Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #266 Daniel Griffith

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Daniel Griffith is such an incredible resource that I am so grateful for having in my/our circle. He comes through big on his origin story and intro to regenerative agriculture. There’s so much more and depth synergy to the regenerative space than most of us, including me, know. He gives us the good, bad and ugly about the current paradigm. While it is a positive trend, there is work to do. Let’s get after it yall! Connect with Daniel:   Website: robiniainstitute.com - wildtimshel.com -  eatcommons.com  Instagram: @robiniainstitute - @timshelwildland - @commonsprovisions    Show Notes:   Allan Savory TED Talk - How to Green the World's Deserts… "Wild Like Flowers" -Daniel Griffith  Regenerative source for meat in the Mid-Atlantic - eatcommons.com  "Ishmael" - Daniel Quinn "The Sand County Almanac" Aldo Leopold "Holistic Management" - Jody Butterfield/Allan Savory    Sponsors:   Desnuda Organic Tequila Sometimes being fully optimized entails cutting loose with some close homies. We have just the sponsor for that occasion. Head over to www.desnudatequila.com for the tippy toppest shelf tequila in the game. Use Code “KKP” for 15% off your first order! HVMN - Ketone IQ This is legit jetfuel for your brain. Whether you’re fat adapted or not, this will work. Get 10% off by heading to https://hvmn.com and use code “KKP” at checkout.  Bioptimizers To get the ’Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu  Our Sponsor - Aura offers all-in-one digital safety for your entire household. Identity theft, fraud, and malware are just some of their offerings. Go to https://aura.com/kyle for 14 days free and 40% off your plan.    To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle:   Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service Academy  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys   Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com  Zion Node: https://getzion.com/ > Enter PubKey  >PubKey: YXykqSCaSTZNMy2pZI2o6RNIN0YDtHgvarhy18dFOU25_asVcBSiu691v4zM6bkLDHtzQB2PJC4AJA7BF19HVWUi7fmQ   Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome back to the podcast, y'all. I did a great thing. I did a great thing because I listened to one of the staff members at the farm, Jaylene Novotny. I think I'm saying that right. Please don't kill me if I said it wrong. Jaylene had an idea about ongoing education for us as farmers. And I was a little on the fence at first. I was

like, man, I don't know. I don't know. I kind of had the wrong idea. And we ended up making a Zoom call to this guy, Daniel Griffith, who runs the Robenia Institute out in central Virginia. And after the Zoom calls, full fuck yeah. Yes, this is a must. We got to go. And was so thrilled and so blown away by what we learned in a week. And I realized three days in that we're just scratching the tip of the iceberg. This young man has his lifetimes of information at his disposal through trial and error, through his own health journey. And it was a fucking treat being out in Virginia, out in Wingina. What a cool town name, right? W-I-N-G-I-N-A. That did not slip past me.

And my high school brain really had fun with that one. And the ladies seemed to put up with it okay. But yeah, that was something that really stuck with us throughout the week. And I'm sure it will every time we make our trip there. We're going to make an annual trip to see Daniel. His work and the work that I've come across, it is reconfirmed that I am connected to the very best of the best in any field. It is not six degrees of separation. It is one degree of separation. You are too.

Not special about that. But you got to know it for yourself in order to realize that as with any manifestation. But Daniel reconfirmed that, you know, we've had Chad Johnson who has worked on our permaculture aspects of our food forest and is ongoing, doing ongoing work in education with us. And Daniel Griffith is in that category of farmer. He is next level. And we really dive into a lot in this podcast that debunks what's happening in regenerative agriculture. He was telling me that there's a documentary film coming out that shits on regenerative. And I was like, well,

what's good about that? What's the better option? And he really did start pointing out some of the things that aren't regenerative, that aren't sustainable in the regenerative space. And we dive into that on this podcast. It's very informative. We don't call out names in terms of who's doing it in the space right now. So not trying to burn bridges with people. And Daniel really understands that there is a point and a purpose to that type of farming. And it's not black and white. There is a gray area, but that's not the style of farming that he's teaching us. Everything he taught us is about sustainability. It's about rewilding the areas that we work with. He recommended a shit ton of books that I'll be talking about on this podcast. We dive into one of those and it's called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

We'll link to that in the show notes. I finished it while I was there on Audible. That's how fucking good this book is. When I get a book that I like, it's done under a week, no question. And I finished that one in four days. Daniel is like me, only better. He finishes a book every 48 hours when he's in the right season. So you can tell when you run across somebody that reads a lot. Like when I stayed with Ben Greenfield, I saw his library and I was like, what's your reading pace? He told me 248 hours. I was like, fuck. So I'm not quite there yet. I'm sure when my kids are older and I have a little bit more free time on my hands that my reading pace will pick up. But either way, if it takes

you a month to finish it, big fucking deal. Finish it. Read this book. It is super important. And it really, really explains what's happening and has been happening for the last 10,000 years in our culture in a way that is not only palpable, right? There's this idea that anything that's in the shadow is inherently outside of our purview. What does that mean? It means we can't see it. Why can't we see it? Our ego will not allow it, right? If there's a particular way I act when I'm enraged and it's a lot like my father, I may have no idea that those programs are coming up, but my wife may know it.

My kids may know it. My friends may know it, but I can't see it. Now, if I go back in time and look through, well, I did kind of blow up with my last girlfriend and I did kind of do this thing and I did kind of respond that way with my son when he was three, if that pattern emerges, I might be able to say there's still something here to work on, right? And the stuff this book points to, I'm not sure, I'm not certain if it was written a different way that our egos would allow us to say yes to it. It's that jaw-dropping. It's that hard of a pill to swallow.

But this isn't a doomsday book. It's not a hard book to read. It's an inspiring book, and it's an educational book, and it's one that leads us to a doorway back into which a reality that we can coexist with nature is possible. It is a requirement for us to create the more beautiful world that's possible, that our hearts know is possible. And Daniel's a fan of Charles's work. Charles obviously been on this podcast a couple of times and fairly recently. So that does come up. And I love this conversation. Consider it the first of many, there is no doubt. And I got Daniel to start his own podcast and I'm actually going to pull it up here just to make sure that I get this right. He breaks down this definition on the

podcast, so don't worry if you don't get it. It is Denusion, the Daniel Griffith podcast. And I will be retroactively putting his first episodes into the show notes here so you guys can click on it and follow. He's going to do a series of solo casts, maybe seasonally based, that really deep dive, not only regenerative agriculture, food and health, but culture and society and poetry

and all sorts of dope shit. I mean, this is, to call Daniel a Renaissance man is an understatement. He has a gift and a knack for really diving deeply into the things that he cares about. And he is nothing short of flawless in many of them. Doesn't mean he doesn't make mistakes. In fact, the way he taught us about regenerative was you plan knowing you're going to fuck up. And then you've used that fuck up through observation to replan. That's brilliant. Who does that?

Well, Alan Savory does that. And Alan Savory wrote a fantastic book called Holistic Management. We will also link to that in the show notes because that was one of the main things that we went out to learn. And we do touch on holistic management and some of the principles of that. But the goal of this podcast was not to rabbit hole or deep dive any one particular issue. It was to cover every, you know, broadly, a lot of what we had learned at the Robenia Institute that Daniel runs out in Virginia, Virginia, and I loved it, man. I absolutely love Daniel. His family is incredible.

These guys are doing the good work and they are so inspiring because seeing him run his 400 acre operation is, is it just makes me want to do it. You know, I mean, we made several changes to our game plan and what we're doing in Lockhart having been there with him. And I really owe a lot to you, Daniel. Thank you so much for coming on this podcast. I can't wait to listen to your podcast, brother. So yeah, check that all out. Share this with friends. This is a fantastic episode. Share it with friends for sure. Anybody that's interested in food and health

and society as a whole, read Ishmael for sure. And then write me. Let me know what you think about it. I'm back on Twitter at Kingsboo. And of course, my wife runs our page, Living With The Kingsburys. We're now taggable.

Yo, we made it off the banned list on Instagram. Whoever would have thought that could happen? So tag us on Instagram at Living With The Kingsburys were now taggable. Yo, we made it off the banned list on Instagram. Whoever would have thought that could happen? So tag us on Instagram at livingwiththekingsburys. Write us on Instagram and count the days until we're banned again because you fucking better believe that we're going to get banned again. There is no chance I'm going to stop telling you guys the truth. Also support this podcast by supporting our sponsors because they make this show fiscally possible. What does that mean? That means when I fly to a guest, when I fly a guest in, when I'm taking time out of my day-to-day and not being with clients to actually sit and gear up and rehearse, or not rehearse, but educate myself on the material. A lot of the times when I have an

author on, I'm reading their book first. That's taking time out of my day to do that. And sponsors make the show possible. So support these sponsors. They'll continue to support the show. And then we will have this wonderful gift return. Everyone that I have sponsoring the show is somebody that I've handpicked. And we actually have a brand new sponsor today. Y'all are going to think it's weird. It's an alcohol sponsor. Why do I have an alcohol sponsor? Well, there's really two types of alcohol. Y'all have heard me talk about dry farm wines and then really good tequila. That's it. Those are the only two types of alcohol I have.

