 It's an exciting time to be on the planet right now to see the connections that are finally being made between the human gut microbiology and the soil microbiome and the planetary microbiome. You know, and I think a lot of those very early philosophers and thinkers that were saying this were treated like they were crazy, you know, that the planet was a microbiome or what you ate made any difference in your health. And so it's so fascinating to see this whole new frontier opening up. And so all the discoveries that we're seeing in terms of the gut microbiome, which is happening every single day. There's another paper that comes out is reflected in what we're discovering in the soil. Nicole Masters is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine sponsored by the Aloha's Regenerative Foundation. Nicole is an independent agro-cologist, pattern thinker, author and educator. For over two decades, Nicole is recognized as a knowledgeable and dynamic speaker on the topic of soil health. Her experience has spanned diverse sectors from community gardens and horticulture to vermiculture, compost tea production and diverse multi-species systems. Her company, Integrity Soils, delivers coaching and educational programs to producers and organizations spanning over 24 million acres. In 2021, Integrity Soil shifted away from in-person consultancy, the one-on-one aspect in some respects, focusing on training the next generation of coaches. Train the trainer. Let's get those people out there and doing the work. Her first self-published book titled, For the Love of Soil, Strategies to Regenerate Food Production Systems showcases examples of the tools, principles and mindset producers adopt to regenerate their soils. When the roads are good, you'll find her traveling in her Ford F350 horse trailer in tow, working alongside producers to build soil and sink her carbon emissions. Nicole, welcome to the show. I'm so excited. I could just jump through the screen and give you a big hug. I'd love to give you a hug. You look very huggable there, Mark. It's an honor to be here. Thanks. I absolutely love your book. And so just to let my guests know, we're here to talk about the book. I'm not going to give it all away. We're not going to be the cliff notes of your book and your life's work. And you spent a lot of time on it. You're doing even more writing. For your first book, wow, you hit it out of the park. This is a beautiful read, wonderful stories. Every chapter, there's something, not only the way you explain science, soil science and way you talk about our living world below our feet is beautiful, but the stories of those farmers and the people you've interacted with is very touching and they're real. And so I really like it. I thank you so much for that. Thank you so much for that feedback. It was a really challenging journey going through writing a book. I think everybody who's written a book appreciates that. And everyone that's dreamed of writing a book appreciates the challenges. But I started writing in 2010 and I'd written about 30,000 words, which is around half of a book, third of a book. And it was saved on Dropbox and Dropbox deleted it. And I had this like maybe three minutes of a little cry. And then I was like, well, that's done. There was nothing I could do to get it back. And so it took me probably another seven or eight years to write this one. And I'm so, so grateful that I had that time to kind of get knocked off my horse and digest a little more because this book is not a technical soils for dummies. It's very much the, what are the stories of the people on the ground? What is it that they do? Who are they in this space? And I didn't want another reference book. And I went to multiple publishers, got turned down by four of them. They said they wanted something more technical. They wanted me to take the personal voice out. And I'm, I don't want to be a reference book that just sits on a shelf that no one really gets. So I went down the self-publishing route and it's been absolutely extraordinary. And I think in this day and age, you don't need publishers. You just, you don't. Yeah, I agree. And I'm so glad you took that hard roll. I know a little bit and I've heard the story a couple times, you know, that they really wanted you to publish a soils book for dummies, you know. And that's not your running style. And it's absolutely true. I mean, if you, I just had Elaine Ingham on the podcast as well, if you look at her background, or if you look at most of her references, you know, there are a lot of academic science publications, books out there. And that's usually where they remain. They remain on the shelf, not a lot of farmers. A lot of farmers who have dyslexia, by the way, are out there with the book and an academic book. They're, they want to hear the stories. They want to get out into the fields. They want to touch the soil. And that's one thing that I love about you is you get out there and you do that. You get into the soils, you speak the same language they do. You drive the same vehicles they do. You're out there working in the fields with them. You're out there just telling them who you are, bearing your soul and telling them what you've learned and what is science and applying it to everyday practice and life. And so I love that. To back up just a tad bit, you are a true global citizen. You're originally from New Zealand. I don't know where in New Zealand exactly. Yeah, my farm that I sold seven or seven years ago was in the Hawkes Bay. So if you look at the North Island of New Zealand, it looks like a stingray. And it's the right flap of the wing curves under and that's where the Hawkes Bay is. So under there. So some are dry country, very can be very winter wet. Yeah. And, and so it's been an extraordinary journey really. I sold that property and had been living on the road ever since. And I think that's part of what you hear through the book is the privilege of being able to live in other people's houses is you really get to see what's happening underneath that first surface of meeting someone. You know, people can be very polite. They're not going to yell at their kids. They're going to say what they think you want to hear. And after a few days people, they just bear their souls. They just, you know, they lay it out. And, you know, some of my most favorite people is that genuine like this is such an honor and a privilege to be able to share in just a moment of your life. So yeah, I'm literally I have family from Auckland, New Zealand. And, and so I love Auckland, New Zealand. I love New Zealand and Australia. There's a lot of great farming and great people in my book menu be that are that are from there as well who've who've written contributions. There is a discussion right at the outset and actually your cut your cover kind of teases it and guides it guides us into this is you're kind of this barefoot. I wouldn't say hippie, but you just like to be in touch with the soil and and you were walking pretty much everywhere barefoot and you were got some advice from some people that that might not be a good idea. And later you found out they weren't that wrong. Can you tell us a little bit about that story and how that kind of really turned on a light not only to what you do, but also your connection to the soil and and and what what humanity does can really affect us. Yes, and I think for a lot of New Zealanders, we we were raised barefoot. I mean, barefoot is kind of normal in New Zealand, unless so when I travel you see don't see so much barefoot, but we lived in Hong Kong for seven years and really not a place for bare feet. And when I was 15, I was walking along the side of the road. This is what we we guess happened and potentially had a cut on my foot and Paraquat had just been applied, which is it's a residual herbicide that there is actually no antidote for. So in third world countries, it's one of the most common causes of suicide is you you can drink Paraquat. They can't get it out of your body. You're going to die really awful, awful way to die. But I ended up in hospital. They thought I had meningitis, did a lumbar puncture. My neck froze up and had just scorching migraines and headaches and foggy brain. And yeah, they were like, No, we don't know what's wrong with you. Go home. You're fine. You don't have meningitis. And so for the next 15 years, I had they thought my divertebracy one C two were fused in my spine. I had neck massive like structural issues like my muscles were so tight. And it was just like I had this foggy veil, which is interesting because I think how much more dangerous I would have been if I didn't have that. And because I was 15, people thought the behavior change was just normal teenage behavior, but actually was you know, pretty serious poisoning. And it wasn't till I was 30 that I worked with an incredible detox specialist who identified Paraquat. And we did hyperbaric chamber intravenous vitamin C. And it came out my nose, like it was this gray, black, it's stank, it was disgusting. And after that, it was literally like it was like my life before and my life after that moment. And it's such a common story is people come up to me and they say, you know, I've sprayed Paraquat my whole life. And I'm fine. I'm like, well, tell me about your children. Well, they'll have ADHD, childhood leukemia, learning disorders, all sorts of issues. And so what we're seeing is many of