 I've been farming since 1981, I'm technically not a farmer, I'm a horticulturalist and it's been a very long journey and I've earned my living from farming ever since that day. This is the produce and the pictures of the farm, there are other random pictures, just to illustrate what we do. Eatwell Farm is where I work and it's not just about soil, it's about community, it's about feeding people, it's about getting the involvement of the children, it's about cooking, it's about people learning to be, not just go to the middle of the supermarket and grab a packet of whatever, it really is, comes down to some very basic things. It's like a child coming into the field and I ask them what color is a strawberry on the inside and they say white and crunchy. It's because they haven't eaten a proper strawberry or a tomato or I don't like that. It's like it's about children tasting three or four different types of chard and discussing which ones they like and the parents looking aghast and saying if I serve chard at the dinner table they just go ugh, they'll never eat it. So really that is essentially what we do but we have to have a really good soil. This world is covered with a half foot of soil on average that we can grow in and we have to protect that. The fertile crescent, you see all these pictures of Baghdad and all that whole fertile crescent, it's brown, nothing grows there anymore because we've destroyed the soil. This has all happened before. We have to learn from the past. History is not something we really work on and we need to understand the past to move forward to produce fabulous food for our family and our children. So a lot of what I do on the farm is to make things easy. To grow organic vegetables or in a biological soil we have to have nutrients. Now those nutrients on our farm are provided not by, even now I can say something now, we actually don't use the compost coming from San Francisco anymore and I think that is a great success because what we did in year 2000, we took the compost that is made from the food scraps in San Francisco and helped enliven our soil. So that has been part of the process of renewal and healing for our soil and now we no longer need it so other farmers can use this compost to enliven their soil. We do it with cover crops, we do it with a whole diversity and techniques that I've learned from a lot of big farmers in the Midwest and a lot of fantastic new soil scientists who are coming out. I mean there are about five ladies in this world who are absolutely incredible at this new soil science and learning what is actually going on in the soil. There is a lot of work that we've seen in the videos tonight to understand what is actually going on and along with people like Alan Savery and Gabe Brown. Gabe Brown is a big farmer in the Midwest, Alan Savery is from South Africa. We've been able to understand how this works and use techniques to enliven the soil. On our farm I take three parcels of land on my farm. One of them, I don't grow any vegetable crops for one year and I plant the most diverse cover crops and grasses and pollinators and all this kind of stuff on that ground. And I bring in, every time they grow to a nice mature state I bring in sheep or even a tractor mower, that's my artificial buffalo and we mow that down and when eating or mowing that down at a critical stage causes the plant to push out lots of exudates, lots of food into the soil for all the bacteria and the fungi to grow. They thrive in that environment right around the roots and then the plant recovers and grows again and then we do the same thing again, the sheep come along a month later or six weeks later or whatever your soil, how it in your climate can handle, that's what happens. So we're pumping soil all the time, pumping nutrients into the soil for the soil biology to live. So we're building up a huge diversity and the compost, when we apply compost to that soil it helps bring more life and more bacteria into the soil to make it a more thriving environment. And now it's taken me many years to build my soil but I believe now with the techniques we have, we can turn the soil around in three to five years to a situation where it can totally be a recycling environment without the use of anything else. We also run chickens on our farm and there is kind of like a cleanup crew too so they're all part of the process. So after a year we then take that soil and we plant vegetables solid for two years and we just keep planting, we don't add compost, we don't add any artificial fertilizer any organic fertilizer, we just keep planting, planting. And then we bring in three years we bring the animals and the cover crops back to the farm so it's cycling, all total recycling. Now what is really going on in the soil is all these bacteria and fungi that are right around the roots they're eating all the sugars and everything from the earth photosynthesis and if you test the soil there's no nitrogen or phosphorus or anything like that, you can't grow a crop. So soil scientists will come along and say there's no nutrients there, you can't grow a crop. There's not enough yet to put it on. Well what happens during the growing season is the other soil life in the soil the arthropods, the nematodes, all these things that we didn't know about 20 to 30 years ago we saw them there, we thought they were dangerous and they thought they were doing damage to the plants they come along and eat the bacteria, they poop out all the nutrients that are in the bacteria and the fungi and the plant is plant available, it's right around the roots and the plants suck it up and they grow wonderful crops. It is to me outstanding how this happens, it's made my farming really easy because if I spend a year every three years working on my soil and growing these cover crops and building