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and easy for me to sit back and not worry about what's happening with my passwords, what's happening on the dark web, what's happening if I click on the wrong porn link. Who knows, man? It's all there. But I know these guys got my back. Aura.com slash Kyle. And without further ado, my brother, Daniel Griffiths. And they called me to interview us just in terms of like agricultural practices and such. And an hour into the conversation, zero agricultural practices were discussed.

It was only philosophy. And the lady goes, I've turned the recording off. I'm not taking any notes. I'm just really enjoying this. We're going to have to do another interview. Yeah, round two. Round two, right? And we did two more interviews and finally got an article written.

It's better than not having an article written. Who was that with? That was with the Lancaster Farming Journal or something like that. Totally unexpected. She was like, I thought I was just interviewing a farmer. I was like, no. Bet off more than you could chew. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. I think we all did this week. We came out here to Tim Scholl Farm, the Robenia Institute out in Wingina, Virginia. Best place on earth. Loving the name Wingina. And I think speaking on behalf of the team that we have out in Lockhart, like we're thoroughly blown away. And not just because of what we learned in regenerative agriculture and farming and holistic management, which we'll dive into a bunch of hot

topics all surfacing around that, but also the philosophy and the books that you love and the poetry and all the things that you're into that make you, you. And yeah, it's been fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And I'm thrilled that you're on the podcast here. Hey, I appreciate it. It's a blessing having you guys here. When we teach courses, we never know the quality of the people coming. And we always wonder if it's going to be an enjoyable experience for us. And this has been truly life-changing for me to get to know you guys. So it's been awesome. It's really awesome. A blessing to have you. Absolutely, brother. Well, we start in the same spot on every podcast. Tell me about life growing up. What helped shape you into the person that you are today? was a second of four kids, all homeschooled, son of a serial entrepreneur father who I think holiness, godliness,

and entrepreneurism is what he stood for and imbued all of that into his children for sure. High athletic career my whole life, Division I college recruit out of high school my junior year, pretty much could have gone anywhere, two-time national champion wrestler. I have more friends in professional sports and Olympic champions

in wrestling than I have not. Just very focused on athleticism and being outside and being wild. My parents, like I said, they homeschooled us. And I remember the dominant school activity growing up was reading and doing what my mom called tellbacks, where we would read and read and read until we got tired, and then we would just sit down on our bed and talk about it, right? Tell it the story, tell it back, right? Open up that creativity.

And so it was a youth full of creativity and hard work on the athletic side. My dad just basically empowered anything I wanted to do. And so when I was in seventh grade, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every day, I would drive up to St. Vincent St. Mary's, LeBron James's high school. They had a dope wrestling team. And I would just personally train with their wrestling coach. And we would work out. And that was my school. Like we really got to explore some really creative unschooling type activities. Long story short, my junior year in high school, Division I scholarships, like I said, anywhere I wanted to go. I emerged into the first day, the first practice of the first day.

It was August 1st of two-a-days into my senior year. And we were jogging around the field. The first warm-up lap of the first practice of the first day of my senior season. One of the top-ranked football players in the state of Ohio led the solo tackle record the previous two years. Middle linebacker. Middle linebacker, that's right. That's right. 220 pounds at the time.

And we were jogging around the field and I collapsed. Just literally hit the dirt. I collapsed. I ended up basically having two broken hips, two broken shoulders, a nervous system that was more or less separated for lack of a better term. I ended up playing through the season. I played six games out of the 10. I was carted off the field after every game.

I didn't practice during the week. Still led the solo tackle season for Ohio. But it was a very denuded year. It wasn't up to potential, and it was very, very, very painful. I would basically play the game, get carted off the field, go to physical therapy, go to the Ohio State Medical Center, and get physical training and ice and, you know, STEM therapy. We just did everything we possibly could to get my body back in, in shape, uh, for the next game. And, uh, and at the time we thought it was just

like a sports injury. We didn't understand the true height of the problem. And then after the season, I took a couple months off and a good friend of mine, a really dear friend of mine in our wedding, and me and his were still really close to this day. He came over to our house, and we were lifting some weights, and I was physically still struggling. And he said, Daniel, it's been months, man. You're still struggling with these sports-related illnesses. I thought it was hip flexor strain and neck strain or delt strain.

I thought it was a strained muscle or something. That's what Ohio State thought. And he goes, you should get this checked out. So we started to look into it, and then we started to realize the height of the issue. It was a degenerative genetic disease where basically my bones and organs are just collapsing in on themselves. So I was losing marrow. I was losing bone structure. My bones were deteriorating. My liver was functioning at about a 30% level. So from a bone and overall

body operational perspective, just complete degeneration. Fast forward seven years, lived in hospitals all over the country, traveled all over trying to get medical answers, have all my limbs taken off my body and put back on tons of surgeries, tons of diagnostic surgeries. I once, a huge part of my life, um, a huge moment in my life that is, I was laying on a table. It was on a operational, you know, uh, OR operational room at the Cleveland clinic. And I was laying there and they were doing these diagnostic tests where they were sticking these massive needles like massive needles they were connected to all these tubes

all into my body, into the different joints and muscles and they were injecting all of these dyes pretty much and then in live time, scanning my body to see how the dyes were being manipulated or not manipulated. And they would move the needles around and I would wince in pain. I mean, big needles in your body and it's not fun. And I remember it was very painful. Most pain I've ever had in my life.

And I remember one of the nurses, she was fully garbed, you know, full operational room gear. Head mask and gloves. I don't know how old she was. I think she was a woman. Her hands were soft. She took her glove off and, uh, starting to get a little emotional, but she took my hand and she held it. And she said, this soon shall pass. She literally said these words to me in, in the operational room. And I'll never forget it. I can tell you everything about that moment. What you didn't know was the moments actually passed. Um, very soon after that, we were at the lowest point in my life, um, from a medical health perspective. And, uh, a friend of mine have had gifted me, um, a book on regenerative agriculture and I was reading it, had no interest

in regenerative agriculture, had no interest in better foods. And, uh and I was reading it had no interest in regenerative agriculture had no interest in better foods and uh I was reading it it was springtime in northeast Ohio a beautiful time for all of our Ohioans here um about the only beautiful time in Ohio um and I was reading I was sitting in the back porch of my of my family home on 30 acres where I grew up and and explored creativity in the world and ran around naked and got way too covered in dirt way too often. And I was reading it, had a little fire and just watched spring emerge. And my mom, she walked out of the back sliding door window, you know, the sliding door of the house, the back porch. And I'll never forget it. Just like the moment when the nurse picked up my hand and said, this soon shall pass. She walked out, my mom that is, and she had a

little tear in her eye, legitimately a little tear in her eye and a little smirk on her face. And I, and I remember both a feeling of joy and pain, pain and joy, grief, if you will, this emotion that I write about now in my later life. And she walked out, she says, Daniel, we've tried everything. And I was like, mom, today? I don't know what you're talking about. What do you mean we've tried everything?

She goes, no, no, no, we've tried everything with your health. I said, yeah, we have. I mean, acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, Eastern medicine, Western medicine, taking my limbs off my body. I lived at the Cleveland Clinic for about nine months where I relearned how to walk after taking my limbs off my body. I was like, yeah, we tried everything. And she goes, but the only thing we haven't tried is chickens. And I said, okay, what do you mean? And she said, Daniel, we've been passive this

whole time. We've passively attempted to heal you, meaning that we've gone to people and asked, what's wrong? How do we fix this? And she said, Daniel, we have 30 acres. What if we change our passive attempt into an active one? What if we just buy some chickens and start raising them? Change our lives, change our diets,

start focusing on the health of the animals and maybe that food can heal you. I said, no, it's not possible. But we bought them. We bought 100 black Osterlob chickens from Murray Hatchery that day. I was married to Morgan, my wife, at that time, or by that time. She was off working a full-time job. She came home that night and I told her, I said, Morgan, my wife, at that time, or by that time. She was off working a full-time job. She came home that night, and I told her, I said, Morgan, we're farming now. And she says, what?

And I said, yeah, we bought 100 chickens. And she goes, you don't know how to farm? Because we didn't. I mean, we had no idea of pastured poultry or what organic was or any of that. And that's what kicked it off. Health started to return. I started to get enough energy to work

at a friend of mine's operation, 200 head cattle operation in Northeast Ohio. He paid me because he didn't have any way else to pay me. He paid me in organs and bones. The exact thing that I needed to be eating. The exact thing that I needed to be eating. The exact thing that I needed to be eating. And we fell in love and, you know, 12 years later we're here. Running a 400-acre wildland in central Virginia.