those early exposures affects the epigenetic pathway. So we see epigenetic responses in the next generation, which is terrifying and frightening for the people who are involved in spraying chemicals. But what for me, I think the conclusion from this whole process was is that I didn't know that I was poisoned, but I spent my whole life looking at how do we get chemicals out of the food chain and out of the soil system and out of the waterways. So it's interesting how your subconscious knows my I didn't know, but yeah. That is, I'm sorry, you had to go through that. But it's quite the learning lesson, I would say. And how integrate the biome of our earth, no matter where we're talking about Hong Kong, New Zealand, Germany, or the United States. And now you're in Montana. Am I correct? That's right. Yeah, I call Montana home these days, but I'm just about to get on the road again and probably be moving moving down towards Idaho. I'll be in my trailer. So my home is where my wheels are. Yeah, well, I'll be in Idaho very soon as well. So I'll be to the 7th Sun Valley form and catch them Idaho. And then I have some property in Lava Ranch, Idaho, that I'll be up there to tending to my property there as well. So maybe our pass across, I'd love to see you. I know that this is kind of going back to this global citizen, you're all over the place. So you you're very well versed. And the reason for that is that's you go to where the farms are, to where the farmers are, to where the soil is and speak with those individuals on how to make this transition and this transformation, which can be sensitive, kind of a hard subject to address. And so in this podcast, I would like to, you know, we've already kind of started out a little bit deep in some respects, but I want to keep it a little simple in the beginning as we get on. I find it extremely hard to do that because you've already you've already in my question, told us about what you experienced in Hong Kong, which is something that they spray on crops and that that you got as a child walking barefoot and it affected your life for quite some time. How can we get into a discussion now or as some questioning how closely tied is the biome of our earth and what we do to that in our farming practices tied to the biome of our body and do a transition kind of into more depth and substance there. Yeah, I'm it's an exciting time to be on the planet right now to see the connections that are finally being made between the human gut microbiology and the soil microbiome and the planetary microbiome. You know, and I think a lot of those very early philosophers and thinkers that were saying this were treated like they were crazy, you know, that the planet was a microbiome or what you ate made any difference in your health. And so it's so fascinating to see this whole new frontier opening up. And so all the discoveries that we're seeing in terms of the gut microbiome which is happening every single day there's another paper that comes out is reflected in what we're discovering in the soil. So that if you think of your own gut system for the plant that plants gut system is outside of its body. And so what we do internally the plants doing externally so there's all of this communication with microbiology to get vitamins and enzymes and minerals and everything that that plant needs water all comes through that that conduit and by disrupting that soil microbiome it disrupts the quality of the food that we're growing or and then the food that we're ultimately eating. So what we see in the US is an epidemic of a hidden hunger and that people are not getting the trace elements and the vitamins and the secondary metabolites that they need to thrive and survive. So people eat more because they're looking for something not even realizing what they're looking for. And there's more and more connection on what they call the farm effect. So how you're raised the animals that you're around being able to play with soil as a child can actually set your microbiome up for life. So if you disrupt that early on and I have a concern around what's happening with kids in the last couple of years out of COVID you know you've got masks on you're in these highly sterilized environments how has that undermined our natural microbiome that sets us up. I love that you give that connection. I don't know if you've ever heard anything from Dr. Zach Bush or so that you know we talk about the COVID and and around the Wuhan province not only was it a high time for industrial agriculture but a lot of cyanide poisoning from heavy industry up in the air mixed with that what they were spraying on their soils and then that that that biome was was very very toxic setting up some right conditions for our own biome and kind of how how things spread around the world. I also am concerned and wonder you know what did the COVID do to to our our health and our gut biome when I talk about I'd give a lot of presentations I talk about the bacteria tree of life there's that one section that wasn't even really discovered and fully understood until 2015 and it's more the candida it's some of the bacteria that they found in in Yellowstone you talk about that in your book as well kind of Yellowstone and some things and and we didn't even realize that existed until 2015 and this whole branch of the tree a bacteria tree of life and it's just more and more this connection of the biome and the biome of our bodies that there's an interesting saying that human health or our individual health is a microcosmos of the world around us and I think I think they're speaking about our our soil health our biome around us is really a big reflector of of our own personal health and so I would love to hear your I mean you say there's papers coming out constantly but I'd love to hear your views and thoughts on on that even more. Yeah for me it is just fascinating you know in some aspects of soil particularly and I talk about this a lot but it's really interesting is how we can smell geosman which is the odor of the earth which is released by some specific organisms so they're an actinobacteria or actinomycetes they release an antibiotic we use about 200 of them to make different types of antibiotics in medical use so they're a long chain bacteria they release a smell and that smell is like when you're driving on a hot summer's day and there's a shower of rain that hits the road like that smell is just you know we all I don't know anyone that doesn't like that smell we can smell that smell at one part at 200 000 times the concentration that a shark can smell a drop of blood in an olympic swimming pool like that's mind boggling and we're keyed in to smell these organisms we know the smell of healthy soil no matter where you live or what your background or if you've lived in a city your whole life people still know what healthy soil smells like and for me it's because it's that return to the mother it's the return to this is where we came from is soil and how much of you know our DNA is viral how much of our DNA and our cells are due to bacteria and yet we're so arrogant to think that oh you can take this probiotic and that's going to fix your problems or you know you just need to alter this one gene and it's going to make all the difference in terms of health you know and I guess right now we're at this precipice or a decision-making time that either we go down more technology and more engineering or ask the question of how does nature do this and how do we work within nature because the solutions are already there it's just once we start tinkering and think that we know better that we end up causing what we call the unintended consequences which you know the book has a lot of examples of those absolutely I mean the one that you gave is absolutely in the book and and and wonderful and I do want to tickle a little bit even deeper that when you have unhealthy soil there's usually accompanying smells that come for there and then you yeah I mean I don't want you to touch on all of them because I'm sure there's many but if you could just give us a few more examples of of different types of smells and what that means when we're smelling those in comparison to good compost or good composting tea that has a totally different smell you know and a totally different feeling as well like that smell your vagus nerve that runs you know between the gut and the brain 80 of those signals go from the gut to the brain like your gut is your primary brain so breathing in um and you know this if you haven't been around a lot of compost you just got to watch because they can be diseases in compost so like Legionnaires however that smell of good compost like it's got those ammoniacal mushroomy kind of smells that rich earthy deep like if you close your eyes you can feel like you're in the forest you know that kind of moist dense oh deliciousness and then you compare that to and you might have smelled this sometimes when you've been around a blocked drain so when soils become anaerobic and they run out of oxygen uh plant roots aren't going to survive in there like this is our one of the main limitations to growth and health is that most soils are incredibly compacted and when they get compacted and they lose oxygen you get the anaerobes so these bacteria that kick in and as they break organic compounds down they release things like hydrogen sulfide so you're going to smell farty smells there's some organisms