 just last 4th of July I got to walk along on the opposite side of a row of trees from two young badgers and I called them to me which was you know kind of curious I didn't expect that I'd be calling badges to me and they were so curious they came up to me and they made these really neat little purring sounds now where do you get that in a wheat field you don't you know but I get some of these magical moments that happen almost all the time because we've set up a system where we all can live abundantly. Mark Shepard is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Mark is the CEO of Forest Agriculture Enterprises LLC, founder of Restoration Agriculture Development LLC and award-winning author of the book Restoration Agriculture which I have right here in front of me real world permaculture for farmers. Fabulous read, fabulous book from a wonderful man we're so honored to have him here on the show today. Mark has been a farmer member of the Organic Valley Cooperative, the world's largest organic farmers marketing co-op since 1995. He is the most widely known as the founder of New Forest Farm, the 106 acre perennial agriculture savanna considered by many to be one of the most ambitious sustainable agriculture projects in the United States. New Forest Farm is a planned conversion of a typical row crops grain farm into a commercial scale perennial agricultural ecosystem using oak savannas, successional brush land, and eastern woodlands as the ecological models trees, shrubs, vines, canes, perennials, plants, and fungi are all planted in association with one another to produce food for humans and animals. Imagine that fuels medicines and just a beautiful lifestyle. I'm not going to go on forever but Mark doesn't just have one book, he has this other fabulous book that I'm holding up now, Water for Any Farm and we're going to try to talk about both of the books as much as possible and many other things because Mark and I have a lot in common and he's also a main contributor in a collaborative book called Menu B that we're hoping to finish publication and get it to print very soon and Mark has been trained in both mechanical engineering and ecology. Mark has developed and patented equipment and processes for the cultivation, harvesting, and processing of forest-derived agriculture products for human foods and biofuel production and without further ado, let me say hello and welcome you to the show Mark. Hello Mark, it'll be easy to remember your name. Thank you for having me on the show. Thanks for the pretty detailed introduction and just for your information, if you look closely under my fingernails you'll probably find pig scratchings under there. That's great and I mean I could actually, you've been doing this a long time and have learned a lot. I mean you're trained in permaculture and been through many courses as well and have a background from your family and and agriculture and organics and biodynamic or agriculture or organic agriculture and many many things so I would hope and I'm glad that you're still around kicking and going at a strong but I could really read your bio for a couple days because that's how many years as a restoration agriculturalist, I guess I don't know if that's the term you'd like to use now today. I see you're wearing your rad shirt. Yeah that you really have put in the seasons and the harvest and the time to be the foremost expert in this area and so it's a sheer honor not only to have you contribute to the book but to have you on the show to talk about these books. The first one we've got to dive right into a restoration agriculture, a sheer work I absolutely love it. It's a great read and I came upon it through many other greats so Francis Moore LePay and her daughter Anna LePay actually write about you and their books and talk about you all the time and so you're kind of popping up all over. You're going to be here in Germany very soon for an event. Yeah two events in two weeks and you're also at, is it bayoneers you're speaking at as well? Yes. You're all over the place, how do you do it? You're like Santa Claus. That's actually a really great question, how do you do it? And I'll have to ask you a question right in return. If you look at your favorite piece of forest how much work does it take you to manage that? Once you set up a perennial system it practically takes care of itself. We have to go in and manage and steer it in the right direction because plant communities change over time, animal communities change over time but once it's set up and in place I know that I've got to be here for a window of time during this harvest, during this harvest, that harvest and the rest of the time you know I'm free to go out and help others set up systems just like this. Yeah and I absolutely love that and that's a process that you touch upon in the book. You recommend a couple other books in restoration agriculture. Tree Crops is one, the other one is One Straw Revolutionary, the philosophy and work of I can't even say his name. Masanobu Fukuyako. Fukuoka. And actually the most inspirational one for me was the very first book that came out about him was One Straw Revolution. Run Straw Revolution, yeah. And it's really about set it and get your farm set up, get your crop set up, get it set up in the way you want and then be around for the harvest, the maintenance and things. A lot of people would look at the outside and say boy is that a farmer, is that a forest, is that that looks rather wild. And this whole concept of wild or permaculture moving away from monoculture and more how the very intricate systems of ecological systems and complexity of forests and agriculture work is more this really kind of almost rewilding in some respects letting everything take its course and work together so you work less hard but also enjoy the reaps of just as many harvests or just as many returns on some of these crops. And actually as far as rewilding is concerned is a restoration agriculture is a little bit more deliberate than a rewilding and that we intentionally set up the ecological system that's native to the area. We'll use genetics that have already been improved for yield, pest and disease resistance, etc. And then we will arrange them in orderly patterns that are based on managing the rainfall and potential runoff that will hit the site. And then our interactions with the system more closely mimic the natural disturbances that would manage and maintain those systems in the wild. So we try to mimic fire, we mimic grazing, we mimic wind throw, that sort of thing. And so it's a little bit more deliberate than a and a little bit more intentional than a rewilding. However, the similar principles apply is once we set up the system, it's a it's a semi-natural system. All of the surviving critters, the legacy organisms that are around, they show up. Just last 4th of July, I got to walk along on the opposite side of a row of trees from two young badgers. And I called them to me, which was, you know, kind of curious. I didn't expect that I'd be calling badges to me. And they were so curious, they came up to me, and they made these really neat little purring sounds. Now, where do you get that in a wheat field? You don't know, but I get some of these magical moments that happen almost all the time, because we've set up a system where we all can live abundantly. Yeah. And it's every, every, not just the fungus, but also the plants and the animals all kind of just not only live abundantly, but they live just in this ecosystem, this cooperative together. There is actually, and I hope you find this funny, there is one other book. And there's probably more than that, that you talk about. This one you talked about for sure. The Wump World. And I kid you not, this book is so hard to get in Germany, very hard. We were talking before we started the recording, how hard it is to get English books in Germany nowadays with the new changes with Brexit and in the EU. But boy, thank you for that. My grandkids, thank you for that. But I also like the message of the Wump World. And so, as we lead into your book, I want maybe to have you start, if you don't mind, with, and I got two copies because it's so hard to get it. I like to, I like to educate people and I have a book addiction. But I'd like you to maybe start us out with some of these philosophies and why you use this, because you teach as well. You travel around, not only teach adults to teach kids, you help other farmers get their processes up. And I see your book not only as a great read, but it's also a very educational book. It's almost like a workbook on getting people into a paradigm shift on how they can maybe see that in their own properties, apply some methods, look at things in a different way. Well, in restoration agriculture, is more of describing a process instead of a prescription. It's not like do this, do that, do this, do that. It's like these are the ecological principles that we are working with. This is how this seems to work. In this area, you know, hot, cold, dry, wet, all of those things affect how the system will work. But these are the ecological principles that if you want to do annual crops agriculture, plant maize or wheat, for example, you have to destroy a perennial ecosystem and then keep that ground bare naked and exposed. Put your seeds in the ground. And when nature tries to clothe it with plants and bring back all kinds of diversity to it, you now fight against that. So our annual crops agriculture is a constant battle against the forces of reality that have yet to be defeated. And if we keep fighting this fight, we're going to end up losing as a species. And we'll go the way of all species that fail utterly at harmonizing with their environment. And the title, restoration agriculture I chose deliberately. Oftentimes we're told that, oh, we need ecological restoration, which means we take the land out of agricultural production, kind of preserve it at a moment in time, get rid of all these invasive species, add these plants that are supposed to be here, and just like, don't touch it and let it be because now we've restored the ecology. Well, if you look at natural systems, there are plants and fungi within that system, all of