my soil I can then come along and plant peppers and plant tomatoes, plant radishes, whatever and they grow because the soil life is totally providing everything that the tomatoes or whatever crop we've got there is growing so my farming now has never been easier. I mean I'm seriously, I've been doing this a long time, it's never ever been easier along with the chickens that we come in afterwards, after crops to clean up any bugs and things like that we now no longer buy any fertilizer of any kind, we no longer spray our crops, even organic materials and yes occasionally we might get a few bugs or environmental conditions around us but it has been absolutely tremendous the changes for the farm. Now I'm doing this in the Central Valley in California surrounded by fields of tomatoes for Campbell's soups that remain bare for eight months of the year and they're putting on anhydrous ammonia, which is killing all the life in the soil, they're injecting gas into the soils and I'm growing in the next bright next field, I'm growing organic vegetables just like this and there's no way they could grow these crops because their soil is dead, they're sterilizing their soil I mean the stuff that made bombs in the Second World War they're using to fertilize their fields and we are using biology to do this and the exciting thing out of all of this is that we can produce fabulous food for people but we can do it in a very short time so whether anything happens, whether any changes happen, we can do this, we've proved we can do this and really that is the work that is really going on at Eat Well Farm or Food or Not, we're proving that these crops can be grown like this and the people that I have learned from and any farmer or anybody can learn from because of the wonders of YouTube is people like Elaine Ingham, Jill Clapperton and there's lots of other people talking about what they're doing and Gabe Brown who are doing it on a very large scale, we're not talking about small scale here I am not talking about small scale permaculture, herb circles, I'm a permaculturalist as well but I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about thousands and thousands of acres of land that can be using techniques to grow grain, grow meat, grow chickens, grow soybeans, grow everything corn this is on a really big scale for every crop we grow, grow fruit trees a guy called Mark Shepard in the Midwest, he's doing it in Wisconsin with Organic Valley there are so many people that are using these principles that we've learned from the soil scientists and managing animals, managing pastures, bringing all of this together is very important and it tastes good too and it feels good I want my children to eat really good food and when people come on the farm, we want the kids face to light up and go wow and run around and feel safe and people to come to the farmer's market and really have fabulous food and nourish their bodies we can't treat the soil as a chemical environment we have to treat it as a biological environment we can't treat ourselves as a chemical environment I know there's all this talk about cancer, so much cancer in the world and we've got to treat our whole body and our whole soil as a biological environment there's a lot of talk about biome, what's going on in your guts just like we're encouraging all the biology in the soil we've got to encourage the biology in our own body that's how we heal ourselves, we heal our soil and we heal this planet it's very frustrating because it takes a lot of people to understand and to work on this and there's a lot of people with very big vested interests I am in the county where I'm growing I'm regarded as a freak and a nuisance by most farmers because they have to be careful where they spray because I'm out there watching defending my property and I have members and families in San Francisco who are lawyers who watch out for me and everybody knows that and so they're being careful but we need to bring this to light but in a gentle, calm, exciting way and the best way we do this is to bring people onto the farm and to taste the vegetables and to see what life can be like and I think I'll finish there, thank you very much We have to have you present more often, that was very good, very inspiring Do you want to mention about the CSA boxes? Yeah, so there are many ways to buy our vegetables in San Francisco this is the farmers market you can become a member of the farm and get a vegetable box delivered to your neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area and also all the way up to Sacramento and easy to find us is eatwell.com we also work with other companies that deliver our boxes and deliver our produce including good eggs and farm box and a few restaurants also take our produce and obviously it's not just me, okay it's many, many people it's 16 people that work together on the farm I'm in the face of Eat Well Farm but they are very important, very skilled people that do this work and take a pride in it and one thing I'd like to note is that when I first started farming I worked on a farm where the guys that I worked with would finish work after 10 hours a day in the fields go home, garden, in their own garden so they could grow food to feed their families now they could take anything they wanted from the farm anything they wanted to feed their families but as they told me they knew how it was produced and they were not going to feed their families with that food right and to me the biggest thrill is to have my foreman came last year with this big group of people his family and the kids and they came around and they came out into the strawberry field with these kids one evening and they all take home bags of stuff I like it when they take home loads of produce eggs, take home meat, take home vegetables from the farm