that almost make a vomiting kind of smell so if you're getting these sour putrid migraines been blocked kind of smells in a soil then you're like okay it's got waterlogged it's got compacted the microbiology aren't functional for a healthy aerated ecosystem so there's smells that we are even if you're not a gardener you'll still recognize that and go oh I don't want to touch that I certainly don't want to eat that I'm probably going to get sick yeah vomiting metallic almost kind of different there you know obviously I love how you talk about that in the book and weave that in so nicely for those who are not very familiar with gardening or composting or or certain types of things and how those smells are not only more fine-tuned than like you say with a shark but also how they're they're tied to the basic elements of life to our biome which is tied to the earth we crawled out of this primordial soup I mean microorganisms and bacteria paved the way for us to come on to the the scene onto the stage of this life and I love that and there's I'm a big huge fan or one of my best mentors in life is Lynn Margolis I wish she was still here she's just scientific revolution but there's a book that she wrote it's a symbiosis as a source of evolutionary innovation it's one of the most fastest growing and biggest innovations our world's ever seen and that's something that you're talking about that's something you deal with every day so sim sim soil and symbiotic soil and this this you know not just micro risa and fungi and bacteria but many things this this web food of life that is really playing huge roles and so was there ever a time where you said wow Lynn Margolis where you got to know her and you you kind of learned about those things and you said oh for me it was through Fritz Hof Capra he teaches a course on systems view of life and he kind of brought her to life for me and I can I cannot shut the door ever again on the wisdom I learned from from Lynn Margolis and how it ties to to exactly what you deal with in your work every single day well I think it's fascinating and in part what I think we're seeing globally is this collective consciousness that we don't you don't necessarily need to read this book or hear this or meet this person that we're starting to become imbued with this knowing it like the poisoning was a knowing for me so we're seeing these conversations pop up and it doesn't matter if you're involved in education or if you're involved in politics or health or a soil or whatever it is that you're interested in we're seeing this collective space opening up and it really it really came to the forefront for me a couple weeks ago I was at the Boulder the Colorado University conference called the conference on world affairs and you had speakers there from around the world you had speakers from who'd contributed to the the latest IPCC report a lot of scientists a lot of teachers there was a whole lot of people involved in equity and justice and what was fascinating is it didn't matter where that person's background was if they were an academic if they were a young person they were all saying the same thing which is if we're going to address these big wicked complex issues that the planet's facing right now we need to connect with ourselves we need to be re-establishing our internal relationships and dealing with that wounded self and falling in love with who we are as individuals and transforming all of that past trauma before we can step out and say all right I'm going to create a just world or I'm going to create a world where climate change is addressed you know all all of those pieces and it was it was absolutely fascinating to kind of look at the the patterns that were showing up that is happening individually even if you're in the middle of the Amazon forest or you're up in the Arctic Circle these these thoughts are arising I want to get into because you have this I wouldn't say it's an acronym but you have this five m's of soil health basically and I would love it if you can kind of touch on those for us a little bit and explain why it's important to kind of use that as a marker and tools to kind of process the health of your soils. Yeah the five m's came about in terms of like training others to kind of see the world as I the the diagnostic tools that I use really so when I'm working with producers what is the triage of decision-making so we're not focused on the small part we're focused on that whole picture as such and so the five m's are first of all we're working with mindset we're working with people what is that part of the puzzle that's affecting the outcomes and the degradation or regeneration of a landscape then it's their management and you know it doesn't matter if we're cropping or if you're in horticulture ranching what's happening with that management piece and that's that's the main part that's going to make a big difference then we look at what's happening with microbiology what's happening with minerals and or mineral imbalances and then what's the state of their organic matter which is om so technically it's an m but yeah we're cheating a little bit through that it gives us some decision-making frameworks and also to think about it in terms of what is the main limiting aspect on any property is our ability to capture sunlight energy and you would think that that was a given but if you have bare soil if you have spaces between plants if you are just growing a monocrop if those plants are nutritionally stressed they will actually lower their ability to capture sunlight energy and we're losing all of that efficiency so that sunlight piece is okay how do we make sure we're making the most of all of this free energy and then we look at air then we look at water then we look at decomposition and nutrients so the same it's that mas masalos hierarchy of needs if anyone ever studied that so looking at what is it that a human being needs absolutely to survive well without air you're not going to last long maybe three minutes without water maybe three days without food three weeks it's the same in the soil so we triage it very similarly except that sunlight is the driving force for what's happening under the ground so having to develop those frameworks was really helpful for a process that for many people can seem kind of esoteric you know a walkout on a piece of land and I can see geez your water cycle is broken down you've got all this compaction you've got these animal health issues because you don't have this microbiology functioning and that can be really overwhelming for somebody like what you know how do you see all of those pieces and it really is by bringing these different aspects together to start to diagnose what is happening on a property and for sure that starts with the mindset piece it's really multiple facets of a complex system which I love how you bring all those pieces and all those facets together and make it understandable how the living world works and that you can't just address one facet of that complex system in order to solve the problem same thing with my work at the United Nations is the same same way in 2018 all international organizations one of them the United Nations all switched to the systems you approach to life where to solve human suffering in our global brand challenges and even agriculture challenges we need to take this systemic approach and I love how the the five ends envelope that and and also the way your approach just hands on on down to earth approach bottom up is very addressing all those facets and in your book that resonates with me and I would I know would resonate a lot with a lot of my farmer friends and people who are on this journey as well to kind of reconnect to the earth or see it with a different lens a new perspective you you really talk about this and it's similar for me or it connects for me because for my personal body but you talk about the soil is your soil constipated does it have diarrhea is that have an upset stomach what's going on in there and I absolutely love that because that happens with us at the same time and so not only is it does it put it into perspective if you if you would maybe please us a little bit with with with those analogies or those similarities and how you see that in the soil and measure that health and what some of the meanings you know if it's heavy and pee or you know what whatever's going on there how how you see that and was was that something that you learned when you went through all your training and academic that to describe the way I don't think they teach that I think that's something you figure out much later sorry I shouldn't laugh no and and this this is in part why we develop the coaching school that we have because you can't learn this right now in university and the you know I talk about the mindset and the paradigms a lot in in the book too and people are asking for us you know the community to define regenerative agriculture let's say and it's it's you can't define something when you're outside of a paradigm when you're moving through a paradigm shift as the world is right now and I strongly believe that you don't have the words in the language to define that because it hasn't happened yet it's like trying to define society now when we only had the horse you know when we were back in the industrial era to try and say what would the world look like and what would people be doing how do you even