which are edible. Why not plant a selected sliver, a piece of the whole pie instead of 100,000 species, let's plant 10,000 species, and cherry pick the ones that have food, fuel, medicines, fibers, animal feed, etc. And then let's manage the system using livestock to trim the grass and to fertilize the site, nutrient cycling, etc. And let's harvest the yields from this semi-natural system. So we're doing ecological restoration. We actually will get badgers returning if they're in the area to populate it. And we're getting food from this system. So we can take degraded real estate, upgrade it ecologically, and have the agricultural activity pay for that conversion process. Sometimes when you have animals in a system, and I always have to think of a story in Johannesburg, just outside of Johannesburg, there's someone who's doing a food forest using agroforestry and kind of mixed things. And he has so many problems with baboons and that, you know, just running through and pulling fruits and things off the trees, and they'll eat a piece or they'll forget they just pick something and drop it and go off somewhere else. In the United States, I'm sure it's much different, but you've worked all over the world with different areas. And I think I've seen images of you and Africa and heard stories as well. When you set up something like that where there are truly wild species and baboons, you know, you've got badgers and maybe wild boars in the US and some other types, how do you deal with that on such a farm? Do you just let it go and what's left over is what's left over or how does that work? Yeah, so here primarily our biggest animal damage is from whitetail deer. We have quite a few wild turkeys, there's black bear in the area. The biggest challenge, of course, that we were having in Africa and Uganda was theft from, you know, wild primates mostly. Problem with baboon, deer are not as smart as your brother. Baboons are, they're as smart as your brother. And so some of the projects we worked on in Africa around chimpanzee preserves for the Goodall Foundation is to plant a buffer on the human occupied lands, a buffer of economic woody species that the chimpanzees find hostile. Shorter shrubs where they can't see over and there's nothing to climb and kind of fit that bill pretty well. And shorter shrubs that provide no food such as tea as one example, they didn't like that. And so they have a buffer of some kind of economic woody species, perennial species between the chimpanzees and the humans. And then we go help to improve the human habitat seemed to help a little bit. What hasn't happened because of, you know, internal policy with Goodall Institute, what hasn't happened is an intentional management of the primate preserves to increase the food supply for the primates that I think that will come because if we want to have chimpanzees and gorillas on this planet, their habitat also needs to be improved because they're not, they're not necessarily intentional land managers either. So here in the US, it ends up being at least on my farm anyways, it ends up being somewhat of a workaround in the early years getting trees established to prevent deer brows. We'll use five foot plastic tree tubes. I hate them. They double the price of the plant growing in the ground. It's plastic. It's horrible. But they really work well. They accelerate the early year growth of the plants and it protects from deer also from cattle. But the real thing that works here and has worked here is sheer numbers. The food force that you may have been talking about in Johannesburg may have been, you know, a half an acre, an acre. I don't know how big it is. A lot of the urban and suburban ones that you see are rather small. Well, if you go to like any of the farming districts around the world, typically the farms are bigger. There's much larger farms. If you plant a 10 foot by 10 foot garden patch with sweet corn in the USA, the raccoons will eat every single ear of sweet corn. If you plant a 10 acre patch of sweet corn, they'll get like six or eight outer rows around the edge. They get less of your corn. You plant 100 acres of corn. They'll get the eight or 10 rows on the outside. And now you have, you know, 90 acres on the inside. And so that's part of what we have working for us with animal pressures. But as we restore ecosystems around the world, and as we create, you know, semi-natural systems that produce tons of food, we will find that all of the, you know, horrible, bad, mean animals that our ancestors shot and killed, their populations will start doing better. And modern humans will all of a sudden have a similar problem in the opposite direction. Now that we're restoring all this habitat, we're having larger populations like coyotes. We're having larger populations of wolves. The wolf population in Wisconsin is expanding. Larger populations of bears, etc. Have you ever tried to raise honey bees when you have bears around? It brings up a whole new host of tech leaves. We will have to learn in order to protect what is ours and yet coexist with what is rightfully theirs. Yeah, it's interesting. So I didn't tell you this before, but I worked for a couple years in Wisconsin, in Hayward, Wisconsin, Marshfield, Wisconsin, up in Hayward, they had the Lumberjack World Competition and went to that two years in a row. And and there's a lot of farm country, a lot of Mennonites, a lot of Amish as well. So the old Dutch and German descendants that are in those areas. So I am very familiar when you write in the book and some of your other things that I've read and heard you talk about some of the areas you've been in, the way the water works and rains and floods and things that you're just scratching your head sometimes of what's going on over the years. But it's really interesting because that is such a beautiful area of the United States. So wonderful to be in those areas. And there are some questions that I have because I don't know if you know the percentages, but and it seemed to me when I was there that there weren't very many restoration agriculturists, there weren't very many organic farmers on a larger scale there. It was more monocrops, industrial ag, high chemicals, a lot of big open rows of crops instead of this new or organics or restoration or agroforestry or ecology that we've been talking about for a while, you and I and others in our circles. Do you know, is that shifting? Is that changing? Is that on the rise? Is that a transition that you're finding a fighting battle with other farmers to help them without or what's the reception, especially after the pandemic? There is somewhat of a bipolar phenomena going on. At least when I got here in the 90s, organics, if there was anything organic available in grocery stores, it was like this poverty section of half rotten carrots that it was twice as expensive and the stuff looked horrible. Well, while I've been farming the past 25 years, the industry has grown from not even noticeable to $50 billion plus in the organic realm. There are issues happening now with the whole increase in organic. It's not growing as fast. I think that's part of that is it's coming with maturity and also part of it is coming with this proliferation of certifications. There's a million different certifications. Everybody would rather start a police agency to go after farmers and police their actions and put a sticker on the package instead of actually grow food. I think that the organic industry has matured way more than we ever expected. This particular part of Wisconsin right here has more certified organic farmers in the area than anywhere else in the world. This is where the biggest concentration of them are. That's one trend that has been ongoing. I think it's stabilized. It's not growing as fast as it was. The other one is the megification of agriculture. It's a constant thing going on right now with these 6, 8,000 cow dairies being built. I've read somewhere that the number of dairy farms has declined geometrically. It's hardly any compared to what there used to be, but the number of cows in Wisconsin is still increasing. The farms are getting much, much larger simultaneously with this flourishing of the small scale, the niche marketers. Now that the internet is available, people can buy and sell stuff direct to the consumer and UPS, ship it almost anywhere in the world. That's been a tremendous boom for small scale growers. I think both are happening at the same time. I agree. It's kind of this quantum people, quantum growth that says both at the same time. I'm seeing that as well. It's really specific to what not only what state, but what country you're in as well. Specifically, if you wanted to jump into dairy farming, there'd be no better time to do it in Germany and in Europe than now to do it. At any given day, I can find about 120 at least big scale, so 10 hectare or more dairy farms here in Germany that are up for sale, or even what the Germans have a term called pochten, which basically means that if somebody takes it over, it's yours for free. You just do the operations and maintenance and keep it going. It's very specific towards, but there's this big trend. In 2006 here in Europe was a big trend that almost set this whole trend of organics in the direction of organics, where organics were no longer a niche in the grocery store. They moved into the main staple and all the grocery store chains and those around Europe started to move in just as many products in organic range as they did normal products. I think there's a lot to say over the years that we've seen in this movement. I'm interrupting you. That's not normal to grow food in chemicals and spray them with poisons that make insects gut explode. That is not normal. That may have been typical for a period of years. That is not normal. Absolutely not. I agree. You interrupt me anytime because absolutely that is not normal. You know a little bit about my history of farming, but you also come from some history of farming. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about your biodynamic history in school and your mother, if you don't mind. My mom was the daughter of a Vermont dairy girl. She was a Vermont dairy girl. When they were young, she was I think three or four maybe. I think it was Scarlett Fever went through and both parents got knocked out with Scarlett Fever and so my oldest uncle was like 14 at the time. He basically took over running the farm and then they all kind of divvied up all the different tasks and for a period of like six or eight years they raised themselves. Now if you could imagine like a 40 acre dairy farm being run by kids, that's exactly what it was. You know the depression era in the USA. My biodynamic exposure, so that was the farming side. My one uncle grew pecans down in Georgia. Another one was a dairyman in various different places most recently in New York State. Well then my dad, his father was a hunting fishing guide in northeastern Maine about 50 miles down the road from Vassalboro, Maine where Earnfried Pfeiffer was brought to this country to set up a laboratory in a teaching place and he trained a lot of doctors, one of which was the owner of the property where my uncle was a hunting and fishing guide and so the doctor was the gentleman who told my dad how to make compost piles and so he just grew up with you know the biodynamic style of making compost and the herbal preparations etc. He grew up with that as normal agriculture. When World War II came along they couldn't keep the lodge open anymore. The family was moved to Massachusetts to work in factories, you know it's a story around the world. Well my dad kept gardening, he kept gardening biodynamic style and he would go to these meetings with all the old school German biodynamicists but like at the end of World War II if you spoke with a funny European accent and did really weird things with like cow horns and swirling in buckets you were really suspect. So when I was a little kid we would go to you know church basements or fire department back rooms to have these meetings that there would be a different sign over the door than what we were actually talking about when I was a little kid if you basically said the word organic you could be arrested for being a communist and boy has it changed and so that whole thread from my father's side of thing I grew up within the uh anthroposophical world view and that's how I saw the world this was normal to me then it was at public school that I had to learn how to think like everybody else does and that that can create that can create some issues when when you describe things one way and I can describe things the other way equally accurate describing the same phenomena that can cause problems when you're like a seven year old kid and you can't quite explain yourself. Two episodes ago I had Sebastian Kritschmer on the show he's also an organic farmer and professor speaks a lot he was also a biodynamic certified instructor and and has done a lot of farming mainly in Pennsylvania and different in the US but he lives in in Germany now we were having some discussions because a lot of the things from Rudolf Steiner and biodynamic organics and and that is at that time really and and still not not too long ago honestly was considered esoteric, hocus pocus the kind of a scary type of thing what are they doing with these horns and and Rudolf Steiner did the Waldorf school in Germany it's what they called the Waldorf Schule or school in Germany and the guy as crazier as out there you would think at that time people thought he was or his writings he was spot on and he did a lot of good for the world and brought brought us many wonderful things and and we just got off the beaten path on how the world really works in some respects and and that's where I kind of want to ask you how how did you get set on this path was it through Bill mollison's permaculture course was it through your family how did you decide okay I'm going to write this book I'm going to go out there teach other farmers I'm going to teach other people how to do this for themselves what led to that that that story in your life well it was a long pass actually you know because you know you already heard to some of my childhood you know uncles and farming and you know we lived in the suburbs had a garden big garden we had a huge garden and my dad was spending so much time out there for one it was cheaper than therapy for him and for two you know there's three of us brothers I'm the smallest and I'm almost 250 pounds and six foot plus so it took a lot of food to feed us and what I noticed in the garden is he would work incessantly to prepare the soil make compost grow the plants pull the weeds harvest the plants and all's we would get was like a handful of carrots and a couple tomatoes to throw in the soup you know my mom did can and preserve a lot of things and we got so little food we got most of the vegetables that we needed you know most of the fruit that we actually needed from the garden but not the food the carbohydrates proteins and oils and so that really puzzled me a lot and since I was the oldest I was the one who was sentenced to work in the garden the most pulling weeds you know planting things or turning compost piles I could I could enjoy turning compost piles but working out in the garden I didn't like it because you're out in the sun you're getting hot and dusty and sweat and as soon as I was done working in the garden I could go run in the woods and when I go out in the woods I could pick blueberries and grapes and hazelnuts and always looking for that elusive American chestnut that somehow it survived and raspberries and blackberries I could go fishing there was an amazing abundance out in the woods and yet in the garden it just took work and it was when I was sitting on a rock pondering this the rock was by a brook and a little little pool I dammed up to make a little pool trying to keep fish alive I never succeeded it was on the edge of the woods a clearing with some blueberry bushes and then garden areas and I had stumbled upon the book tree crops by J. Russell Smith that you have right over there and what Smith recommended in 1926 when he when he wrote that book 1926 some 60 to 80 percent of all annual crops corn and beans etc were fed the livestock he says well why grow why grow our annual crops on steep slope ground because it all erodes and washes away why not grow tree crops have the seeds be harvested for animal food and have them graze in the grass underneath it and that really struck me is making a lot of sense I'm sitting on the rock and I can visually see the garden and I can visually see the woods and there's this line between here's the edge of the garden and is the edge of the woods is like nature doesn't have hard edges like that why not do some of the gardening in here in the woods why not take the woods out here and plant it out in the garden and so why not combine the best of both worlds and wasn't too long after that that I social pressures caused me to you know go to a good school to get a good education to get a good job which I hated as mechanical engineer and so I I quit and I went back to school for ecology and once I started reading about how natural systems work and all the processes of nature the the complexity and the beauty of it how it all harmonized and worked together it just really resonated with me and then before I graduated I read an article that they were going to be closing the homestead act laws up in Alaska for the last time for good and that you better get out there and claim some land or else you miss out on it so I did went up there claimed my homestead land 300 miles from town five and a half miles off the off the road and 3,500 feet up the side of a mountain and here I am living in this beautiful ecological paradise it's literally a wilderness almost everything that you could imagine the most spectacular views and then I look around me down in the valley I could see all these people cutting everything down plowing up the ground destroying the ecosystem it's like oh my goodness I'm participating in the destruction of some of what I hold the dearest and some of the most precious things left on this planet is wild natural planet earth and so I I really um actively attempted to figure out how to insert myself into that ecosystem what did the the previous human communities eat here what are the bears eat what are the squirrels eat how does this ecosystem function and how can I work within this functioning ecosystem and supply myself with the carbohydrates proteins and oils which takes a lot to make a big 250 pound guy and so it was at that time I started writing notes about some of my experiments and a neighbor a couple mountains over he said oh don't bother to write a book about that they've already invented that it's called permaculture and so that's what led me down the the whole rabbit hole of permaculture and and to think that we can actually design natural ecosystem mimics will design these systems that act like a natural system and supplies us with all of our food fuels medicines and fiber to me that was like you know it's the gardener's dream because now much of the work goes away it's the engineer's dream because now we can design things it function more effectively than they might if it were just randomly assembled and the artist because I could go to a place and now I can sculpt the land somewhat and set natural systems in place that start to flourish and and are just truly beautiful beautiful systems and so it was after I came to that epiphany this guy Michael was the guy who said you know don't write that book I was thinking to myself it's like well if I can do it on a little homestead on the arctic 3,500 feet up the side of a mountain just below tree line I ought to be able to do this in the middle of the corn belt and so while at a permaculture design course in Colorado I was teaching a couple of the subunits within the within the class the some of the instructors were saying with permaculture we don't need farms we'll just grow all of our food in the front yard and there's no example anywhere on planet earth where that occurs that any human being has ever been able to do that and and so since there is no proof of concept let's just throw that idea out the window I said well look we've got to get our food from permaculture systems and everybody says yeah but the rice and beans are organic now functionally