Perfectly healthy, too. I mean, I'm not you. I'm not seven foot tall and muscle man, but I'm pretty good. Yeah, just, I mean, to, to do what you guys are doing, you know, as a husband and wife with the occasional intern, that's the proof in the pudding to handle that workload. Um, yeah, I mean, that would kick my ass and certainly put stress on the marriage. If my wife and I were doing that with just two kids, you got three kids while you're doing it. Right. So that's a feat in and of itself um I want to dive in a little bit of the

education because you got that book you started doing it it seems like you almost like us said fuck it we're in and then and then now let's get educated since we're in I did the same totally MMA I remember my first the the, the, I've told this story before, but the first time, um, the first time I actually had a pro fight was because the guy at the place I was training at, he ran a fight promotion and he's like, dude, just do it. You're tall. You're handsome. If you win and you like it, keep going. If you don't, you can say I had one pro fight and I was like, all right, a hundred bucks, a hundred dollars. I got to pay a hundred dollar flat rate to fight. And when my first two fights in under 30 seconds, fight three. And I'm like, it goes the distance I win. But I was like,

yeah, I should probably start paying attention and training and actually diving into this. You know? So that, I mean, that's, it's kind of what it seems like with, you know, the, the adventure into farming for you as well as us. Like, let's, let's actually get some, get some knowledge here. Let's learn from some of the best of the best. Talk about where you started and what led you to Savory. Yeah, that's a good question. I often tell people that when you're so low, it's only blessings. When you're so low, it's only blessings. You have no other choice but to jump in headlong, break your neck, or your neck's almost broken already.

So when you're solo, it's only blessings. And that's the way we attack to agriculture. A good friend of mine was a student of Jeff Lawton, the permaculture guy down in New Zealand, Australia area. And so he said, man, you need to learn permaculture. Permaculture's a shit. I said, okay, we'll learn permaculture. So I studied with Jeff Lawton, gotta learn permaculture. Permaculture is a shit. I said, okay, we'll learn permaculture. So I studied with Jeff Lawton,

got a permaculture design certificate, fell in love with the idea of community. Permaculture as a vegetative design science is all about guilds. That plants by themselves grow less optimally than plants within a guild, a community. Guild is a vegetative or botanist word for community. I fell in love with it.

Started to see the connection between plants and then I started to work with animals and realized that I'm more of an animal husbandry guy. Like I said, I was working at that multi-hundred head cattle operation and I really just found complete joy there. In a food forest or a market garden, I have less joy. And I think that's really important.

I think joy in any sort of activity, especially a healing journey, is just absolutely critical. And so we got out of permaculture from that perspective. I mean, our farm at the time was called Timshel Permaculture. And if I have to say, one of the other reasons we got out of permaculture, not just because we were less vegetative-based, but people would come from all over the world. I mean, we had the secretary of agriculture from Sweden or Denmark. She flew out here, and she wanted to see the place, and so we gave her a tour, and she looked at me, and she was like, the undersecretary of agriculture, whoever she was. And she looked at me, and she's like, where's the permaculture? And I said, it's all around you. We've got we got 400 acres of it right key lines and ponds and all

this really cool stuff she was expecting permaculture in this linear array of you know micro markets in costa rica exactly exactly no this is central virginia this is open range um and so we got tired of people asking us where's the permaculture and so we started to do a little bit more soul searching and found the savory institute holistic management this idea of large scale or large landscape-based regenerative agriculture we started to understand soil health a little bit more intimately and then we just fell in love with cattle i mean plants are really cool plants going into cows are much cooler in my opinion um i I always joke with people, I'm the biggest vegetarian around. I just prefer to go through my cow first.

Fell in love with cattle, fell in love with sheep and goats and pigs, and the history is there. I was teaching a course a couple years ago, maybe five years ago, that caught Savory's attention. That's how it happened. And then we applied and went through a couple of year application and accreditation journey to become a Savory Hub. Then we formed the Robinia Institute back in 2018, 2019 officially, which became the Mid-Atlantic Hub with the Savory Institute teaching holistic management,

regenerative agriculture, wildland ecology, basically from Pennsylvania to Florida as far as west as Tennessee. So that's a little bit of a story. Yeah. I will link to a quick 20-minute, brilliant 20-minute TED Talk that Alan Savory did. He's one of the main featured people and kiss the ground

the documentary which we may dive into uh eventually around uh philosophy if you desire that yeah exactly well i definitely want to i definitely want to get into some philosophy rabbit hole stuff and certainly on the regenerative side of things um but he is featured in the documentary and um it's funny we almost didn't come here because there is a tinge, and I have Ryland coming on, the guy who produced Kiss the Ground, I think next month or at the end of this month.

I'm not certain. So I definitely want to chat with him. One of the questions that I'm going to propose to him is why is there the undertone of eating less meat? As if that's healthy for the earth or for people. And I'll dive deeper into that with him, but I kind of lumped savory into that crowd. And so when Jaylene was like, Oh, go see the savory Institute. And I was like, nah, this guy's like put animals on the ground, get, take humans out and let nature restore herself. You know? And she's like, no,

I think you know, he's, he's about this, this and this, you know, and we had our zoom call, but, um, since then I've taken a deeper dive into savory and obviously think thanks to Jaylene completely proven wrong prior to this trip. That's why we're here. And it's awesome. It's been, it's exceeded all expectations. Um, what were some of the things that struck you, um, that Alan was changing in the game of regenerative that you really wanted to be a part of? It's a simple and beautiful question. Um, management, management, Alan has his terminology. He uses it in a lot of his It's a simple and beautiful question. Management. Management. Alan has this terminology. He uses it in a lot of his talks. In his TED Talks, he talks about it. Humans, technology, none of these are bad things. It's how we manage,

how money, labor, and creativity is managed. That is a regenerative or degenerative force. Technology is neither regenerative, neither is it degenerative. Animals are neither regenerative, neither are they degenerative. It's how they're managed. How communities are built and nurtured and loved, how they're managed matters. And this phraseology demands a sense of context, right? So what's the context of the management? And now it's forcing us to actually be purposeful in our understanding of our communities. It's forcing us to be purposeful in our creation and nurturing of those communities,

but also the actions within those communities. It's hard to manage on accident. We're doing a lot of regeneration on accident today, which maybe we'll talk about later, but we're also doing a lot of degeneration accident today, which maybe we'll talk about later. But we're also doing a lot of degeneration on accident. The idea between a regenerative system and a healing system is this idea of active participation,

of active becoming. So I wrote this book last year, Wild Like Flowers, and the intro to it is this etymological root. It's really a play on words, the etymological root of the word cultivation. So I think most agriculturalists, most farmers today, most market gardens, permaculturalists, holistic managers, entropic agriculturalists, whatever you call yourself, I think most of us agree that we're cultivators of the earth, right? Ford's commercial in like two Super Bowls ago was like the farmer, the cultivator of the earth, right? This mantra of cultivation is huge in agriculture.

It's the foundational paradigm, the cultivators of the earth. It's interesting though, when I was writing Wild Like Flowers, I wanted to know the etymological root of this word cultivation. If it's so universal, it's so global, what are we really dealing with here? I think words have unbelievable potency.

And so I looked into it, and the Latin root of cultivation is a word called cultivo. It's a verb called cultivo, and it means to till to toil or to turn over and it hit me immediately i'll never forget it our daughter sequoia she was just born it was the middle of november and uh i remember her in that moment she was i was writing one room she was crying and trying to figure out the whole nursing thing and the other and uh and i remember seeing it and seeing to till to toil to turn over and it struck me i said wow to till, to toil, to turn over and it struck me.

I said, wow, I want nothing to do with cultivation. And so I started to dig deeper and I dug and dug and dug and researched and I found that cultivo's cognate, its etymological root, the foundational word of cultivo is not Latin and it doesn't mean to till, to toil, or to turn over. It's Greek. It's Koine Greek.

And it's palo. P-E-L-O. Palo. And it means to be or to become. And I get chills. And I got chills then. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. The foundational understanding, the paradigm, if you will, of cultivation is not tilling, toiling, turning over, working.

It's being. It's becoming. Right? That's what is required in management. It's really hard to manage something that you're not a part of. You know, and right now we have this idea of mother culture, mother earth, which maybe we'll talk about later. Absolutely. And it's the divergence of cultivation or cultivo and palo it's the divergence between

tilling and toiling which is work it requires control like try try to toil and till without control it's impossible it requires control palo Palo doesn't. Palo requires management. It requires being. What's the difference between humans, the human world and the natural world? I think we'll live in a much more beautiful world than our hearts know is possible. Pull in some Charles Eisenstein here. When we realize that there is no difference. That it's just the world. The human world doesn't exist. The natural world doesn't exist.

The world exists. It is one whole, one ecosystem. Many environments, a beautiful, diversified, microclimate-infused bounty of environments, but it's one ecosystem. And this one ecosystem demands being or becoming, not cultivation, not cultivo, not toiling, tilling over or turning over.