define the era right now and so I think that's an important piece to to pulling some of these layers back and and I guess to go back to your initial point just thinking about how do we how do we describe and reconnect people to something that really is the source of everything which is soil and so this book wasn't written just for farmers and ranches although they are my intended people to communicate with and they are who I'm communicating with but anyone that eats food should be interested in how do we restore these functions and then how does climate change relate to how we're treating landscapes so everything right now from the soil side we have these totally disabled systems you know 90 percent of rangeland in america is highly degraded that's a problem right and that degradation then shows up if you think of soil systems like our digestive system here's the constipation here's soils that are being lost through um that diarrhea process which means they are no longer holding on to nutrients everything's just flushing into the rivers and the waterways or blowing his dust and I think most people this year in the US have seen those dust storms has seen the sediment showing up in waterways like the the impacts of poor soil management or all around us right now you know I flew into Denver a couple of weeks ago and it's just like wow you could barely see Denver at all as you're coming down um and so we're breathing that and and that is also having an impact on respiratory systems and underlying human health they now say over 90 percent of humans living on the planet no longer breathe a clean air it's like hello people anyone in there like are we waking up to what's happening around us and the soil is very much just the reflection of our own in the landscapes when when you say the soil's constipated what does that look like what does constipated soil look like what does a diarrhea soil look like and what does it tell you when you see that so visually what we see with um soils that are constipated you imagine that for you it's very uncomfortable but things are moving very slowly so in the soil that means that we won't be seeing decomposition you'll see the development of thatch layers for instance which is organic material it's just sitting on top or the organic material that is there kind of oxidizes it goes gray and white instead of bright yellow and breaking down into the soil we won't see a lot of um the keystone species that tell us that the microbial population is flourishing so and we can do a microbial test to take a look and say oh yeah yeah we don't we we have these organisms in the soil but their activity is very very low but visually what you'll see is um there'll be a lack of diversity of the invertebrates there'll be um there won't be a lot of pollinator species there's not going to be that kind of hum you know when you're on a property that's really healthy they they hum right because there's all these different flying insects and and you know bees are the least of it really you've got all those native pollinators especially in this country um and even dung beetles you know dung beetles fly in and make a huge amount of noise like they sound like wasps even um so that that noise gives us an indication that those soils have slowed down like there's no turnover there's no release of nutrients and above ground we'll see probably a lot of bare soil we see surface crusting so we see soils that aren't allowing water to move in and a consequence of that is you're going to see flash floods and then drought and flash floods and then drought and we're seeing this right around the world right now and climate change is exacerbating it but actually the soils are totally dysfunctional um and so people managing landscape no longer absorb and hold on to water which means they're also not recharging the aquifers which means they're affecting everybody downstream like land management is not an individual individuals responsibility this is a social issue for everybody on the planet to be interested in and to be supportive of what producers are doing on the ground because they're the ones that can make the biggest difference right now the um want because I truly believe that that's also part of it and I and I want to ask you some questions leading into that just last May in Germany we really experienced some some huge issues with floods so we had some supercell storms which are basically like hundreds of thousand kilometers of clouds and and cloud moisture that just drops out of one spot you know like a bathtub and it overwhelms these cities and we had 1300 people missing lots of deaths and a lot of damage farming damage um the thing that it told me is was that I know enough to be dangerous about soils and what my practice is over six generations of farming come is that all those even though they were older German cities infrastructures were all built upon degraded dusty non mossy uh old farmland basically where the soils couldn't hold that moisture and then once we built all this concrete and cobblestone whatever type of cities on top of it then then then that's uh was a big issue and the infrastructures haven't been kept up to speed how do we get the rain water in how can we get some hold how do we figure out some other things for the city aspect but that ties into other things now during the covid we see a pretty much mass exodus for a lot of people moving out to the country trying to start farming and things and in your book you say you wouldn't buy an expensive piece of property or acreage or hectares without checking the soil first and that health with the whole principles of regenerative soils and with these practices do we want to still check the soil and do that or do we want to say well if i can get a good deal or if i can do the soils i'm going to restore it i'm going to try to put some of these practices into place to turn it into the kind of farm and practices that i want and it will be okay eventually or is it some places in our world that it's just too late it's never going to happen it's never going to get back oh no i don't think that's true at all i think we can we can regenerate every single landscape it just takes the will people with the financial backing to do that because on some of these landscapes it's going to take a while right these are incredibly degraded so i just think for the average person if you're looking at buying a property to dig a hole and at least go into it with open eyes and not have hey there's something lurking underneath the surface so the farm that i brought we discovered a significant hard pan concretion basically and i knew that it was going to be part of the fun like let's let's see how quickly we can regenerate that you know in year four i was questioning my sanity and by year seven that entire hard pan had been churned through worms and deep rooting plant systems and we'd built a huge amount of top soil and it was you know this great feeling of we've overcome something that nobody else in the community could do and at the same time yeah that wasn't my main source of income you know for somebody that is actually having to live off a landscape how to do that you know maybe you could invest in bees or pigs or things that have a higher financial return and then invest what you can back into building infrastructure on the land but this is kind of why i say it's a social issue is we will spend billions of dollars cleaning up new Orleans or new york city or you know the the end that where the where all that water or that dust lands and the sediment or everything else or build walls or whatever you want to do and bridges instead of going actually we should invest in the producers we should invest this into building infrastructure at the source so have the soil that functions like a sponge that will absorb you know 18 inches of rainfall in an hour which is what some of these soils can do and yet you see we have flash floods after two inches of rainfall right we have soils that are totally water repellent how do we find systems to to restore and reward those producers that are doing an incredible job because the money's going somewhere right and right now it's all the reactionary um no mechanical approach and mechanical thinking to something that's a biological issue it's almost um yeah mechanic mechanistic approach or mitigation approach instead of adaptation or trying to put in some of these regenerative practices that's for sure um so you you would say definitely we you know even though we shouldn't before we jump into a new property or if we know wow that's pretty degraded we should still kind of get an assessment of what the soil's like drop a stick and and check it out to see what you're dealing with with that pan that you experience on your property and you knew it's taking you seven years now to to get it up to speed what did you do did you rip it and uh what what what kind of what kind of tools and things that you used to to get that back yeah and it's a good question because that's what everyone else was doing was ripping and um with big big tractors and what they found was they could actually only drag one ripper through that um hard pan and then what happens is if you don't address what's causing that you know to reseal up it just seals up again so um yeah we lived close to a racetrack and that's what they were doing on the track on a regular basis and it wasn't addressing the