now technically there are differences but the differences aren't with how that agriculture happens how chemical agriculture happens and how organic agriculture happens is you have to destroy a perennial ecosystem in order to expose the soil to accept your seeds of annual plants then you harvest those annual plants the exception in agriculture being grazing on grasslands but a grassland is only a thin it's a thin ecosystem it's not 125-200 foot tall redwood forest ecosystem and so I proposed at this permaculture course that we get a group of us together that purchase the property as a real estate investment it's a buy and hold strategy we will receive no income from this whatsoever now let's install a farmer on that and it's the farmer's job to develop the the perennial ecosystem following these particular natural pathways ecological succession they'll start by planting it and they will harvest it all along the way during their tenure on that property and so a couple guys in the audience immediately like we're in we've got investments that we can't stand let's cash out of those let's buy up a farm in Wisconsin so there were originally two other investors aside from me and my partner at the time and when we moved to the property within three months the other partners pulled out and we had to buy them out and so I found myself in southwest Wisconsin on of what to me was desolate you know barely rolling uh 60 of the hundred acres were abandoned crop fields and 40 was like overgrazed pastures as short as a golf course green and the only option was to succeed and so I started with all the processes that I write about in the book restoration agriculture and after about 10 years of doing it um Fred Walters at Acres USA when I was complaining about the fact that I keep having to describe my study explain myself over and over and over and over again he says look mark just just write a book about it just just explain what you did you know sometimes it's like when you're sick sometimes you've got to throw up we'll clean up the mess so that's what restoration agriculture is is me just like getting it out there this is what I did I really did this it's really happened and then them helping me to neaten it up and tidy it all up and if I knew it was going to win three literary awards I would have done a much better job on it so I did you did did a wonderful job that's why it won yeah that's a long roundabout story about how I got that book I love those long roundabout stories and it really is shown in this you said there's also a Dutch version of it as well which is which is interesting because there's there are a lot of farmers here in Europe I want I want to um I think that really sets up and talks about the book and what what can be found here I've also taken your course that you offer and you talk a lot about you show a lot of your pictures and images before also in the book you show a lot and discuss kind of your your journey how you did it and what it was and I absolutely love it when you took Bill mollison's course I have a question for you on this and it's kind of off-subject but I'm I'm really interested in knowing the permaculture course he has two books the big the big books I have them both but the first one had the most unique title ever and I want to know if you if that's the one that you had it was called permaculture a practical guide for a sustainable future for a sustainable future low your mind you know to have that title and compared to what the title is now you know but uh when you took his course did you take the first book or wasn't much later well here here's uh here's how first book it was the first book I got from Bill mollison was uh stapled together barely more than a mini purple mimeograph thing called permaculture one then I got another one called permaculture two then I got the first hardcover edition which was that title with uh you know uh what was it practical practical guide for sustainable future yeah that book was so fascinating because in the back of it um were listed all the people and organizations that were related to training with bill mollison there was like about a hundred of them at the time and it was a hugely expensive book and then now of course it's the it's the designer's manual what that's you so when I when I trained with bill mollison I had already taken a permaculture design course at the central rocky mountain permaculture institute in basalt colorado uh and then uh he was offering certification for teachers and so what what we would do is we would correspond this is back when people would write letters before the internet age we would we would uh correspond back and forth he would send me assignments I would do an assignment send it back for review then would have a phone conversation and so that that's how that process went through and then I got um you know his official diploma of of permaculture design with his uh signature on it so unbelievable that's so cool one of my favorite signatures yeah I I believe it so I've I've seen around the uh the internet that there's some some old copies of that uh that book still available they're selling for for a fortune because people are crazy about it but that's really interesting and I knew that there there was a journey there and some learnings and and as I said in the beginning you you've been doing this for for such a long time and not only had these learning lessons yourselves and and kind of this journey but I want to ask from the other fellow supposedly fellow farmers around you and uh around the world is it more that they knock down your door or they give you a call or stop by and say hey how how can I make the transition or um they hear about it from someone else and come come and visit you and ask for help or what does that process look like and then most importantly it is it a struggle with traditional industrial agriculture and those type of farmers to have discussions about agroforestry about restoration agriculture um that that's uh there's a lot in that kind of question and uh what we could call the typical you know chemical industrial ag farmer I don't directly address anymore um they're too far in debt to be able to get out they're too far entrenched they're most of them that I've met are really wonderful people and they truly believe that they're on a noble mission with a higher calling they are feeding the world and we don't need to tear that argument apart um and throw it on its face but just say that they're okay in their world for now there are enough refugees from that system to keep us busy for the rest of our life what what our role especially at restoration agriculture development is is to help farmers who want to make this transition already and we need more of that more help helpers of these particular farmers and some of these strategies aren't even uh ecologically or or agriculturally related they have to do with tax structure and business entities in order to uh if you have this much economic activity in your life well what is this function what is this function what is this function and each function is its own separate entity and with each function known clearly defined as its own separate entity uh then the overall business picture makes sense let me let me explain this because I mentioned that we originally got into this wisconsin property with other investors that this was purely a buy and hold strategy for the investor if the real estate is held by a real estate investment company um investments in the infrastructure buildings wells uh you know renewable electric system etc those are all tax deductible for the owners of that company well then uh part of what it is it's like a shopping mall the the general contractor you know has the shopping mall built and then pizza hut they build out their own little store on the inside and they run their successful business they pay their lease you know the shoe box they build out their own infrastructure and then they run their own business and they pay their lease so on this you know agricultural shopping mall model we've got the real estate investment company that owns the land uh the farm is the actually the business activity that manages uh one or more uh sectors of the agriculture it could be cut flowers herbs could be livestock it could be grains it could be the the nuts and it doesn't have to be one farmer it can be several different farm enterprises that all overlap and utilize the asset that's here it was actually a gal who harvested medicinal um flowers from various different flowers growing around the farm here and I think in the 10 years that we worked together here that that she paid rents to the to the to the land owner um I only saw her like three times so that's how infrequently we overlapped in our in our activities so the real estate is owned by one entity the farm is another entity well the nursery that grows trees and shrubs for sale and does the breeding work that's another entity then the consultant that goes out and does all the consulting work that's another entity the guy who writes books and does blah blah blah recordings that's another entity and when you divide it up that way um as long as that farm is profitable in and of its own self and pays its lease it can be there forever and if that farm while paying its own bills paying its lease is also improving the asset for the real estate owners long term the real estate owners get a greater return on their investment and so it's a it's a designed suite of enterprises that the overarching goal is to work with one another and to increase the asset value for real not just put a cracker box cardboard house on it that blows over in a hurricane it gets an insurance payment but to actually upgrade the ecology of that system so that can support more human beings more wildlife etc it's a more valuable asset there's more timber on it there's more water on it it's just a more useful asset all around I absolutely love that it sounds really like you know the system of system through ecology although those are for very economic purpose or business on what state or country you live in broken up into different facets of a complex system different entities they're all kind of working together for this