That's what drew us to holistic management in Alan Savory. It's this understanding that management matters. And to manage, we have to first become. Ruin the book for you, Wild Like Flowers. The last little bit is, it's a moment where we argue that in order to regenerate, we have to address the soul, and then we can progress to the soil. It's this understanding of being. Regeneration is not about soil health.

It's not about biodiversity. It's not about carbon sequestration or fixing water cycles or mineral cycles or producing nutrient-rich soil, producing nutrient-dense beef. It's not about local economics. It's about relationship. Regeneration is about relationship. It's not about anything else. Everything else will come as a byproduct

of healthy communities functioning as being in relationship. That's holistic management. I love it. And I love just understanding the context of holistic management that we spent at least an afternoon, maybe an entire day on, right? Which was so critical. And for most of it, didn't understand the why, but we'll just, all right, let's dive in. And then after the fact was like, holy shit, you know, and then the consecutive days after, how that applied to any decisions with big questions we had, like how many sheep do we run cows at what rate, you know, all those things because we had a context factored into that. But the understanding of being and becoming fits perfectly into that. What is the future we live?

Well, that's our becoming, right? If we're not doing that now, we never get there. Yeah. Yeah. Holistic management courses, that now, we never get there. Yeah. Yeah. Holistic management courses, they're always hard because it's just a pure Socratic dialogue. Right. How many sheep do you want to run? What kind of landscape do you want to support? Right. What kind of sheep?

What kind of sheep do you want to manage? Right. It's a Socratic dialogue, all founded back to the holistic context. The holistic context, the elucidation of not just your whole, the boundary of your own making, as we discussed, but also the quality of life, the future, the ideals, the visions, the values that you're trying to co-create within that community. Between the human community and the land, the land community itself, the human community itself, that all has a context, which we would call the holistic context. I once had the opportunity to sit Alan Down, the founder of the Savory Institute, as you mentioned, Alan Savory, the formulator of this idea of holistic management.

And I asked him, I said, Alan, you're 85. You've been doing this since the 1950s, early 1960s. I got you alone. What is holistic management? He put his fork down. I'll never forget it. He put his fork down. He says, well, Daniel, according to my book, holistic management is a decision-making framework to manage complexity. You can hear the farm operations behind me. Geese a little earlier. Yeah. Yeah. And that little turd Baxter barking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Operations of a wildland for sure.

And he said, you know, according to my book, holistic management is, you know, a holistic decision-making framework to manage complexity. And he goes, but really, if you form a holistic context and you make decisions off of it, you're managing holistically. I thought that was interesting. That's very simple. Right? That's unbelievably simple. Very simple truth. And he goes, well, to be honest with you, let me say that differently. I was like, okay, shit, here we go. And he goes, actually, holistic management is overgrazing on purpose. And he just paused and he moved the conversation on. He had no interest in elucidating what he meant by that. I've spent like the last two years of my life thinking about that day in, day out. I think it's a great book title too, Overgrazing on Purpose. The idea is purpose, right? In order to manage, we have to have a direction that we're going. That direction is purpose. So much of modern life, so much of

mother culture, so much of modern commercialized, industrialized agriculture, the byproduct of mother culture, realize, is overgrazing on purpose. And if anything good comes about it, it's entirely on accident, right? It's my health journey. We were overgrazing on accident. And if we had any health coming, it was because we were passively seeking for it. We were not participating in my health. We participated in my health when we bought chickens and started raising them. Failed horribly because we didn't know what we were doing, but that was active. That was overgrazing on purpose. The idea is purpose. Management requires purpose. And so it requires a community that has come together prior to management and defined what that purpose is. Management requires

community function. Control does not. Control just requires that you have a tractor and diesel fuel present. It requires mother culture. Management is a parallel system. It's a parallel system, which I think is just really cool, especially with what we're dealing with today. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I definitely want to dive in here to a deeper dive into mother culture and into parallel systems. I've brought that up in the past on this podcast, the book, The Power for the People. I believe that it might be messing up one or two words there. Power to the people, power of the people, something like that.

Vaclav Havel, I was telling you guys about earlier in the week, was put in jail for four years when the Soviets invaded, I think, the Czech Republic. And then when they were able to not be fully taken over, he came out and became president. Really fascinating story. through building of communities and through enough infrastructure at the local level that people could survive without having to step in line. Imagine that. Pretty damn cool. Pretty important for times like this, right? So I love the parallel systems. But before we get into that and we dive into Ishmael and some of the more philosophy,

break down what's happening right now in the regenerative movement that is not sustainable. Yeah, that's a really good question. It's going to shift in my seat a little bit. Okay, so Voltaire's Bastards, brilliant book. John Ralston Paul, or Saul, John Ralston Saul wrote it decades ago, I think in the early eighties, Voltaire's bastards. It's a beautiful and massive book as well, but it's a beautiful book. The foundational argument that Saul's making in the book is a culture is controlled by language, right? I mean, just think back to this last two years, three years that we've lived through, um, language was controlled. I mean, human action was controlled a little bit,

but it's our language. If you're not this high in terms of immunology or you're not an expert economist, you can't hold a conversation. It's experts running the world, and the experts can run the world because they know the terminology. They know the shop speak, and as long as they know the terminology and the shop speak, they run the world. And the experts can run the world because they know the terminology, right?

They know the shop speak. And as long as they know the terminology and the shop speak, they run the world. It's through speech. It's the verbiage of a community that controls the community. I'll say it that way. Just go back to overgrazing on purpose.

In order to have a purpose, we have to define and elucidate that purpose first, which requires what? Communication, words. Words are unbelievably powerful. Quick note, this is just going to make the conversation longer, but it's a good one, I promise. Our third daughter, I mean, our third child, she's a daughter. She was born this past November or two Novembers ago, I guess. We were trying to figure out what to name her. And we were in the middle of this COVID pandemic and I'm reading Volta voltaire's bastards for the second or third time and i'm realizing the power of language and uh our other two kids are named after trees or distant relations

the the their their names are distant relations of trees or meanings of trees and uh and we love maybe like trees if you haven't learned that yet um and i was i was reading actually cherokee history a little short story so in 1828 um andrew jackson signed the cherokee removal act uh the trail of tears as we understand it in history books and uh some of the cherokees stayed some of the cherookees were forced to go and one of the Cherokee tribe leaders, we can call him a chief, was a guy named Sequoia.

Brilliant man. And up until this time in human history, up until this time of Cherokee history, who called themselves the Aniunawaya, not the Cherokee, that's an American word, English word. They called themselves the Aniunawaya,

the principal people. Just brilliant. So much depth there. They've been in this region for 14,000 years, about, as we understand it. They've never written their language down. Their language is totally undocumented. They had no syllabary, no definitions.

It was all oral, and it was all community-based. Why do you need to write anything down if you live within community? It's a really interesting point too. Well, for the first time in Cherokee history, the Cherokees were separated. They had no community. Some stayed, some were forced to go, some died on the journey. You understand the Trail of Tears.

What Ralph Waldo Emerson called the greatest stain in democratic history of all time. The Trail of Tears. And so Sequoyah was moved. He moved into the West. He survived the Trail of Tears. And so Sequoia was moved. He moved into the West. He survived the Trail of Tears. And for the first time, the Cherokee people, as a people, not an economic situation, not anything, just as a people, they started to decline. The Cherokee way started to fade. And Sequoia saw this very early on. And so said well hell i'm going to build the cherokee syllabary we need to communicate with each other the decline of the cherokee people he believed would be solved by cherokee communication words have power and so sequoia he penned what's called

the cherokee syllabary the definition of the cherokee language that it could be written down so they can communicate via distance or through distance. Words have power in place. Words have power through distance. This is the power of words. This is the power of words. And so we named our daughter Sequoia. And at the same time, that month that she was born,

I wrote Wild Like Flowers, which I encourage everybody on this episode to listen to. It's a very short read. It's 150 pages. You can do it in a day or two. But it's the power of words. The power of the word is to be wild like flowers, flowing in the wind, beautiful, but fine as hell, powerful as hell, potent medicine, potent, potent medicine. What we see in the regenerative movement, all of that was just to say a very simple statement that I think is more clear and lucid now that I've founded it. It's that words in the regenerative movement have power

and we're also using them in such ways that convey a lack. Well, they convey power, but they actually lack power. What I mean by that is right now we see all these documentaries popping up where we're controlling the language. Instagram, social media, it's controlling the language, right? Soil health matters. I think everybody has heard this. If you haven't, I mean, just turn on Netflix or Amazon, watch the most random, most recent documentary on regenerative agriculture, and the first words are probably soil health matters. Open Instagram, follow all these accounts.

Soil health matters. The issue with soil health is it's linear. Okay, so we're going back to this idea of overgrazing on purpose. Purpose, in order to be actually purposeful, has to be holistic. It's the holistic aspect of management. Management matters. Management requires purpose in a holistic context, but it also, management, that is, needs to be holistic.