issue so we used adaptive grazing management as much as we could we were also running a horse training and breaking business so horses are very hard on land um so we did a recovery program for horse management so if we had horses grazing really hard then we'd be after the horses came out we would put biologicals on there um vermicast because i'm a big fan of anything out of the worms but is pretty magical um and maybe some trace elements if it was needed a little bit of calcium if it was needed um and then diverse plant species that we would actually either feed through the cow's minerals so putting seed out through minerals and allowing cows to germinate seeds or trampling it in with animal activity um so yeah really just using um biologicals addressing any major mineral imbalances so when we think about the five m's we already had the mindset it's the management piece and we knew that um in terms of horse management they're really really hard on ground so we couldn't necessarily change the management with the horses but we could change the recovery after the horses came out um we addressed our microbial imbalances so we had a lot of bacteria in there very low predators so low protozoa low nematodes so we are using products that we were making on the on the property ourselves so like a wood chip inoculant um and vermicast and compost that were applying to the ground to address some of those microbial imbalances then any mineral imbalances we're applying minerals and then the organic matter piece is part of compost so that's the five m's so by by applying those five m's to that property we we were able to break through that hard pan and it was amazing to see like in about year four you could dig holes and you could see how all these huge earthworms were starting to work through what was a calcium silicate lurse so it's um you can buy calcium silicate to add to concrete to quick set concrete like that's it literally was a concretional layer now i i used to work for OSHA and occupations health and safety administration of the us and and teach different train the trainer courses so i won't i won't tell them that i've seen several pictures of you and some trenches oh yes checking out the soil checking out the soil but no i'm just teasing so basically you you get down down and deep in a lot of situations i've seen you in several pretty pretty deep uh looking at the soil the difference of difference of top soil how far it goes down in your book you talk about you know the uh uh bears kind of a bear cave area hopeful thank goodness the bears weren't there but how deep i think it was you said something like 25 feet or even more we can see good top soil and things some some healthy things going on pretty far down um when when you're when you're you're doing that around the world and you know especially probably right now united states north america um and you're getting down in these trenches is the hope to to um increase the depth of top soil on existing farms and are most of those farms making this transition to out of industrial ag into more regenerative or biodynamic practices to really um increase their long-term regenerative process so that they're that the the f a o of 60 harvest left that they said in 2015 is now only i think 40 or 41 harvest left uh the last i checked i want to kind of know that process and what what what pathway are we going on are this is a transition i'm sure for each one it's different but what are kind of the things that you're teaching coaching preaching and trying to get these new coaches on board of what what we want to do for long-term success in food and agriculture yeah i find that the soil trench can be such a powerful connecting tool because you can get at eye level with with soil and what i find is some of the best producers graziers in the world have never dug holes unless they're putting in a fence they really are not connected at all with what's happening below the ground and um with more and more interest in ecosystem services and greenhouse gas mitigation and you know carbon drawdown soil is you know one of the largest terrestrial reservoirs obviously um and so being able to kind of connect people with you know below that four inch depth typically the carbon that's down there is like over 500 years old 500 to 2000 years old and it's been dropped down there through the exudates of plant roots so you can visually see that and and you can see how you know that carbon those plant roots the microbiology are all functioning down there in a system that's working well however most ranches i go to are only their topsoil might be half an inch their rooting systems might be half an inch i tell them you're half an inch from a drought really when you think about what these perennial grassland systems look like when the colonials first arrived they talk about you know ripping up areas in Nebraska and Ohio with the plow those roots were like 20 30 feet deep they were dense and the sound of that plow coming through those root systems sounded like someone cracking a bullwhip from a mile away we don't have any of those systems functioning anymore so for me it's a way to connect people with what could be possible and how far perhaps are we from that but that we could restore these ecosystems and and really be pumping a lot of those greenhouse gases down into the soil back where they belong um that 60 harvest left i don't think there's any data to back that up it's one of those sensational kind of comments that people like to make we will continue just it just depends what it looks like but soil is not going to run out right and we can build soil very very quickly we have had operations where we've built an inch of topsoil um about we were building a millimeter a month so you know in nearly two years we built an inch of topsoil so it is possible to to build soil far far faster than what academia thinks possible yeah i agree with you on on the on the data as well it comes from several different sources so it's also um i i've been speaking about this for a long time but when they originally set it in 2015 it was based on several things back in 2015 we were losing 23 hectares a minute of of land due to deforestation soil degradation contamination deforestation drought and and flooding um and that's since gone up i think today's date is 29 hectares a minute and so that's part of the data that they're using and it's based on that global replicable hectare that we have and so it's constantly fluctuating and i i don't think our regeneration or restoration projects around the world are going fast enough to to increase it but hopefully it's keeping it out of bay in some respects um that leads nicely into a couple points you know we we see this in the us this new regenerative organic standard coming about we see a lot of talk about regeneration and regenerative agriculture i kind of want to know your thoughts and feelings and and can we do it can we make that transition uh help industrial ag farmers and the new youth and uh next generation of uh of youth from those families and those farmers who are there that they want to pass that on to their children and that there's hope that there's training support education and things out there and i know that's one thing that you do but i'm not sure if you're big enough to handle the whole world no and that that was part of the this coaching training school was the the impact of right now we have a bottleneck in terms of you know the industrial farming model is coming to an end um we can not continue to farm or live in this chemical soup that we've created you know and talking to a lot i mean i do talk to a lot of conventional groups and i'm careful with my language obviously but um they are confronting huge amounts of pressure from from so many different directions and it's no longer viable and it's certainly no longer fun you know you talk about the amount of stress the debt the overwhelm what's going to happen with the climate you know it's it's not a fun space to be in and what regenerative agriculture brings is all that creativity and all the fun and so we see a lot of young people coming in who are so lit up and so inspired but part of what we wanted to see with the coaching school is there is no way one person's gonna you know gonna turn the ship around this does take the collective and so the 20 students that just graduated two days ago the impact that they potentially could be having on the world or even you know i think of some of the calculations we've done on some of the ranches i work with one ranching family in Idaho older spring ranch they are sequestering the greenhouse gas emissions of 18 000 people just that one ranch right so our potential to do things is enormous it it just takes that the confidence it takes having someone perhaps to mentor and walk alongside a conventional producer especially really high input industrial model ag is how do we do this in a way that is not going to endanger the profitability because people are really up against the wall you know farmers are not making money it is not a viable business to be in unless you are doing this regeneratively so some great studies and multiple studies now coming out to show that on average regenerative agriculture is about 78% more profitable than the industrial model you know and Jonathan Lundgren's done some of that work but there's many scientists involved in that and so i think that's a part of