bigger ecosystem of businesses that are all really supporting in a structure so it's it's sounds to me at the end like it's a real infrastructure at the end that is a good a good model a good business model as well you tickled upon this in your last statement and that is good timber and water and I don't know if we've touched enough on restoration agriculture but I think water for any farm is um that's a big statement not only it's a great book but that's a big statement tell us how how this book evolved why and and how how you feel uh with the statement water for any farm that that you've kind of you've you've solved it for for many farmers out there who might be struggling well restoration agriculture uh originally fretted acres usa says oh yeah let's put the book out it has good sales for six or eight months or something you go on the road you kind of push the book and then you take each chapter and you write it into its own separate books so restoration agriculture was supposed to be six books so this little six months of increasing sales ended up lasting close to 10 years um before I even had time to write the second one well if you if if you look at any piece of land on the face of the planet a certain amount of precipitation occurs on that site some of the precipitation comes in the form of mist and fog not necessarily as raindrops so no matter where you are you can sculpt the surface of the land at that place even if you're in an area that only gets three inches of rain a year you can sculpt the land in such a way that you can concentrate that water uh in dry spots so then you can you know have something that would require more moisture and for an example i'll just use a very shallow depression you can look at this v right in front of my face my chin's down the bottom of the v if we live in a area that gets three inches of rain per year um that's at this spot right here well if we go 10 feet out and 10 feet out and we get it all the channel in this way we now have what 30 inches of rain to work with in that one little spot and so that's on one little micro pit catchment in in extreme desert areas you can you can make micro pit catchments like that and keep a pistachio tree alive that will that will feed you um you can combine that with piling stones loosely with big air spaces at the bottom of that trench and they can throw up some of the soil as a mound on the sunny side so the sun never really shines on those stones and at night you'll have condensation collect on those stones which in a desert environment condensation out of the atmosphere is a huge huge victory so that that's on an extreme dry site well on many sites there's ample moisture but the shape of the land is such that the water falls up here and it comes down so fast that it can't soak in so it runs off so your valleys end up being wetter and the ridges end up being drier around here we get about 30 inches of rain a year most of these farm fields the ridges don't get 30 inches of rain a year because that rain comes down and it runs off the valleys get like 300 inches of rain a year because it all runs down to the valleys um just look at what happened in Germany um a few months ago with all these big huge floods much of that was because the agricultural soils are impermeable surfaces and it absolutely in so now i'm so i'm so glad you brought that up i because i i i i i really want to hear your view on it because you're not here in Germany do you know the exact same thing happened may 2017 not quite as big loss of life the same amount of flooding and there's a reason for it and i i i know you look at it at different eyes than the Germans that were there the the Germans that were born beforehand in 2017 that that this isn't this is coming this is a potential it could come again and uh how does farming in that tie into how does how we see our soils tie into that so i'd love to hear more about that if you don't mind kind of going off on a tangent since you brought that up but it's it's not a tangent at all it's yeah it's like who i am and what i'm all about but the um the rain that actually falls on the earth is what it is we have to adapt our culture to that period well if it if it's falling in in thunderstorms like you know 10 centimeters in an hour or whatever it's going to run off because it can't soak in fast enough one of the things that grazers can do you know right a ways have longer rotation times before they move their animals on out so they can have more root penetration so the water will soak in better there can be some mechanical deep uh uh subsoil tillage to break through hard pans and that sort of thing but those are just little techniques that you add on top what we do is we go in and we do a a uh initial just a rearrangement of how all the fields are located on the property we tend to start high up in a landscape i'll use this little point where your collar bones come together and we make ditches so instead of the water coming down into the valley and flowing away the water will fall off the landscape collecting these little terraces usda calls them terraces hermiculters call them swales and berms i don't care what you call them they're linear excavated channels and the material that you excavate you put into a mound so the water comes down hits those channels and now it spreads out going slightly downhill but out towards the ridges and then along the way we put ponds at strategic locations because we want to be able to design the the land itself so that it can handle all of the moisture that falls out of the sky and if we look at an order of operations and importance in operations this parallels the the biodynamic perspective on the levels of organization we start with the mineral realm this is the thing that it is the most unchangeable and if we do a little bit to it it will be set up for a long period of time so the mineral realm the earth itself as it interacts with this elemental cycling that's going on now is shaped in such a way that whatever biological living realm we put there is now optimized and so all of the rain that fell in the the big storms if you read in the last section of of my book water for any farm right there i think it was on the last section either that or the introduction i was in a storm event in cross plains wisconsin where 19 and a half you were picking up your dad from the airport right that's right i think that's in the beginning yeah and people died you know that that rain all of that rain fell on agricultural land and it and it was tile drained to get rid of the moisture which is kind of insane the soil was too compacted and the water just came down and it just roared right through the nearest town and it washed out bridges and it killed people that is that is that was caused yes by a big storm but we could have mitigated that we could have prevented that from happening by having our landscapes be able to absorb all this water and i don't necessarily mean storing it all in the soil because a lot of places you'd have mud all the time you can store it in ponds and tanks and pools etc but we need to be able to have the ability it's like a battery here comes this energy source all this water boom we just store it and then when we need it we can drain off these little ponds and irrigate our crops water our livestock wash our cars there's there's some good videos online of uh jeff lotton uh also trained by bill mollison on some torrential rain and i think it's an australia um tanzania or somewhere his farm there and you know the rain coming down in torrential uh respects where he also has those ponds and they're they're staggered in a way also kind of on a sloping or pile where he has these one one pond drains to the other and it keeps going down and it spreads throughout the entire farm and it's a very good usage of water in a high rain area there's other examples so that specifically in germany when this hit and it also hit in belgium in in in london as well this last time where there was um trillions of dollars of insurance damage there was um at one point at time 1300 people missing there's more than 200 odd people who died during this time in 2017 uh it was in the billions of dollars of insurance damage also around 200 something people died uh both of these times was what what we're calling now these rain bombs or supercell storms where it's like kilometer or mile wide you know a thousand miles or a thousand kilometers wide cloud supercell storm that's collecting all this water and then it dumps it out like in one bathtub drain one spot and it just overwhelms the the the earth um no matter how sustainable you are no matter how great your farm is that's something that you really have to fight against or have to be set up very well for pre-planned for uh such a unnatural event um but interrupts it's a perfectly natural event it is natural it is normal this happens on planet earth we need to adapt to reality instead of thinking that this is normal and that's a disaster no the disaster is because we set up systems that did not function the way they could have and and I agree with you and the only reason I kind of say this unnatural is it is a natural occurrence I think it's more intense and it's gotten more intense over the years and the the range of moisture because our world is is warming in a different way there's automatically all over the world more moisture in the air there's more heat in the air which is more moisture in the air which is making the storms a little bit stronger a little bit more uh slower moving but also more impactful when they hit and and and I might be wrong you could disagree with me as it is but I'm kind of bringing it up because I think we're we're aligned in many respects there is a way to set up the infrastructure or your your surrounding areas that it would probably weather such a natural occurrence pretty well if it if it was done in the right way and and none of these places are a lot of them are industrial agriculture the the soils are already dead they're on their last leg of of minerals there's no hummus there's no hold they're they're not storing water if you saw some of the images in Germany of what was washed away there was a lot of farmlands in their all industrial