Because if we manage on, according to any other aspect than the whole, we get a very denuded form of abundance. Explain denuded. You explained it to us earlier this week, and I love this term. Yeah, this term is, my wife tells me I gotta stop using it.

We're bringing it back right now. I just like the penny pack. Denuded is like a reduced form, but in a negative sense, right? You can reduce something down and it's not negative, but a denusion maybe, maybe that's not a correct manipulation of that word, but a denuded reality is a degraded reality, but it's a reduced version of a more whole reality. So it's a reduced version of a more whole reality. So it's degraded and linear, which is why I really like this terminology.

It's mother culture. Mother earth has been denuded by mother culture or mother earth's denuding has resulted in mother culture. It's an absolute brilliant word. We use it in the processing space. Anytime you take a perfectly fine piece of meat, you denude it, you make it into a you take a perfectly fine piece of meat, you denude it, you make it into a more aesthetic

and wasteful piece of meat. You're taking a hole, you're reducing it down, but you're also degrading it. Denusion, denuding, denude, too denude. Soil health is a denusion. I'm going to keep using that term. A denusion of what the hole really has the ability to be. The CEO of the Savory Institute, Daniela Bauer-Howell, always jokes with me, my favorite word is emergent abundance.

There's no space in between there. Abundance can only be emergent. Emergent as an idea requires three things, co-creation, self-understanding, and the non-linear or the complete eradication of the non-linear thinking or the complete eradication of mathematics. Co-creation is when two external realities come together to create something so much further and beyond the abundance of each one of those communities. So co-creation is one plus three equaling 10. It's co-creation. Self-organization is when one plus one the same plus another version of itself equals 10 that's self-organization the complete lack of mathematics being the third aspect of

emergence is that there's no such thing as numbers or arithmetic and now we just have pizza it's magic emergence is magic pizza happens out of nothing. These are all emergence. Co-creation, self-organization, and non-linear, non-mathematical. Holistic management, true regeneration, requires emergence because it is so infinitely more complex than the human mind can possibly understand. You operate for abundance via emergence. Soil health is one aspect of a much greater whole. The regenerative agriculture movement has been born out of the sustainable agriculture movement. Again, watch the most recent documentaries on Amazon and Netflix, go on Instagram. You'll see the terminology, we can't sustain, we must regenerate.

That's fine. Okay, I get it. Sounds cool, but there's a serious issue with it. We are building a regenerative world that isn't sustainable. Regeneration requires sustainability. Regeneration without sustainability is input for production's sake. Why is the 600-acre monocrop cornfield just a half a mile down this hillside in front of us, why is that degenerative?

Because it's production, right? It's input for production's sake. That's the only thing wrong with monocrop of corn. It's input for production's sake, not for community's sake, not for food's sake, not for food's sake, not for the health and nourishment of the soil and the human beings eating the corn's sake. It's input for production. In 1920-ish, in the 1920s, I should say, the global agricultural systems changed.

They wanted to grow more corn per acre with whatever inputs that are needed, right? GMO corn seeds starting to get developed. The idea is the bushels of corn per acre, produce, produce, produce. Today, what's different? We can slap the word regenerative on it, but what's different? What's actually different in today's society? We now have carbon markets that wants us to sequester more carbon per acre as fast as possible. In the 1920s, we had more corn per acre or bushels of corn per acre as fast as possible, input be damned. Today in the 2020s, we have more carbon per acre or tons of carbon, not bushels of corn, tons of carbon per acre, inputs be damned. It's the same system. It's just carbon, not bushels of corn. Tons of carbon per acre. Inputs be damned. It's the same system.

It's just carbon, not corn. We're just trading these two different realities and calling one regenerative and the other one degenerative. Focusing on carbon in the soil is like focusing on corn in a cornfield. That cornfield is degenerative because it has so much more ability to regenerate via biodiversity that we are killing. In many tangential reasons. Carbon in the soil is not entirely interesting. It's corn in a cornfield.

It must be surrounded by a grand array of biodiversity in all spheres. Not just vegetation. Not just soil life. But the human community. You can sequester all the carbon in the world you need to sequester in order to be the richest carbon farmer ever known. But you can do that through slavery. You can do that through degrading economies, communities, societies.

Carbon in the soil does not require holistic health. Carbon in the soil is like corn in the ground so we've created a regenerative world that is not sustainable it requires too many inputs if i want to regenerate these 400 acres of what we call the timshel wildland project how many acres do i have to degenerate in order for that to happen we need to start addressing these problems regeneration is not always holistic regeneration can be entirely controlled regeneration in that sense is a part of mother culture i don't know if you have time for that we have to imbue the regenerative movement with sustainability

and therefore sovereignty yeah and sacredness. Thinking of those key words that were in our context, that really helped us to understand where it would be sustainable with cattle and where it was going to require inputs and not be sovereign to run our exotics. Unless we could rotate red stag and black buck in with the cows and the sheep, which we'd probably do that with the black buck, but definitely not with the red stag,

we're not going to be able to form an understanding that allows us to graze intelligently. Right. Purpose. But the purpose, that's the overgrazing on purpose, right? So we're going to feed them inputs from other farms. We're going to make sure it's the best inputs, no spray hay. We're working with Dr. Anthony Gustin right now,

who's doing the same thing on a 20 acre farm for no corn, no soy feed, you know, and just making it the best possible, but that is input based, right? And that is not coming from our land. And that isn't a part of a self-contained whole. It's not within our cell, right? Right. And you could say, well, that requires community. That's okay. That's just you bridging out and strengthening community. Exactly.

But if that's the corn farmer down the street from you, that's loading up on glyphosate. And I think whatever dozen other chemicals you've been talking about that go beyond glyphosate, right? Then that's degenerating someone else's land to regenerate mine. Exactly. It's only a matter of time before people start to realize this. This is not very complex thought. This is very simple. You say it once, you get it forever. It's not complex.

Regeneration to be regenerative has to regenerate the whole of the world, the human world, the natural world, the wildlife world, all the world, the social world, the political world. It is only one world, as I said earlier. Regeneration to be regenerative must solve the whole problem. And it's not. Think about mother culture, right? Some of the biggest regenerative farms that everybody on this podcast knows the names of, the first time one tractor trailer load of pig feed stops coming to the farm. The first time, what do they do? Maybe they can pivot. Maybe they can, you know, process more pigs today than they expected. But what about the second time? And where's all of this feed coming from? Is it coming from regenerative, no-till, biodiversity-infused, carbon-sequestering soil with stable soil organic matter?

No. The American Academy of Science and the Rodale Institute just proved that no cropland, no annual-based cropland, is building stable soil organic matter. So what is stable soil organic matter? It's organic matter that is stable or sustainably, meaning sustained in the soil for a period of time. It's not happening. So as grass farmers, as regenerative farmers, as farmers who manage animals on the land holistically,

we're looking at building long-term soil that is stable. I'm not interested in building soil that's today and leaving tomorrow. That makes no sense. That's not regenerative. Nobody would think that's regenerative. So in order for me to regenerate my 400 acres, how many acres of land that is not able to stably build soil organic matter, let alone all of the chemicals and the GMOs and the lack of biodiversity. I mean, oh my God, how lonely is our corn down there?

Like, walk through it. Ask the corn. Like, where the hell are all your friends? We need diversity. We say in courses that resilience is diversity in motion. Although I said resilience is uniform diversity. There's diversity uniformly in the landscape and to the point that it's just completely overwhelming. Walk down to the cornfield and you'll be overwhelmed by the opposite. There's no resilience there. You can't have regenerative systems without soil, stable soil,

organic matter that are resilient, there's nothing resilience there. Sustainability in many ways is that resilience. It's diversity in motion. So how much diversity my land is producing is uninteresting to me. How much diversity my land is producing by supporting other people's land and measuring their diversity, biodiversity, whatever it is. That's interesting. That's interesting. If I have to denude your property to heal mine,

what are we getting? What are we getting? I don't think we're getting anywhere. It's a reallocation of the consumer's perspective. Yay. We're regenerative. That's cool.

We can sell more meat. But don't look over there where I buy my feed. Don't look over there where I get the carbon from my compost systems. But look at me. I'm regenerative. And now we're in a very uncomfortable social justice issue.

If white privilege exists, it exists here in the conversation. Right? Denude, destroy, degrade our neighbor. Regenerate ourselves. There's problems there.

There's problems there. It's solved by community. This is not a podcast of a lack of hope. I mean, my God. All of these problems are solved with community, with intentional action, with overgrazing on purpose. I'm not saying perfection exists.