the puzzle but finances alone isn't enough to really shift behavior it is about having yeah having that partner really to walk walk alongside and that's why we develop the coaching program love that and i i mean also what you mentioned before is that you're doing this you do a bunch of different courses or you have in the past and you're kind of continually growing learning spanning more train the trainer more coaching the coaches and getting you know to to reach that critical mass but i mean there's some some wisdom from holistic land management alan savory he's also in my book the the problems and the issues with a lot of his work is that they weren't scientifically peer reviewed or backed up with with things and in a lot of respects and now more so they are and others are kind of coming into that space but all the work you've done is really it's proof from the pudding so to say real hands-on groundwork grabbing the soil teaching the people you've got this course coming up it's coming up and actually the application for the course closes May 15th and it's a soil coach program called create is create an acronym for something or is that is indeed and it's a mouthful so it's consciously regenerating ecosystems in agriculture through transformative experiences wow so yeah it is mouthful so we just create and it has amazed me the people that applied for the first program you know some of the best producers in the country and also in in canada um you know we had a we had a turf guy randy booker who's been running a golf course regeneratively for 10 years you know using biologicals and he's able to demonstrate he could cut his inputs in half he could cut his mowing in half and his labor in half just through building soil health and so having someone like that on the program is being fantastic and I'm learning well well they're learning in terms of let's bring all of these different aspects that you know bring in the technical aspects microbiology and minerals bring in the management piece and and bring in the coaching piece because what I found is we were looking to hire people and just not really able to find the caliber that I need that I demand and so I'm like let's just train let's just train people and not feel like I have to hire or control or have any of those old paradigms of scarcity and competition and threats like let's just give it all away so we've given away all of our coaching protocols all of our business plans all of our everything that so these coaches that come into this program have everything that they need to actually set themselves up in business everything that they need to address their own internal struggles around might be finances it might be around success it might be around confidence like the program really looks at what all the different parts that create a successful business or a successful entrepreneur and and they had their own coach for the 18 weeks so they've got someone they can actually work with to work through some of these big challenging issues you know I'm not good enough I don't know enough and it's like you don't you don't need to know everything we're not here to be the expert with the answer because that's the old paradigm we need to be able to ask better questions we need to be able to walk alongside people without having our own internal stuff come up you know how to work with someone without judgment and assumptions you know big big big topics and I've just been blown away by how people really embrace this like this is exactly what the world needs right now complex adaptive thinkers who yeah just incredible people I love that yeah a true 18 week program designed to train and power consultants coaches not just in the theory but the hands on principles and practices behind healthy regenerative agriculture systems I absolutely love it so I'm gonna be in the US during that time I think I might need to come by and partake of that so I'm yeah I'm on I'm on a eight country speaking tour and so I'll be there and I have a little downtime during that period so I would absolutely love that you would it's a big commitment it's like probably we say 20 to 24 hours a week like it's a it's a pop time job like job that's well yeah if you want to do this you want to do it right so I agree the reason I really wanted you to touch upon it and thank you for explaining the acronym and going into more the application deadline closes May 15th I want people to through our podcast we're going to put the podcast out and I want people to apply and really get in there and and who are interested I have a lot of people who are interested and hopefully it's the US only so we'll get just make sure they get in there and get committed yeah right US only for this year next year it won't be offered in the US we're going to go to Australia in the following year probably Europe so those that missed the US deadline this year you're going to have to wait a few years unfortunately we have had quite a few people from Europe applying for this one and I wasn't quite sure how that would work because you have to be in person twice at the beginning and at the end of the course but what's exciting about those people is if they can come in learn the whole diagnostic process the coaching process then they potentially could be coaches on future courses and that's the expansion model is that I don't want to have to be the one it's like no we want to lift and empower people so that they too can be driving a program like this which I'm really excited about beautiful I know that you were on Elaine Ingram's soil region summit as well just recently it was I don't think it was a month ago and beautiful presentation beautiful talks there and more and more awareness is just going through of people who who want to do this but you and her and many others Matthew and and and there are really talking to farmers about hey do you have a refractometer do you have a microscope are you taking soil samples are you sending your soil samples out somewhere else at the very least to someone else and so what I like is you also talk about the tools you talk about how to use them properly you also talk about where to go for help and it's a total support structure not only in your book but also in and everything that you do to empower those individuals those farmers those people who and I'm sure and you you could tell me more in the past there's even been quite a few gardeners or permaculturists or people come in who don't have this vision of grandeur of hectares worth of land but who who want to do it right and I've seen some some miracles happen around less than a hectare where people have done some of these practices and just have produced an enormous amount of results on a small piece of property because it's like it it's a food forest that turns into this jungle of opportunities of what can be planted so I don't know if you want to go into a little bit more of of why you choose to teach people those tools and why it's important to to refract your your your leaves and and find out what's going there and to test your soil and get looking under the microscope why those are tools that we kind of have overlooked in the past yeah and I think again it comes down to context you know for many uses they're so busy that we need rapid assessments we need to be able to do potentially some of this monitoring without it being really cumbersome or overwhelming so with that in mind we develop the region platform which is a online app that are that are developed with soil mentor and beta cycle in the UK but what's cool about it is it has 10 indicators that can be done pretty quickly and you can compare yourself to others in your same biome and on your same soil type and get that instant feedback because I think a lot of people have data for data's sake they might have some chemical soil tests if we're lucky they might have some biology tests most people I find are not they haven't spent the hours you know if you've got your 10,000 hours really on a microscope to adequately be able to assess you know is that healthy or is that dysfunction and so yeah people can spend a fortune kind of chasing different rabbit holes where I kind of like what are some of these indicators and a refractometer is probably a simple one just to measure you know sap bricks but being able to observe being able to smell be able to look at color be able to smell that soil dig profiles and just have a really rapid feedback that's like okay yep we're heading in the right direction I just showed a client a photograph of a soil we we've been we've did some work on in 2018 and went back and took a photograph of that soil now and it is unrecognizable and I think he hadn't realized just the impact of all of this work that he's doing that you're starting to really see that on a large scale and for me I think I predominantly am interested in the larger producers because they are the ones that are influencing climate they are the ones influencing the water cycle and the amount of chemicals in the environment but there's not to say that all of this can't be translated to a small scale right and that small scale you could be feeding hundreds of people on a hectare and I think that was the cool thing to see come out of COVID is people realizing how broken the current food systems and structures are and why are we not growing food in the local community you know I work with the Intertribal Agriculture Council