 Hello everyone, you look very beautiful. You must be eating from a beautiful land. So it's lovely to be in this tent and on this island and last night I was reminded of the philosopher Isabella Stengers who talks about how critical it is, which thoughts are thinking thoughts and which stories are telling stories and which worlds are worlding worlds and the context into which we are speaking and creating and in this case co-creating and so the story of this place and the story that's being held here about the new story We're entering is like almost the perfect context to talk about radical land reform So thank you because it's not always such an awesome context to talk about radical land reform We my Marata and I arrived in the airport and the Ministry of Primary Industries Looked at us and said, well, are you horsey girls? And because they were inspecting our tenons taking away our avocados and And both of us had been here before as woofers and as kind of a rite of passage of becoming a young Farmer in the US is you know going on a woof adventure preferably somewhere awesome like New Zealand and then going back And in her case she worked for Elliott Coleman and in the lineage in Maine My case I worked on an Alan Chadwick lineage in California Full season years of apprenticeship with elders who are in that long relation with land And observing and trusting The institution of their instincts that's developed over time in a place in a reciprocal relationship that is driven by the volition of that place Yes So that's kind of what it takes just to become a greenhorn let alone, you know a real a master farmer, which we of course all Hope that all of us hope would hope to be happening As close to us as possible And in our headwaters So okay, the talk that I'm giving is the project is land repair and I wanted to just Introduce tiny bit the work that I've been doing that got me to this place very briefly because it might be good context Obviously the project is recruitment of bodies onto the land of sentience and care Of stewardship to use this big beautiful brain We've been given to manage the complexity and the thousands of decisions that it takes to bring that land back into life So the work the method the way that we've been doing that or I've been in the last ten years organizing is like very many different Infrastructure creation I would say would be a way to say it cultural infrastructure political infrastructure technological infrastructure And now coming to territorial infrastructure That meant parties for young farmers all over the country tours in Farmer halls films about agriculture that we made and distributed Almanac's Literary journal of young farmers writings weekly radio show blog Math media stunts sailing boats from the farm country into the city carrying all our gorgeous produce like kind of different lots of ways Of celebrating this story of new people entering agriculture with reform on their mind with change on their mind with a big Serious motivation to celebrate and and deeply disrupt the monoculture that we find ourselves in Yeah, one of the things we disrupted the other year was there was a Not this year it was last 2016 the the conference was called The Hunger Games it was a it's put on by the conventional young farmers organization and That it was called the Hunger Games and then it was called volunteer to be a tribute Needless to say we were there. We got got been some money by the organic milk people To pay for our booth and we went through all our materials because you know then the Hunger Games the revolutionaries win So it was quite astounding that they'd spend millions of bucks on a propaganda machine With a moral of which counter Counter Indicated their narrative So that was fun. So as all of this And through all of this, um, you know, I've been almost like a naturalist of the young farmer universe and Accompanying the the bravery and the free-range chicken of the kind of person who decides to buck all trends Listen to no one and follow a deep premonition of what is the right valuable thing to do with your life Which happens to be you know bend over in the sun for a long time with humility working hard and earning very little money Which is very different from Decisions that might lead you to the top of our economic food chain in this current market economy So it's a different character and it's a character I've really enjoyed studying and it's a character. I thought I might transmit to you all because that character That lives in that context is the character. We're gonna be in alliance with it's a character We're gonna be in a truce with And especially since some people here I know are coming from a more meta tech pattern of open source entrepreneur hero character also a different character You know in the pantheon of characters that exist and I think one of the big cultural projects is how do those characters meet and How do they meet as equals? in gentleness in mutuality and in relation So that's a question So now we're gonna talk about the character. Oh, yes, and this is another thing This is a farm hack is a platform on the computer and a place We meet in person where we put the tools that we as Farmers and farmers working with older farmers and younger farmers and working with computer engineers and people They went to school with and with architects with hacker designer people all the different formats of collaboration that arise in Cheap tools we can use on our farms because they don't sell the things we need in the store And there's more than a million people on there and there's great tools and you should spread the word It's not only happening. It wasn't just our idea. It's everyone's idea and that's open source universe