ag and as that washed away you could see how it was basically just at the bottom end of a sand there was hardly anything which which in Germany is pretty unusual because there's normally not a lot of sand uh uh in here we're very good on forest and and these very rich soils in many respects so I think it's an infrastructure thing not only are the cities and the roadways not set up for such amounts of water but our farms are not set up for that and in traditional industrial ag I just wanted to bring that up whether you agree or not I don't know I just uh think it's interesting the um I think it was the American actuarial society uh they're the they're the they're the bookies for the bookies they're the people that do the numbers for the insurance companies uh and they have all the records in the world that they crunch the numbers on us and they say we don't necessarily uh have the ability to project what's causing this but we have the observational uh data that shows that yes storm frequency is increasing storm intensity is increasing and insurance companies generally don't lie and so that is some real hardcore data from people who actually they'll run their numbers and then they act upon that because that's the nature of their business whereas other people can go into denial and you know and propagandize away these various different things but yeah absolutely storm frequency and intensity is increasing and if we don't design uh our agricultural systems our urban suburban systems to adapt to that reality um we're being foolish with our resources and and the time is not like five years from an hour when we come up with this latest new technology no the time is 20 years ago we should be doing this and we now need to ramp this up as fast as we possibly can at scale which is one of the reasons why uh in restoration agriculture I focus almost specifically on the staple food crops the carbohydrates proteins and oils that make muscle and bone and bodies um not on the specialty crops not on the niche market gardening and that's one of the reasons why I've also only wholesaled my products my product go to wholesale markets that means you have to have pallet loads truck loads in order to go out the door and we can design perennial natural mimicked ecosystems that are wholesale sales uh in part why why I can get away with getting a wholesale price which is a lower price than if I were to sell at farmers market or whatever as I get the volume increase and my costs are so low because my system is almost a wild system I'll use an example of apples I was with a client just a week or so ago they had 200 apple trees that they paid $30 a piece for these apple trees they dug them into these big gigantic holes and added all kinds of compost to it they put a fence around each individual tree and then a fence around the whole orchard area and then they've mowed it for you know three or four times during a season it was a new planted orchard it's only like two or three years old had not yet started to bear and yet they have all these costs that they sunk into it um and they're really concerned about pests and diseases and you know will this happen and will that happen it's like well yes it will because what you've done is you have now taken your apple tree out of its ecological context all of the things that were provided for that apple tree by nature from the soil organisms to you know whatever else is floating in the atmosphere all of its nutrition all of its pest and disease control its immunity any kind of other masking sense to hide it from other you know pests and so on all of those things are now inputs that you have to provide and I pointed to an apple tree on the on a on a corner um just growing out of out of the woods next to their driveway I said now how much money have you spent on that apple tree over there I said well well nothing it just you know it's a wild apple tree it showed up on its own I said well okay if we go over there I'm willing to bet that off of that tree we'll be able to harvest probably one bushel of picture perfect grade a number one top quality fruit and there'll be you know 10 bushels of worm riddled diseased ugly looking fruit and they're like well yeah okay we agree to probably possibly that so now we have this bushel of fruit for $40 that cost nothing do the return on investment you know 40 divided by zero boom the numbers blow up imaginary numbers it's an infinitely incalculable rate of return it's it's free well now let's go back to this tree when we were picking them we sorted out our perfect ones now let's sort out the ones that have no bugs but just blemishes and they're physically deformed may have some disease on the skin now let's take that and squish it into some juice we can either drink it directly like that we can ferment it with oxygen to make vinegar or we can ferment it with no oxygen to make cider and then what's left that does have the bugs and all that kind of stuff in it let's go have the pigs go pick that up and eat it up off the ground we have a hundred percent utilization of that crop you know the first top quality is the dessert fruit then we have you know juice for human consumption and then we have animal feed and what did it cost us nothing was our total yield what they expect and what they want what the university tells them that they should get of course not but their expenses were were you know almost non-existent does that make any sense at all as an economic model no their model doesn't your model makes absolute sense and and and I see that time and time again I can't cannot remember if it was your course or if it was in the book and this is where you'll have to help me on some of the perennials that you plant when you go in you have have some unique ways on how you do them you do them like almost a bunches of three or these little clusters very close together can you tell us a little bit more about that and the thought process behind it and and what you're seeing how successful that is by doing it that way yeah I think part of what you're what you're blending is two different things one was with the apples I'd put four varieties of grafted varieties at a time to trial a whole bunch of different ones but the principle is the same whenever we're doing a planting we plant high density and those of you who live in areas with oak trees around may notice that every five or six years when they have lots of acorns they cover the ground with acorns and that's a survival strategy in nature plants make way too many seeds because not all of those seeds are going to grow into a mature plant so we plant super high density within the row and then we have uh they're mostly seedlings we don't we don't rely on grafted material we will include grafts in there but mostly seedlings because we want the genetic variability because when you roll the genetic dice that many times you're going to end up with one with superior yielding characteristics maybe superior disease resistance pest resistance some kind of magic plant is in there and we just have to find it we're just picking chestnuts yesterday and literally found chestnuts this big like two inches two and a half inches in diameter wow chestnuts that if we had planted a grafted variety of this known variety you know big deal would never get that this was a total it wasn't random because i've been selecting over time but back to the high density and why we plant high density we want those variations because now there's a winner in there so if we've planted chestnuts for example at 18 inches on center the research shows us that eventually in 15 or 20 years we want those trees to be 30 feet apart then we'll have maximum bearing surface area well so that means that we're going to have to remove material um through the years until eventually we have trees that are 30 feet apart and so what we do is we'll watch how they perform um if this one has lots of diseases we might take it out earlier this one produces really young it needs more sun so we'll we'll remove one that's next to it well chestnut would even when it's only two inches in diameter you can inoculate that with shiitake mushroom spawn so by doing the work of removing the tree we get another resource so by planting high density instead of just having cost cost cost we're setting up for additional yields so we can thin small diameter material for you know for for growing mushrooms larger diameter material can be used for building and so on and so then as as a trees get even larger some of them grow rather timber type straight and tall let's trim the branches off of that and we're eventually growing a saw log so my chestnut orchard if you call it that as chestnuts as the main species but then there are um elderberries in between the rows there's mulberry in there grapes raspberries currents uh hazelnuts and mushrooms and then I graze mostly hogs and then sometimes cattle says 10 different things coming off that same field all of them providing a small income stream I'm not going to bank on any one of those but I am focusing on producing chestnuts and all those other plants are with it in that system and it's 100 yielding system it's some of the most fertile soils on the farm now it was an all eroded hillside and now it's the most amazingly fertile soil you know that's so wonderful to to hear and then I'm I'm sure I mean you're I don't know if you're this far along but you were talking about selling off kind of in a nursery selling off some already pregrown do you take grafts and sell those off in a nursery or do you do much of that as well when you get these nice ones that you kind of graft them in or you actually take them off and sell them in a nursery or how do you do that the the seed that we harvest for our nursery goes to the nursery then we take some of that the elite seed and we put it in variety trials and then we have universities or nonprofits you know weigh and measure and and keep track of that well then once they go through a period of time in the variety trials we take that seed then we plant that out in a nursery and that gets sold for a nursery stock so we're selling some of the seed direct we're also using it to continue our breeding efforts and then whenever we have