who work with 574 federally recognized tribes around the US and when COVID hit they had no food and realizing that all the beef or the bison or the food that was produced on the reservations was being sent out of the reservations and suddenly there's no food so realizing hey we could we could be providing food in our own communities and I got a beautiful message recently from a school in London and they were growing their own making their own sourdough bread from their own wheat they were building soil they were had like a little restaurant and food for the parents and educating students around that soil function and the importance of livestock and I'm like and you're in the middle of London you know so I think there's so much opportunity and right now it's people just sharing their stories on whatever scale you are that could be the light bulb that someone else needs to just start growing some broccoli seedlings on their window cell it doesn't matter what that scale is like how do we start to reconnect to nutrition and to food and how simple it is to actually grow a lot of these plants for yourself want to talk about IAMO's indigenous microorganisms so basically as Korean natural farming kind of practices and stuff everywhere we go as you work globally work in many different areas and there there is and you talk about it in the book a little bit that you know going back to them the way it used to be decades ago or might not always be viable because we've disrupted it might be gone but isn't it always better to not only check the soil before you start and get going and find out what you're working with but also find out what those local indigenous microorganisms should be or are or could be in the area where you're farming or you're doing this and then to build those back up in your restoration and your regenerative processes and what kind of tips or tricks or things have you dealt with that that kind of deal with in that restoration process I think we know so little about all of it we just know so little and I think this is where don't be buying in biological single organism inputs from India which is where a lot of these are coming from I like the IMO I like natural Korean farming I like vermiculture and compost in terms of let's foster that indigenous community that's already here go and find an area of forest that's really really healthy and get some of that leaf duff if you've got a grassland that's really performing well take some of the soil from those areas and incorporate that into your compost we use compost slurries I'm not a big fan of compost teas at all but I think this idea of like we think that we understand a lot of you know a lot of the microbiology you know there's DNA and PCR not PCR NLFA PLFA type testing now for microbiology and what they find is a microbial test they did one in New Zealand and they tested from one side of the South Island to the other they did six different samples across crop land to forest to tusset grasslands to swamps and what they found was 95 percent of those microbes were the same and a scientist actually came to an event and tried to undermine what I was saying about building biology because he's like oh the biology is all the same luckily there was a scientist that was kind of on my side and he said well five percent that you don't know what they're doing must be really really important for them to drive that much difference across and so just saying something's present or absent doesn't necessarily determine how healthy an ecosystem is right and it's the plant that's feeding the microbiology and dictating what kind of microbiology you're going to flourish that resident population the biomass has all been driven by that plant microbial relationship so generally what we find is it's not a lack of specific organisms is that the environment and the foods are not there to support them there is microbiology in the jet stream right there's spores being spread right across the planet just coming in the air so there is a microbial population out there it's just what are the conditions that I'm creating through my management and plant health and sometimes it does require some mineral nutrition and I've had producers say well I'm doing this great grazing management my soil should be really really healthy and after 30 years finding even with adequate rest that those soils are still not the same soils that they were pre-colonization and the reason for that is we have lost 30 to 60 percent of our carbon probably 30 to 60 percent of our new nutrients and often we've lost a lot of really key important trace elements sodium certain elements have been lost out of that sort of environment so what we find is we might do a single input and I'm just saying once it might be something that we do put some trace elements on to support that plant so that it can now feed microbiology and also there's stuff going on with plant breeding now so that many plant species no longer communicate with the microbiology so wheat no longer signals to protozoa or fungi and so we've got these very insipid weak plants that no longer have zinc they no longer have secondary metabolites they are totally dysfunctional but they do well with you know phosphate fertilizers and all the rest of it but that plant breeding has a big say in terms of what is the biological community so really looking at native seeds if you are using seeds plants that are fit to your context and yeah making those kind of decisions so again that's where the 5m part comes in is it's not just microbiology that's creating a healthy ecosystem I want to go a little bit deeper if you don't mind you you've said this before in other podcasts or other things you also a little tickle a little bit and but why the difference between flurry and tea compost tea what's your what's your thinking and why are you kind of not a big fan or can you explain that to us a little more I just feel unless you're really good on a microscope most people don't know what they're looking at I've seen a lot of people applying disease organisms they're like oh look at all that activity I'm like yeah those are anaerobic bacteria and you just spray that all over your place when you're brewing you're there's organisms that are going to respond more rapidly to the brewing process than others you're kind of trying to second guess what it is that the plant actually needs and and you know so a brew so compost tea brew you might be bubbling that away for like six hours or three days different organisms are going to come and go and flourish through that process but it depends on what foods you're giving them right so if you put a little bit of molasses or a bit of seaweed or humic acid it's going to feed different organisms and then again depends on the compost that you're using so I would prefer to use a slurry whereby you you test your compost you know that your compost or your vermicast is really really good quality and we put it out at a higher rate so as a you know a compost like a compost tea you might only have a couple of handfuls of compost are actually literally going out on a hectare we or an acre let's say we might be using 30 pounds of compost per acre to get to get the effect and when you're putting a slurry out you know it might be up to half or a fifth of an inch in size and material and it's got all the compost in it we might put some minerals in it we can still put the food in it but you don't have to brew it and when you're working on a large scale to have to wait for a brew or have to get your timing just right you go to apply it now and you're on a large scale compost teas just don't fit and I used to do it commercially and we would try and get things on in time and it was just it was it was too hard and I think if you're a small producer and you're good with a microscope then yeah use use the compost extracts or compost teas but for us slurries just make so much more sense and it gives the microbiology something as well like a substrate to live in so you're just kind of sending it out with a home and then there's less consideration around having to get something to stick to a leaf or protect it from UV light and the other benefit from it is it's not just the living microbes that we're dealing with it's all the secondary metabolites so i'm not as concerned like is the biology living it's those metabolites so every single cell wall has like a hundred thousand receptors waiting for some kind of signal and it's the signal that they'll get from those extracts that is in parts per trillion that's enough to either get a biological community to respond or get a seed to germinate and this is what we're seeing is that very very low rates we are seeing native seed banks germinate and respond to the application of extracts on large extensive grassland and that has been just a aha phenomenal moment that's beautiful i only have four questions left for you and then we'll be done i'm i'm giving you a workout today i really appreciate you bearing with me i want to talk about natural capital or total environmental cost as percentage of EBITDA how do we get that natural capital that true cost back into farming that we take farming where the products that we produce through farming out of the commodity system because i think most of these transitions to regenerative are eventually stepping away from that model because it's a model that locks you into something that is a no-win model in