I'm saying purpose exists. And we need to start making decisions holistically that require management, not control, payload, not cultivo, being, not toiling, that correspond to the health of the whole, which is entirely sustainable. Soil health does not matter

if you're getting or achieving or building soil health, one, temporarily, but either way, temporarily or stably, through social systems that degrade human community. Slavery. If you're doing it in a way that destroys somebody else's soil, if you're doing it in such a way that you're actually destroying your soil in the 100-year long term,

I mean, you can build tons of soil organic matter today. Just go buy it and put it out in your field. You did it. There's no virtue there. There's no resilience there. You just bought it. We do, at the Rubinia Institute, we do what's called

ecological outcome verification it's a global protocol landscape monitoring protocol accepted pretty much universally scientifically peer-reviewed and backed that basically is the measurement it's the verification it's the monitoring protocol for the term verified regenerative third-party scientists we come in we look at a landscape, we measure the biodiversity, we measure the carbon in the soil, we measure the soil, we measure the health of the communities on the soil, including the biodiversity. Hundreds of different facets, aspects of the greater ecosystem of the whole that I talked about. And we can help farmers through that process, understanding exactly how management is impacting the land. we call this feedback loop in holistic management plan implement replan holistic

management can't fail if you replan that's the idea it's brilliant that's that feedback loop and so we help farmers understand their their natural landscapes feedback loop basically we talk to the land and translate it for the farmer so That's how we sell it. That's how we understand it. But we'll be out in the fields, and I'll say, oh, my God. We've been out in fields before doing EOV. In the East Coast here, we're in central Virginia. We have two seasons, growing seasons. We have the warm season.

We have the cool season. We have cool season grasses. These are grasses that will be in your yard, grasses and pastures. These are cool season grasses that grow well in the cool season. So spring and autumn. And then we have warm season grasses, grasses that are probably not in your yard. They're more native and old style. They can't take mowing well, which is probably why they're not in your over mowed lawn, but they grow well in the warm season. So we're out there at this field recently and we're just overwhelmed by the beauty of native warm season grasses. Never before have I been in a native meadow like this

with yellow Indian grass as tall as myself, little blue stem coming up to my knees, big blue stem literally 10 feet tall. Gorgeous, gorgeous grassland. Never been in a native warm season meadow like that. And I looked at the farmer, I was like, oh my God, this is unbelievable. If ecological outcome

is a product of management, of purpose, what was your purpose? How did you do this? How did you manage to get this ecological result? This is unbelievable. You would call this regenerative, right?

Like film a regenerative agriculture documentary on this farm. And he goes, oh, this was easy. I sprayed some glyphosate, wiped it all out, then we did a controlled burn to burn all the oxidized, you know, glyphosate, murdered life, and then we no-till-drawn

out these warm season grasses. Oh, that's not management. That's control. That's degenerative agriculture. No, no, that's regenerative agriculture. No, it's degenerative with a capital D, generative agriculture. That's control. That's not sustainable. Glyphosate, controlled burns, and no-toe drilling out the species that you want to exist. There's nothing sustainable or resilient there. Not just that, but oh my God, who do you have to be to say,

I know nature good enough that they only want to grow, or she only wants to grow three plants. You know nature that good. Wow. You must be God. You have to be God. Because all I do, I walk around these pastures, I'm completely overwhelmed with what nature wants to grow.

It's never what I want to grow. You know, we plant annual vegetables in our garden and wild mustard grows. What the hell? I didn't plant wild mustard. Nature did. Nature wanted wild mustard to grow. I wanted a tomato to grow.

The interesting thing, wild mustard comes out in the spring. It's an amazing medicine. High, high, high in vitamins needed by the body in the spring. Nature knew what I needed. I didn't. She knows me. Do we know her? That's the problem.

We need language. EOV is a good language, but we need intimacy. We need true long-term community where we sit back and listen. We don't turn the tractor on and start planting out all these 19 different species of cover crops because that's what we think our cows need. We need observation. We need meditation. We need intimacy.

We need observation. And we need listening. We need language. Go ahead. Sorry. No, that's flawless, brother. Let's unpack one of the languages, the piece of language and vocabulary

you've been using throughout this that I had not heard before. You've mentioned the word mother culture or words mother culture a few times on this podcast. You recommended this book, Ishmael. Daniel Quinn, I think is the author. And I couldn't put it down. I listened to it. You came here for the course and you listened to the book instead. Yeah, that's all I was doing during class. No, but it did keep me up at night and I got up early so I could finish it before this podcast. And it's absolutely brilliant. And of course, in the book, he really dives deep into what mother culture is.

Unpack it. The story that they start with, and it's not giving away the book, but breakdown what happens in Genesis that we as a society have taken wholesale and don't understand. You know, these stories that remain that we don't understand that influence in what is mother culture and what does the parallel culture look like? Yeah, that's a good question.

In the book, Quinn talks about, there's two different types of human beings on this earth. Maybe two different historical types, which is what the book's about. The leavers and the takers. And he doesn't elucidate who those are until the end of the book you start to learn who they are though he doesn't do a good job of hiding them the takers are mother culture the levers are mother nature i like the phrase you can only have one mother and i think it applies here. That's the idea of Ishmael. You can't be a taker and a leaver. You can't be a part of mother culture and mother nature. You can only have one mother. What's happening in Genesis at Ishmael, Daniel

Quinn really unpacks via the story of a gorilla educating a human being, right? In the very beginning of the book, it's like gorilla or teacher looking for a student who wants to save the world or something like that. The teacher ends up being a gorilla. The student ends up being this gentleman, the two main characters in the story. Ridiculous. Oh my goodness. The whole story is unbelievable. Um, it's the gorilla educating the man. And he says, there's two different kinds, leavers and takers. You have mother culture, mother earth. And he says, the takers, mother culture, are those who believe they are God and they are God's hands.

The leavers, mother earth, are the opposite. They live in the hands of the gods. I think that's brilliant. Unbelievably brilliant. We can unpack that for hours and hours and hours. The difference between being God's hand, right? That's control. That's cultivo.

That's to toil, to till, to turn over. Being in the hands of the gods is palo. It's about being in the hands of the gods. Palo. To be, to become. It's a state of being, not doing. I think as you enter into this very philosophical state in your own life, you realize that the more you do, the more you learn to not do.

That's a saying. It's not news to most people. It's not my saying. But it's a state of being. When you be more, you realize you do less, and you realize that more gets done. That's magic. I said all abundance is emergence. Emergence is magic.

We see magic again. It's magic. The story of Cain and Abel is the book that this mail is all about. It's funny. I'm going to interweave. The wildland is called Timshel. Timshel Wildland. We named it that.

Actually, before we read Ishmael, when we read Ishmael, we were like, holy hell, it's Timshel Wildland. That's exactly what it is. The story of Cain and Abel is simply this. So Adam and Eve, they had children, Cain and Abel. And God asks Cain for a sacrifice. Cain, pick some wheat,

pick some veggies and such, and he says, here's your sacrifice, God. And God says, oh, no, that's not what I wanted. Abel slaughters a lamb, gives it to God, and God says, that's what I wanted. Notice that Abel slaughters a lamb and Cain harvests wheat. We start to get the tension between what Daniel Quinn calls

the agriculturalist and the pastoralist. And he warns us. This story is a story of warning. We'll get to that in a minute. God looks at Cain and he says, no, this is no good. I don't want wheat. I ask for a sacrifice,

a sacred, symbolic sacrifice of stewardship. What does wheat have to do with any of those words? Right? You can only plant wheat when you control it. What do I mean by that? If you want wheat to grow, you plant wheat. If you want wheat to grow, you don't plant corn. That is control. If you want to raise a lamb,

you have to work within the entire ecosystem. You need soil health. You need carbon in the soil flowing from bacteria and fungi to nematodes and protozoas, pooping out plant-available nutrients. To raise a lamb, you have to care about nematodes and protozoas and plant-available nutrients. It requires totality. It requires being.

It requires management, not control. Notice this. We see this idea coming out through this book. And God looks at Cain. He says, no, this is no good. I don't want weed. I don't want control. I don't want control. I don't want you to be an agriculturalist.

And he says one word to him. This is not an Ishmael, but this is our farm name. God says one word to him, the ancient Hebrew. He says, Timshel, one word, non-translatable to the modern English language,

but it's both a declaration, like stop, and an invitation, like please come here. But it's both a declaration, like stop, and an invitation, like please come here. But it's one word, a declaration and an invitation. And what it really means is like you may, thou mayest, depending on how you translate it. Not you can, as in like you can come here, but like you may come here. You have the power to act.

You have the ability to make the right decision, right? And that I am declaring this. I am stating it. I am manifesting it into the real world. I am declaring it. You have the ability, but you may or may not use it. God says, Cain, give me something else. I don't want wheat. I ask for a sustainable, a sovereign,

a steward-based sacred harvest of a lamb. Timshel, you have the ability. Are you going to do it? Cain doesn't. And he's banished in the rest of the story. But what Ishmael is all about is this banishing, is this a story of foreboding, a

warning of a pastoralist people that are turning into agriculturalists. A pastoral people who live in the hands of the gods who are beers and becomeers, not toilers and tillers saying, hey, there is change in the fore. There's winds coming. These agriculturalists, they're takers. They are God's hands. They plant wheat because they want wheat to grow. They don't nurture nematodes for lamb production. They don't see the totality of life. They don't see management as desirable.