you know a particular species we were talking chestnuts we'll we have work with smaller nurseries that do the bulking phase where they're gathering in all of our seeds and grow them up into trees and then they plant their own where from which they grab get grab their seed well the seed from upstate new york is going to have slightly different selection pressures from the seed that's grown in arkansas or north carolina and so we have somewhat regionally adapted genetics from the various different regions and so if you're ordering from you know ohio we will get get you chestnuts from as close to you as we possibly can and the same with hazelnuts etc so it's all of the above that that's amazing and i love that you use everything and and you you've got a pretty busy lifestyle overall so i know um you you talk about doing karate with your kids and i've heard them on on some of the courses in the background and and uh you're running around doing not only the books speaking tours but you're doing other coachings and trainings and speaking about restoration agriculture you're you you said you're going to be in um germany in two weeks and you're going to a place in a castle area that is so beautiful you're going to love it the food's going to be great i i gave uh karen some tips on some good places you can go eat and i i hope that you thoroughly enjoy your time when you're here i i feel so sad because i would have ran over and met you and uh spent time with you at the event but i'm leaving this saturday to go to glasgau to the climate conference the conference of the parties where this last two years has really been a huge discussion about food about agriculture about regenerative organics about uh the united nations has set this a decade of action for restoration how do we restore our soil how do we restore our lands into something that will will heal us all you know because the biome of our world of our earth is really uh a telltale sign of of the health of our own biome our own uh human biome whether we're doing good or not as well and so um i'm just i'm very sorry that i won't meet you but we're going to find some other opportunities with the book and and uh i i i mentioned you know the cop because we've had this united nations food system summit talking about um all the tools the tips and the tricks and i've been tooting your horn your books and talking to people about i tried like heck to to get you into the conference and i'm sorry i i started too late and our discussions started too late but uh we should plan on next year that that we have a firm spot because this isn't going away it's only going to grow i mean it's only getting stronger this is a new book that came out from paul hawkin i don't know if you've seen it regeneration ending the climate crisis in one generation the majority of the books about restoration the majority of the books about food and agriculture um and uh and and so i think that what you talk about and what's out there and the direction that we're going of restoring things uh there's no better time than now you're you're properly placed and as i see you're all over so uh i i do have a question and that is how in the hell did you get invited to bioneers that is such a wonderful conference paul hawkins spoken there all these wonderful greats and and you're going to go speak there yourself uh is it about restoration ag what what are they having you talk about and can you kind of tickle a little bit of that event as well part of part of the the bioneers conference there that it's about scaling up permaculture you know to bring it to scale permaculture has had a i think it's a fundamental misinterpretation of something that bill mollison once upon a time had said said to take small and slow steps to do things small and slow so you don't make a huge you know category one error i agree with that um but however what that turned into is permaculture has to be small um a small one small slow and step would be to take all of the corn and soybean growing regions of the united states of america one small step would be to convert it back to the ecosystem that it was before we put it in corn and beans it's a small step but it's like 300 million acres it's a lot of land um so i think that that was a fundamental misinterpretation that the permaculture movement took into itself but back to um uh the the paul hawkin book there in in you know turning this all around in one generation just go online and look for you know new forest farm aerial photographs and you'll see photographs of my farm in 15 years uh you know one farmer small family uh took a burned out corn and bean field and turned it back into a functional oak savanna with all those different species in place and they did it at a profit so that's called a a proof of concept what we can do around the world is we can absolutely revegetate restore the ecology of this planet in 15 years at a profit but we can't do it with this western reductionist um you know closed-minded mentality with with these ferris wheels growing our spinach and 50 million acres under plastic we have to follow nature's rules and what we will find out that when we set about to healing nature it's healing ourselves and the process of going through what i have done uh here in the past 25 years if everybody did this what you would feel inside of you to walk through these you know literal cathedral forests that were because of these hands once i put those seeds in place you know those plants are on their own all the interactions the emergent properties that happen in a system like this that's all up to the miracles and wonders of nature but it takes a human being deciding to do things differently and what i am doing is i am from now on i am investing in nature i am investing in natural processes because of all these silly little systems that came up by human beings that were invented by human beings have always let me down nature has never let me down and as long as i help it out a little bit it helps a hundred times in in reverse i always ask all my guests um a couple questions that are that are similar uh the first one is the burning question wtf and it's not what the fuck it's what's the future and i want to know from you uh in your view what you've been doing what's the future for you what's the 2030 for you well for me um part of what i'm doing right now is uh same restoration agriculture but at a different scale of scales and working with um a couple different investor groups one of which is Cranmore advisors C-R-A-N-N-M-O-R advisors and they're the uh the group that's pulling the investors together that are buying a real estate that we're then converting to these types of farms with the intention of focusing uh um production of certain woody crops within that system to then justify the installation of the factories that process and do the value added products and marketing of those of those crops and Cranmore is focusing right now on um opportunity zones in upstate new york and the project that i just came off of you know this last weekend was in an area that the the farm it's a dairy farm that currently uh it's a massive contributor to pollution of the water because the stream that goes through it is all water supply for new york city and so by establishing these systems we can catch water slow it down soak it in so the water gets filtered by you know mechanically by the soil acted on biologically by the soil organisms and then the above ground will go to perennial plants and woody riparian buffers along all the different streams to increase the cleanup of that water uh and with the woody buffers that we're planting those are all different food plants chestnuts and hazelnuts and pine nuts and so on um so that that's that's more of the extent of what i'm doing and i'm doing more of training our own in-house staff so that i'm you know ultimately replaceable and that the work can continue and um i'll be doing more writing and more uh more you know uh podcasts and interviews that sort of thing i love it you know the large and impactful yeah instead of the guy with the shovel in his hands i've got enough gray in my chin right now that's time to be the you know the wise philosopher if if i only i could find the wisdom jeesh i'm looking for it you've got tons of wisdom in natures uh probably teaching quite a few things along the way uh the next and last and hardest question for you is very similar to the one i just asked but it's a little bit more philosophical or maybe more future-oriented it's it's a more global question what does a world that works for everyone look like for you well uh physically it would look a lot more like new forest farm aerial images aerial photographs um there would be a lot a lot less uh angry yelling at each other i think a lot of the angry yelling at each other is coming from a frustration that there are certain things that are not right in our world and instead of being upset with the fact that certain things are not right in our world and working that ferociously to really solve what's at the root of those problems we're yelling at each other instead and so uh i don't think that that is going to be created by any workshops that we go to or feel good seminars that we go to that it's it's the down and dirty interpersonal relationships of you and me and trying to figure this out and i'm actually going to refer back to a conversation um that erne fried fifer uh ji rodale and charles walters were at it was before i was born but my dad was at that conversation and he kind of explained how it happened well uh in the agriculture lectures by rudolf steiner erne fried fifer asked steiner well why aren't people as spiritually evolved as we possibly could be and steiner just quickly answered oh it's a it's a matter of nutrition you deal with the health and nutrition of the food and then people will be more spiritually evolved and that was all he said about it well later on in like the 19 late 1950s ji rodale um former founder of the whole organic movement uh with charles walters with him who founded acres usa they basically had a conversation with erne fried fifer and said fifer you've got to cut all of this you know spiritual science gobbledygook out of biodynamics