of farm tools out there in In the UK in Italy in France in Guatemala But it'd be fun to do a farm hack in New Zealand and put that out there People show up who are fun really fun people to do show and tell and Tinker together in public Problem-solve together in a team format like around the tool in the Sun. It's very beautiful to be around Okay, so but back to the project The project that we're engaged in Moving from monoculture to diversity How did we get here? Let's set the context We can think about the future But we can also think about the future historically and I think we need to know a little bit the history in order to think historically about the future So in the US I'm seventy percent of farm work is done by people who do not have citizens status So the context in which we labor and the land that we're working to repair and the big project that we see ahead of ourselves You know, there's a major structural colonial extractive concentrating financialized cartel monopoly reasons That we're dealing with the situation and and and it would be naive of us not to recognize the structural violence That's been enacted and the legacy infrastructures that we're coping with And the racism and the expropriation and the exploitation that is inherent in the food that we're now eating and the land that we're now drinking from so Acknowledging that we are also all orphaned from the land Many of us not all of us. Thank goodness, but most of us are orphaned from the land and that injury We also carry So we have to be careful with each other and remember that injury and when we hug just hug gently Here's my chicken So, yeah, I mean I I had a whole other talk prepared about Arts and artists coming into radical agriculture, and I'll give you that talk later if you want And a really awesome group in England who did the Empire remains Which is basically anthropology, but they dressed it up as art And it was kind of like showing our cute little scar a little 19th century scar of extraction like a little kidney operation That that many of the white world Countries have from their extraction period you guys in your sheep colony lumbering mining California Wherever it was that was being plundered from your shores by people who came from somewhere else on the sailboat In some places, you know It's now the colonial architecture and it's lovely on the prow of a hill beautiful proud hall that people then forge an identity as working people that was a working people identity that was forged on ecocide and we're all coming into this as daughters of extraction Half breed expropriator and and expropriatee so it's complex But of course it's happening Now on in places on scales that are unfathomable You know with machines bigger than this room and Laser beams and herbicides and I just had to put the orangutans on here to make sure that nobody's eating any palm oil ever again Thank you very much And if you don't know about it go expose your brain to the pictures of that rainforest That's been leveled in the last ten years in my lifetime Rainforest 50 million acres of rainforest in Brazil in the Brazilian rainforest has been leveled for soybeans just in my life so anyway that our sweet little our sweet little version of of plunders Bigger other places So here we are now in this Here you have Gorse Here we are as daughters of extraction mothers of invention This happens to be breast tissue with cancer Which is a whole other amazing group of people if we could get the black lives matter occupy women gay Cancer moms. I mean if you get all those people together That's a lot of people if they were all eating properly from the land their power would be unparalleled So we get some more blobs here together And so anyway back to the gorse the gorse that's the invade invader the invasive species here Happens to be a scar tissue Just like that breast tissue Scar tissue of an invasive economy of an invasive species that happens to fix nitrogen and be really prickly and keep people out And you can spray it and they did but apparently if you don't spray it then the native plants start poking through and The understory which is tender and eat by possums apparently also Has its own has its own next phase and so that's as you're looking at the landscape And you need a reminder about the tender understory you can look at the prickly overstory to remind yourself Okay, well we just to review we're talking about the old boys with their subsidies and their market distortions We're talking about global trade. We're talking about climate flux and inflexibility. We're talking about the militarization of agronomy We're talking about massive concentration of power in the seed and agronomy sectors What else are we talking about? Those are the core dilemmas of fear that we face and I'm happy to do like one oh one What is the theory of change on sustainable agriculture taking over the planet with any of you as a one oh one one on one? later And what are the tactics What are the tactics of the understory? How are we approaching the revivification of these landscapes and the answer is pigs chickens Ducks vegetables fruit trees grains And in a succession that many of you have experienced that takes in each case usually ten years of commitment on on a piece of land a sequence of business Decisions that rebuild a local food economy and It takes time and It takes a lot of risk-taking and it takes an incredible amount of commitment Without a bunch of resources to do that work So here we find ourselves in the forest denuded and We recognize that the big project is to restore ecological vitality in that place and This work is being undertaken and there's incredible leaders and visionaries, and I know that you have them