm profitable and tweaking our idea of wealth, just how different the meat from ethnically treated animals is from factory farmed meat. And what the future looks like for America's resources and the extent of the damage we've done as well as the methane myth that was great too for that vegan argument that cows are putting out more greenhouse gases than the system can support He gives a great counter-argument to that. So please support the show you love and get all of it because you love it, and I think our guests say so many great things that I know I'd want to hear at all without any breaks or ads! So that's that, and I'll see ya next time! Big thanks again to Peter Allen of Mastodon Valley Farms

1:11:23 Your move corporate food producing parasites, glyphosate crop soakers and evil entities involved in the limitation and quality reduction of our food supply. Your fucking move. They built a little out of some crazy garbage called the blood of the exploited working class. We've overcome their shinin', now we're calling Your Highness And the world screamed Save me, THC They destroyed the bonds of friendship and respect Between the only people left Who'd even look them in the eye? And make a fortune off the same one that they tortured And the world saved me, THC

1:12:36 Look for Jesus, and we'll say Mr. Jesus You wonder who can tell me if it's true? There are merchants too They built a little out of some crazy garbage Called the blood of the exploited Working class overcome their shining Now we're calling

1:13:27 Save me, THC.