They see control as desirable. And they definitely don't see the whole. For instance, what's a cow out of a grassland? Let's make it very simple. What's a cow out of a grassland? It's a dead cow. Bottom line. I don't care if you put it in a feedlot, it's still a dead cow. It's a dead cow on hooves. It's probably eating dead cows, mad cow disease. Further problematic.

What's a carburetor out of an engine? It's a carburetor. Walk into AutoZone and order a carburetor and he doesn't get confused. He gives you a carburetor. In fact, with a serial number on it, fitting your engine. Technology can be controlled. And this is a very good thing. Imagine if you didn't have control over your car. It would be very bad news. But your car is your car regardless if it works or not. Your car doesn't lose itself when it doesn't work anymore. When its carburetor dies, it's still a car.

It's just a dead car. The cow loses itself when it leaves the grassland. This is not technology. This is a complex system. Cars, carburetors, auto zones understand life, understand technology as complicated systems. These are hard systems. These are replicable systems. Life is not replicable. Life is not complicated. Life is not hard. It's soft. It is not hard. It's soft. It's moldable. It's fluid.

It's complex. Living in the hands of the gods requires fluidity. It requires complexity. It requires holistic management. Being in God's hands requires us to be technological, hard, complicated. It requires carburetors to be carburetors, whether or not the engine works or not.

A carburetor is still a good carburetor, even if it's worthless. Realize this. We're trying to feed the world through monocrop corn production, for instance, and over 47% as 2018-2019 numbers go, 47% goes not to food.

Goes to ethanol production and beef who actually can't digest the corn and they just shit it out the back end. Worthless food. Modern agriculture, commercialized production, emphasizing control and linear thinking, complicated thought, not complex reality, being, they till, they don't become, is not producing food.

It's producing fiber, whatever that means. It's producing carbon down there, I guess, whatever that means. It's producing carbon down there, I guess, whatever that means. But it's not producing nourishment in the same sense that controlling life doesn't actually create abundance. Abundance requires emergence. Emergence requires pastoralism.

It requires complex realities. That's what Quinn's getting at. It's uncomfortable. It's complex realities. That's what Quinn's getting at. It's uncomfortable. It's really uncomfortable. And he does such a good job between the two characters with the discomfort, with how hard it would be,

and I don't know, would be, if I'm sitting across from the gorilla, just how hard it is for people to acknowledge, how hard it is for people. Kind of feel like I am. To acknowledge, yeah. How hard it is for people to acknowledge something about themselves that they don't like, right? Like that, they say that anything's in your shadow is inherently outside of your purview.

It's not in your awareness. You can't see what's in your shadow, right? So to admit something's off, or if your wife points out something like, you do this every time we get in an argument, or you do, you know, and it's like, no, I don't. What are you talking about? Like the denial there isn't a conscious thing. It's an unconscious thing. It's because you can't see it. Right. And we're trained in that way. Unconscious action.

And mother culture has been training us since birth. Right. And all the stories that Gorilla lays out are painful to admit, but they are obvious. Yeah. Right? There can be no denial. And I think it's easier for the ego to accept it because it's told in the novel form. And a gorilla.

And a gorilla. It allows you to step outside of yourself. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I listened to the foreword at the end, and Morgan Freeman does it if you get on Audible, the very beginning and the end, and Freeman does it if you get on Audible, the very beginning, the end and the prelude forward. And he says that, you know, this, he's come back in and revised this after he wrote

all three of the books. And he said, he's answered a number of questions, you know, in between and different things like that, that really helped me out questions I still had, but more or less, I just want more, right? I want more. And so I just got the second book, but one of the things that he said that came out of the second book, he said, if you've ever heard of the term totalitarianist or totalitarianism agriculture, that came out of book two, the story of me. And I'm like, totalitarian agriculture looks a lot like what the World Economic Forum is doing. It looks a lot like the environmental policies that the EU is proposing that's having farmers in the Netherlands go on,

go out on their tractors and hold up people and get shot with real bullets completely unarmed. That looks a lot like totalitarian agriculture. And that's all right now. Think about it from the corn's perspective. If corn could talk, what would it say? Stop spraying me with poison and put me next to something else. All these bugs keep eating me because you're planting me by myself.

You've been linearly focused on genetics. You pull me out. you put me in an isolated field you spray me with poison and then you kill me and you feed me to gasoline engines and you call me food it's totalitarian agriculture from the human perspective but also from mother nature's perspective i interject but I'm just saying from all perspectives, it's totalitarianism. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah. That was a full resonant. Yes. When I heard that, I was like, oh yeah, right now. And likely for the last 10,000 ish years,

that's where it's at. And the expansion of that, you know, if you're not doing it, we're going to help you modernize, right? We modernize the savages. We update their way of life.

We get them civilized. And it happens through our way of living. Massachusetts Bay Colony's flag is a European man standing on top of an indigenous person. And the indigenous person has words coming out of it. Look it up. And it says, please come save us. Wow. You can do nothing but laugh.

It is that uncomfortable. That's brutal. That's what we're doing today. It's no different. And that's why language matters. If we have hope, we have hope because we have the ability to purposefully find purpose in language, which requires community.

It requires community. Sequoia, the Cherokee chief, building the Cherokee syllabary without community is worthless. It's a hobby. The creation, the nurturing, the co-creation, and therefore the nurturing of language requires community but it builds community. It's cyclical. It's the chicken and the egg, the egg and the chicken. Which came first, community or language? Both. They are the same thing. There is no difference.

Just like human world, natural world. What came first? What is more important? Bad questions. Because there is no answer to those questions. It's linear and reductionist. Both of these worlds are neither. Because there's only one world. And it's questions. It's linear and reductionist. Both of these worlds are neither, because there's only one world. And it's complex.

It's not complicated. The power of language. We have to change our language in the regenerative movement in order to be sustainable, in order to sustainably sustain, via regeneration, the world, not the human world,

not the soil health matters world talk a bit about these parallel systems and I think we can wrap after that I know we got to make our way out to the airport just thinking in terms of everything we've talked about not calling out names, but these larger scale regenerative farms

that have ungodly amounts of inputs that are not regenerating, but degenerating other lands. Knowing, learning, I'd heard bits and pieces on USDA processing and things like that, but not to the full extent, and not to the amount of hoops one must go through and the cost differences to the farmer just to get it out to the market.

So much there, but what are the things you see in a parallel world and system that we create together? That's a good point. Anytime we're talking about parallel systems, I think we have to define terms. Mother culture, Mother Earth. Mother Earth is a we have to define terms. Mother culture, Mother Earth. Mother Earth is a parallel system to Mother Culture

because Mother Earth does not operate within the confines or the needs of Mother Culture. If Mother Culture dies, Mother Earth lives. In fact, it's also true if Mother Earth dies, Mother Culture might also die. But it's going to feel like it's going to live. We might just move to Mars.

It's going to try to live, try to survive. In many ways, these are parallel systems. A parallel system is a system that exists outside of an incomplete independence from another system. Going towards the same direction. Mother Culture wants to feed you.

Mother Culture wants to give you a nice home. But I don't think she doesn't. to feed you. Mother Culture wants to give you a nice home. I don't think she doesn't. Some of you. Maybe not others. So does Mother Earth. Mother Nature. We have very similar desires.

But there's a lot of operations right now that are scaffolding mother culture. To be very clear, I see these things as very good things. If mother culture collapses too quickly, we don't have the parallel systems. Mother nature is not ready to take 7 billion or however many human beings there are in this earth into her arms and feed them yet. We have so denuded her emergent abundance, or so denuded and then limited the emergence of her abundance that she is not prepared for this. The parallel systems have not

been created well enough to sustain life post mother culture collapse. A lot of these larger scale regenerative farms, a lot of these larger scale regenerative endeavors and organizations, they're scaffolding mother culture. And this is a very good thing. They're scaffolding mother culture because they're providing alternative pathways to Walmart buyers. They're providing alternative and very convenient methodologies and lifestyles journeys, I call them pathways, for people who are buying meat at Walmart. Early adopters in the consumerism sense.

You know, I listened to a podcast and they said I should start eating better, and so I bought from this place instead of Walmart. This is a scaffold to mother culture. Raising pigs in pasture, raising animals, whoever they are, in forest, woodlands, or pastures, silvopastures, better. Via the understanding of input, non-sustainability, but soil health, is a scaffold to mother culture. It's not a parallel system.

And to reiterate for the third time, we need these scaffolds. If mother culture collapses too quickly, hundreds of millions of people leave city centers for three days, or three days later, trying to find food. This is not a good world. To quote again Charles Eisenstein, this is not a more beautiful world than my heart desires. And so what we need to be doing is helping scaffold mother culture for long enough that we can build these parallel systems.