my opinion but i want to get your thoughts and feelings and how yeah i mean i know you're capturing the carbon you're also also talking about you know what what you you mentioned earlier how much the farm was capturing carbon enough for so many people which is amazing but what else are you doing on the true cost in the natural capital yeah and i think this is where full life cycle analysis needs to be included with everything that we buy if that's a refrigerator or a solar panel or a crop what what are the what are the costs that aren't being revealed and it might be even in the equity or justice component as well who grew that and in what you know conditions were they growing that but the commodity markets and the industrial model has really set up structures for land degradation and until those structures are addressed then land degradation is going to continue because that model's not set up for it which is low cost monocultures large scale and produces being very isolated and not being remunerated for the product that they're growing anyway and so i do think the natural or ecosystem services i mean you could call them life support services is part of what needs to be acknowledged and appreciated for you know farmers and ranches are the greatest area of conservation on the planet they are the the water source and the greenhouse gas sink and and that whole part is how do we start to do this in a way that doesn't put ecosystem services on the commodity market because for me that's the death now of what it's the it's the antithesis of what we're talking about which is how how do we really reward people for doing the good work that they're doing for the whole planet and that's a tricky one right because subsidies even right now subsidies are set up for degradation how do we shift some of those subsidies towards more of a green bond or acknowledging ground cover or acknowledging allowing land to be fallow for a year or two if you're in a cropping situation sure it's not going to make you money immediately but you're building that soil resource is let's get really interested and engage with how do we start to reboot these entire systems because the consequence of not doing that is the end of humans living on this planet like let's not miss about with this yeah i mean when you're talking earlier i really thought of alan savry about resting the ground and and that even alan has said many times a lot of conservation projects natural parks or things like that they've seen that it hasn't increased the microbial health the soil health over time by just not having any any movement blocking it off conserving it that that it's actually better that we we get a little bit of compost and movement and herds and things going through there so that we have have the whole the soil restoring and regenerating and doing its natural cycles in some respect then then it is to just leave them and the the last three questions i really have and you can address that if if you want to i just was thinking about it because we spoke about it as well important consideration to just weigh up is where is land being conserved who is conserving it what is really happening with the the land function in that you know taking livestock off if there's no wildlife to replace it or there's no wildlife with apex predators which was seeing some people trying to put bison back without a predator but really their land grabs right it's it's ways to take land off indigenous people it's just the colonize it's just another form of colonization and we need to address that and there's a huge amount of land in this country that i believe if we could work together to really look at restoring land function should be returned to indigenous people absolutely i'm going to get hate my absolutely not no you won't um this is the hardest question i have for you today and i really want your answer not what you think other people want to say and i don't have to worry about that with you i believe what what yeah what does a world that works for everyone look like for you what does a world that works for everyone look like for you what it looks like is people really addressing their wounded selves so they're not operating out of greed i mean we are seeing the consequences of the capitalist model right now you know you're seeing wars in areas that have been driven by oh well someone needs something in the US you know we're seeing wars over phosphate in Morocco you know there's kind of ridiculousness and and people below the poverty line while there's oil coming out while there's you know mind resources coming out there is enough food on on this planet for for probably two population full you know that that wastage that greed that consumerism so much of that comes back to people that are deeply wounded and people that have not dealt with their own trauma and so for me a world that works is that people can they regenerate themselves can they love themselves can they truly have empathy for people around them and then some of the things that we do if we could see what was that full lifecycle analysis for this material to get into my hands would go i cannot have this telephone because there were children that suffered along the way to do this but and do i really need a new phone every year for instance but i think the more that we start to peel back some of that hidden and some of that consumer drive and you know fear especially fear in this country is a huge motivational factor to to get people to feel like they don't have enough or that they got to protect themselves or we better you know go and shop at these big box stores so that we can top our our hearts up and it's like that none of that tops your heart out so i think reconnecting with nature we don't have to be putting the stress on the environment that we currently are it's it's all just greed and overconsumption so yeah that that's what i feel like a world that works beautiful if there was one message that you could depart to my listeners that was a sustainable takeaway that really has the power to change their life what would it be and even if it's two messages no pressure mark um um dig a hole and sniff that soil breathe it in get some microbes in your in your gut get them in your lungs um and connect with where your food's coming from get curious if that's a farmers market if there's a local community garden if you are sourcing from further away there's some beautiful amazing ranches out here that are distributing meat around the country connect with them get to know who these people are as people and get to know how your food was grown you know is how humane that is you know even if it's just once a year go take the kids get in the car go and visit some of these food producers and just realize how hard they're working and how much they care and how much they care about you the people that are eating food so yeah that would be my message oh i love it what have you experienced or learned in this big long journey as a global citizen so far that you would have loved to know from the beginning from the start most people always say hey mark it's the journey i i don't think there's anything i've just enjoyed the learning and the journey that's what i had to and the other thing that i say is i always wish i would have started sooner much sooner i wish i would have came to that realization much sooner i would be much further along um trust your gut i think and doing i gg i ga blood tests for major um allergies i wish i'd done that earlier because a lot of that contributed to the just function of my brain and my ability to achieve what i wanted to achieve um was being limited by food allergies as well so i you know i feel like it's all been a journey for a reason but i would really have liked to have seen that earlier and someone had told me about that i gg test in 2005 and i didn't get it done until 2015 and man that what a difference that would have made but you know that's that thing i don't live in regret like having the veil lifted yeah i know exactly is that is that test similar to like a blood culture is it different than a blood culture no it's looking for your immunoglobulin so your what are you chronically allergic to and what are you acutely allergic to so it picks up those two different markers in the blood but yeah it's a test that i want to make available to everyone in my family because you see uh you see major because we have a gut disruption and everyone's got broken gut microbiome most people have allergies now that they wouldn't have had the previous generations you know like your parents didn't necessarily have those allergies but if we can restore that gut function it's going to definitely help but you know we've got so much chemical exposure now it's hard to have an intact microbiome or the love of soil strategies to regenerate our fruit production system i love this book i i i think you're fabulous nicole nicole masters thank you so much for letting us all inside of your ideas it's been a sheer pleasure and when i'm in the states i hope that i can swing by and come and bug you uh or say hi um i hope our past cross many times in the future and thank you so much for your time i really appreciate all that you do your you are the the true evangelist and hands-on practitioner changing our world and i thank you for that thank you mark it's been such an honor to connect with you thanks everybody keep up the great work thanks bye