and just talk about the practices these are the practices this is what you do in order to have organic agriculture um that the mainstream can adopt and and it'll take off and it'll change the world will be wonderful and fifer very staunchly said no because if you take away values human values spiritual values compassion all of the things that really make us human if you take that out of the system it'll become a code of laws and pretty soon the government will be involved and will be enforcing it and what has happened we now have a you know a national organic standard that the government is ultimately in charge of enforcing and it's not been good for the organic farmers it's it's create as much strife in in the marketplace you know you have people growing hydroponic blueberries it now qualifies you know there's all kinds of issues within the organic people trying to come up with a new label that means the same but better regenerative is one of them and i'm going to slap regenerative right in the face the term regenerate regeneration has had a meaning in biology and forestry in in ecology botany for 400 years it's been researched by phd's and that's the ability of an individual a community type or an ecosystem to reproduce itself on the site the way it is with the natural forces the wind the rain the storms the fires etc all of the disturbances that nature can throw at it it will resprout and regrow and it'll expand its population and there was no organic broccoli farm out there no regenerative broccoli farm out there that if you go and wipe out that broccoli crop it does not regenerate so it fails the ultimate test of regeneration it has to be able to regenerate itself grow and expand its populations and the only thing that i know that does that are natural ecosystems and so that's that's why i'm once again investing on nature i would too and i mean you know i i don't have a problem with you at all you know saying what you said about regeneration i think it's become very trendy and you know it's the the buzzword lately i interesting enough i had a conversation with a mentor of mine dr fritt fritt hold capra who's the system's view of life and and i knew this from previous conversations in his work but in the moment we were discussing i was so enamored with speaking with him i totally forgot and he said you know regenerations and restoration and and regenerative has been around for a long time and matter of fact i think you know who one of the first scientists was who came up with it and he says you know who do you think it was and so i'm going to ask you that as well who'd be before rhodale before rudolf steiner before any of those who do you think the original guy was the first scientist who came up with that well i don't know the name that you're going to come up with and i don't have a name associated with mine but it was actually forest research in germany that was 400 years old so who leonardo da vinci he believed it i love it yeah he was and he he used a little bit of a different term but basically um he went through and um he he he's the father of it and regenerate you know matter of fact i you know i have an example of of of that you know it goes into a dia theory and many other things when you talk about this but really regenerative is core of sustainability but it's also something that's been around for a long time and we think it's this new buzzword super dill but it's actually been around for a long time i actually wrote um i'm writing another book besides menu b on social innovation and it's been around for a long time and i mentioned our conversation of ritholf and about leonardo da vinci he's written several books on him as well but if you think about his observances of nature and of the human body of plants and animals he really saw this this process going on and that's how our world really works we're we're out of time i have three more questions for you and then i've got to say goodbye and these questions are really for um my listeners they uh i want to give them a takeaway from you if there was one or two vital messages that you could depart to our listeners here today that was a sustainable takeaway how the power to impact or change your life your message what would it be start now where you are with the resources that you have uh one of the easiest places to start is with your diet start to transform your diet begin by eating only perennial um plants if you eat animal products only animal products that are raised in perennial systems you know grass fed and so on then once you do that you can continue to refine that down down the road so start with your own life with what you have right now start eating perennials and then take it from there transform yourself transform your life start planting trees one seed at a time you know the mighty oak tree grew from a little acorn um and and if you want a great example of sustainable agriculture you've got to go to the island um of sicily mount etna is on the eastern side facing um facing roam about two-thirds of the way up there's a little village called san alfio and san alfio has in the center of the town square a chestnut tree that once upon a time had the largest trunk of any tree on the planet ever measured it's about 4 000 years old it's growing in the solid rock on the side of a volcano it's been shaken by earthquakes 10 to 15 times a day it's been burned to the ground several times keep sprouting back over and over and over and over it's el castano de gentle cavale that's sustainable agriculture that 4 000 year timeline so start where you are and think 4 000 years down the line i answered one yeah i absolutely love that that's great um not i want to caveat this next question uh a little bit in advance not everyone wants to jump out out of the hustle and bustle of big city life and become a fireman or an urban farmer or get into agriculture um but what would you tell the youth or the younger generation or innovators our future um if they're looking for ways to make a real impact would you say you know homesteading would you say farming would you what would what would advice would you give them the first advice that i would give them it sounds like a you know like an old geezer or an annoying parent that would say that um but with our current economic system the way it is right now do whatever you can within that system to figure out how to improve your credit rating learn how to manage your money and borrow regularly in order to increase your ability to borrow more those money management skills the essential money management skills of you know charitable contributions putting money aside to pay taxes and to save and invest and to borrow prudently for things that actually increase in value and pay them off uh in a timely manner so as to limit interest payments those skills right there are the most important skill whether you're running a business whether you're running a farm whether you're running your own household economy so start doing that then if you do want to leverage and make a difference uh in the real world by real world i mean the natural world not the human made world um farming is a great way to do it it is a great way to do it and how do you get into farming real estate investment buy a piece of degraded eroded nasty horrible a german farm that's been eroded down to the bedrock buy that farm and do the restoration work yourself while running a nursery business farm enterprise raise a family live a good life it works and yeah and even those who uh those billionaires and those who have the money are starting in on carbon farming they're buying land they're buying real estate so eventually it ties you to to farming and those natural resources those infrastructural basic needs of humanity so i love that advice the last advice is um you've been doing this for a long time and you're definitely a thought leader and a fabulous uh educator but what out of all of this uh do you say that boy i wish i would have known this back then is there something that you say boy i wish i would have known that or done this done it differently in all your experiences that's a great question because uh i'm not sure that i that i know the answer to that um because maybe if i'd known that all of what i was feeling inside and all these thoughts that i was having in the in the practical effects of what i was doing on the ground if i'd actually knew that that was going to take off and become as popular as it is right now maybe i would have done something different i don't know you know maybe i maybe i would have um tried to be more articulate or polite or i don't i don't know a lot of people say say it's the journey that they like but the others um a lot usually say i wish i would have started sooner and in some respects you said that you know start investing start learning uh you know the basic of economics and credit worthiness and how to manage your money and those things uh the sooner you get those things in line the more freedoms you have to do many things so i i think that was the perfect answer so that's all i have for you today mark it has been a sheer pleasure and all my audience um to to get inside of your ideas to see your mind to hear your stories and i really thank you for letting us inside of your ideas that's all i have unless you have anything you want to ask me or that we didn't get a address in this in this podcast that you want to say now's your opportunity otherwise i'm done i think we covered a lot of ground i thank you very much for uh for hosting me during this time and i hope to see you soon very soon i hope and i'll talk to you soon thanks so much mark have a wonderful day you're welcome and be sure to post all of the different links to all the different websites i absolutely will uh the books the podcast everything here's the one thing that i will add has anyone ever told you that you look like john mail no no john mail back in the in the 60s and 70s you look like john mail thanks so much i will definitely look i've heard a bunch of other people uh but i haven't heard that one before i will say i'm a mix between jesus and ferro faucet i think more like ellen watz yeah ellen watz is great too thanks so much take care mark thanks mark bye