And we need people building parallel systems. We also need the scaffolds to identify themselves as scaffolds, not members of the parallel system, which is a huge issue. I think it is improper to drop names because there's no reason to degrade community and relationships. Not at this time. We need to imbue community with relationships. There's no time for that. We need to identify where we are, to identify where we are, to identify where we're going.

And the scaffolds to mother culture should not be ashamed of being scaffolds to mother culture. They should be identified. They should do self-understanding, self-identification, self-promotion of it. We are scaffolding mother culture so we can be building parallel systems together in community and via relationship, being the art of becoming and being,

not the work of tilling, toiling, or turning over. Pay low is a parallel system. A lot of consumer packaged goods, we call them CPG companies that a lot of your listeners probably know and maybe support, I don't know, need to come out and say, yeah, we're a scaffold to mother culture. I think that's a very healthy thing to do. They obviously don't. They don't know, need to come out and say, yeah, we're a scaffold to mother culture.

I think that's a very healthy thing to do. They obviously don't. They don't need to. They're scaffolding mother culture. Mother culture lives in the line of production and complicated thinking. That could be their mindset. I think if I could focus though on a more hopeful note, we need to really understand and start building communities around these parallel systems. For instance, USDA processing is not just limited to a lot of smallholder family farms, human scale farms, let alone big farms, but definitely USDA processing, and we're scheduling out three years. These cows haven't even been born yet. How am I supposed to decide when they die? So I have to control breeding. Because if I have to control when they die,

I have to control when they're born. So USDA process requires control. Again, we see ourselves in Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. We are Cain. We are no different. We are Cain. We are no different. We are Cain. We are no different. We are takers. We are God's hands. We need to be creating a parallel system that could support large scale change without production mindset. Production is an output of relationship, right? You focus on a relationship, you get product, healthy relationships. You focus on relationship with your wife, you get kids.

That's pretty cool. That's magic. I want to talk about magic. That's magic. And then you raise the kids and you realize that that actual process, it's not even magical. Everything else afterwards is an exponential equation of magic. It requires being, not doing. USDA requires doing. It's a system that needs to die with mother culture. But it needs to be scaffold. Oh my God, absolutely.

We can't just have it die today. These parallel systems look like food sovereignty. It looks like communities acting together as communities. It requires bartering, not capitalism. Capitalism isn't a form of Mother Nature. Capitalism is a part of Mother Culture. Mother Culture's best version of itself might be capitalism or a version of

capitalism in a way. Well, we're not even experiencing capitalism. No. It's kind of hard. There's nothing that natural. It requires local communities acting as local communities. No, no, no. It's kind of hard. There's nothing that natural. Never seen it like that, but yeah, exactly. It requires local communities acting as local communities.

We run an organization called Commons Provisions where we've built a massive network of verified regenerative human scale and family farms all across the Mid-Atlantic side here, the East Coast, the Central East Coast of the United States, doing unbelievable things. We've raised almost $700,000 for farms this year directly to farms.

We've bought farms for farms. We've donated about 80 cows to farms to help them scale. Done a lot of really interesting stuff there. But the name, Commons Provisions, is the name of a meat company. We buy all their meat at basically retail prices and we sell it at a very minor profit to the end consumer. You go to any of these CPG companies.

I've known them all. I've talked to them all. I know all their owners and founders and the operators. You go on there. You buy $10 a pound ground beef. I know what the farmers make. About $0.14 on that dollar. The farmer, the person who spent three years out in the field, risking their lives, working 87 hours a week, making $18,000 a year.

Those numbers are products of a study we did of mid-Atlantic farmers under 800 acres last year. 14 cents on the dollar is what those farmers make, three years. Commons provisions is built on the idea that these parallel systems need to exist in community. Basically, we need to rehabilitate the town commons provisions is built on the idea that these parallel systems need to exist in community basically we need to rehabilitate the town commons also it's full of common sense to play on words the commons is full of common sense right if you need something and your neighbor has it why would you buy it from texas oh my god my neighbor has it it's right there i can walk there

it doesn't require roads it It doesn't require diesel. It doesn't require fuel or extractive methodologies and mechanical production, mother culture, industrialization. I just have to walk. I need communication. I need language. I need to be able to walk over and say, hey, Jimmy, I need some of this.

And Jimmy says, cool, let's go. We need communication and we need community, which is all the form of a Latin word, communis, which is communion, community, communication in common, in common sense, in commons. The idea is that these parallel systems need to be built in the commons, not in the USDA, not in consumer package good online companies that buy meat from Australia, ship it to the United States,

from there to some random state, pick one, New Mexico, and ship it out to New York City after that. I mean, your food's traveling 5,000 miles. It happens to regenerate the soil in which it's grown, maybe. Maybe, right? But that farmer made 14 cents on the dollar. You just spend $10 on that piece of meat. It's traveled over 5,000 miles.

It's been frozen and defrosted three or four times during its life. And because it's packaged in a consumer package, a good package that's been frozen and defrosted three or four times during its life. And because it's packaged in a consumer packaged good package that's really sexy and good looking and makes you feel good, which costs about $2 a pound to do, we call this what? Regenerative?

What do we call this? It's mother culture. That's what we call it. It's the story of Cain. And right now the story of Cain is again a warning. And it's warning us. Right? We are losing the pastoralists.

We're losing the people who live in the hands of the gods. We're losing these parallel systems in the name of mother culture and convenience. And we call it regenerative. This is a problem. This is a problem. Regeneration on accident, in my opinion, is as bad as degeneration on purpose. This is regeneration on accident. But it's definitely degeneration on accident and on purpose.

These parallel systems require sovereignty, but it requires community. Undeniable communication, unbelievable nourishment, which is communion in community for the sake of that commons. I could just keep playing with the word communists, but we'll stop there. I love that. Yeah. Charles Eisenstein has been out to the farm a couple of times and been on this podcast a couple times. He said you could have all the guns, all the ammo, your own water, bulletproof house, you could have all those things, 1,000-acre food forest, permaculture style that requires no inputs whatsoever. You have nothing without community.

Nothing. Nothing. And it's product communion and conversation. Not just language, communication, but conversation. Communion and conversation are the same word.

Not just that, but like, why would you want to defend that life? It's quite lonely. It's like the corn in the cornfield. It's unbelievably lonely.

You can defend the shit out of it. You're still lonely. Yeah. And you can't defend it for long without community cornfield. It's unbelievably lonely. You can defend the shit out of it. You're still lonely. Yeah. And you can't defend it for long without community. Yeah. That's it. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, brother, the light side of this for me has been really getting my hands in every aspect of everything we wanted to learn. You know, you've tailored this program for us. We came in. We got to help butcher or break down a cow. We got to help move the cows. We got to see many facets of what you're doing here. We got to learn from not your mistakes, but your lessons, you know, and why you got out of pigs.

Which includes mistakes. Yeah. Plan, implement, replan. Right. And so that to me is the standing on the shoulders of giants, right? Like, hey, I'm new to the game. Where have been your pitfalls, right? And just understanding that in real life circumstances, you know, like, okay, cool.

That helps me shape my decision-making without making the same mistake. And it's been absolutely brilliant, you know, speaking on behalf of us all. Like, we have fucking loved it. Absolutely. You heard me on the phone with my water guy. Yeah. I was not expecting it. I was not expecting it, but I heard it. So good, brother.

So good. Yeah, it's been an absolute thrill. Where can people find you online? I know you've done a number of other podcasts. I get tons of people from Vip for Service asking me, how can I dive into this? Where's the best place to start? What are the best resources?

Where can I learn this? Maybe, you know, throw your handles in. We'll link to in the show notes, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever you're on and your websites. And then one or two books, you know, in the space of agriculture that really shaped you. Yeah, absolutely. Best place to find us and

learn more is robiniainstitute.com. Throw it in the show notes if you don't know how to spell robinia. Robinia is a Latin name for the black locust tree, by the way. It's really cool. Really like that. Timshel Wildlands, our operation here, our 400-acre wildland pioneering rewilding project.

Wildtimshel.com. If you're in the mid-Atlantic and you want to buy some meat from some pretty good farms and support them in the process, eatcommons.com is a fine place. All three of these organizations are on Instagram to some degree.

I don't even know our handles. Probably Timshel Wildland Rabbini Institute and Commons Provisions. We'll find them. Yeah, you'll find them. Books, man. Oh my God. Ishmael, for sure. And if I have to say it,

The Sand County Almanac. And Sketches Here and There, I think is the title of the book by Aldo Leopold. It's an unbelievable, brilliant book. It's all about ideas of community. There's an essay in there. It's to think like a mountain. And it's agriculture via the eyes of a mountain shaped by time. And it's absolutely glorious. Those two books have been life-changing. There's 10 more I can give you. We'll link to all those

and we'll link to Savory Solistic Management. I think it's been a big help for us as well. I appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you so much, brother. Hey, thanks for having me on. Hell yeah, we'll do it again. Annual, annual trip out here.

I'm in. you