here And I know that they bob around as wonderful pollinators of inspiration and Inspiring the minds of young people with strong backs to go out and plant thousands of trees in agroforestry schemes and lift thousands of crates of pasture chickens to scratch up the grasses and do the work that it takes to restore the land So who owns most of the land is in the US? It's actually people over 70 So one of the things that is really really true about this particular moment is that the gray hairs have gray hair and the green horns have no money and The people who've chosen to enter agriculture from a young age are in no position to own the means of production Now I spent ten years celebrating the exceptions to that rule that comes with a gift with a family money with a sweet hookup with a non-profit or a school or a church or Borrowed land or a little lease or marijuana on the side or whatever But the basic math of the situation is you cannot afford to buy the land with the food that you grow from it and That is a major challenge to our project. And so that is the major challenge that is keeping me up at night giving me palpitations and Forcing me to do all sorts of good get hubbery and lawy land reform moves And to study the history of how did land relations occur in other contexts that were sane and safe and Healthful that we can replicate now In this big project of land repair. Yes So Then we go back into history and we say well What were all the different places in places in places where the commons were not tragic where the commons were durable and the commons were vital and The commons were Making beautiful for clean water and clean food for the people who live nearby and it turns out There's all over the planet. They're all over the planet Some of the really most beautiful ones are in tropical places, but they're also in dry land places I just organized this seminar in the southwest about the Asakia system, which is a commons irrigation ditch that is a whole big long story, but you could watch 12 hours of video that we put online on agrarian trust about the Asakia system Another one is in Hawaii the ahapua system and this This study of these models of indigenous guardianship council-based representative Holistic you could even say holocratic representation of the interests of the land on behalf of the whole community That occur so frequently in history and across geographies have been actually studied Systematically by an economist her name is Eleanor Orstrom. She's the only lady economist ever win the Nobel Prize and She's very amazing And she discerned from that study the kind of system dynamics of land relation the governance structures that are required for correct stewardship the constraints on Appetite for logging and mining and extraction expropriation and growing sod to export to the Saudi Arabians for their golf courses that is characteristic of our current agricultural economy, so those characteristics You can read about in a book called governing the commons and that was what is informing that's what story I'm thinking with In the group process that we've been thinking for agrarian trust Some of the other thinkers I have here is Leo Tolstoy a great theorist in the surf in a surfdom of Russia Talking about liberation of the land and common ownership of the land Henry George looking at land tax and trying to stop speculative and financialized valuation of land Wanted land not as a commodity The southern tenant farmers. These are the sharecroppers Union, this is Slater King cousin of Martin Luther King who went on a trip to the kibbutz In Israel looking for context to figure out how to hold land in common for the benefit of shareholders share Croppers. Oh, you know there is it interesting slip I Had a conversation with a guy who was the tech guy and He said oh, I've got a new app. It's so great. It connects the young farmers with the land It's like sharecropping 2.0 And I just stepped three steps back And I said oh, I got a baby engaged with this question And then Vinoba Bhaveh who After the liberation of India as a disciple of Gandhi said we cannot have an independent nation as a post-colonial India Which was you know sending cotton Sending cotton back to the Empire and in every way a colony Although a magisterial common colony said we need to have economic sovereignty and we need to have villages owning their land and producing for themselves and that village economy structure he made possible by walking around India mostly barefoot followed by followers in a Socratic dialogue with landowners and They donated four and a half million acres of land Gift to the commons to village management Vinoba Bhaveh anyway all these references are You can read on my rabbit website, and I hope you'll join us in this interesting journey of learning about these things so we embarked on this interesting journey of Bringing this knowledge together and fusing it all and managing the complexity of it through our use of the github Which took me a while And we worked with wonderful lawyers in Oakland using the community land trust model and with no time left. We quickly summarize Building a new land trust a new community land trust based on these principles This has already happened in France In the similar lineage of thinking Ter de lien has now 112 farms that are owned in common that are leased on a life basis to farmers who grow for the local community where thousands of investors an average of five thousand dollars each are Cooperative members of a council whose decisions are managing the right relations on that land So that's the vision that we hold and that's the work we'd like to do and that's the time we have So we'll see you in the tender understory of the commons