Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #300 How Regenerative Are We? w/ Daniel Firth Griffith

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

The homie Daniel Griffith is on the land for this ep. We talk regen ag of course, but it goes deeper than that. He gets into questioning how sustainable is your practice without inputs or contributing to the degeneration of our world and in turn, us. It was a veritable call to arms to take the macro of all macro views of the movement towards regenerative life.    ORGANIFI GIVEAWAY Keep those reviews coming in! Please drop a dope review and include your IG/Twitter handle and we’ll get together for some Organifi even faster moving forward.   Connect with Daniel: Website: robiniainstitute.com - wildtimshel.com -  eatcommons.com  Instagram: @robiniainstitute - @timshelwildland - @commonsprovisions    Show Notes: "Wild Like Flowers" -Daniel Griffith "Dark Cloud Country" -Daniel Griffith "Ishmael" - Daniel Quinn "The Story of B" -Daniel Quinn "My Ishmael" -Daniel Quinn "The Power of the Powerless" -Vaclav Havel LocalFats.com  "The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic" -Martin Prechtel    Sponsors: Ra Optics Better sleep, more melatonin, blue blocking… These guys and Matt Maruka are the best around when it comes to blue blocking glasses that look sharp. Head to RaOptics.com and use code “KKP” at checkout for 10% off.  HVMN - Ketone IQ This is legit jetfuel for your brain. Whether you’re fat adapted or not, this will work. Get 20% off by heading to hvmn.com/kkp  discount is automatically applied at checkout.  Cured Nutrition has a wide variety of stellar, naturally sourced, products. They’re chock full of adaptogens and cannabinoids to optimize your meatsuit. You can get 20% off by heading over to www.curednutrition.com/KKP  using code “KKP” Lucy Go to lucy.co and use codeword “KKP” at Checkout to get 20% off the best nicotine gum in the game, or check out their lozenge. To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    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.

this feels uh odd and good at the same time i uh recently recently got back not that recently two weeks ago got back from soltara in costa rica first time in four years i've sat with ayahuasca and I'll be doing a solo cast on that coming up hopefully next episode 300 is a landmark episode and it's funny because I wanted to release the solo cast for episode 300 but I'm still integrating and it would be a disservice to myself and to everyone to try to get that out early and I had a podcast that I most recently did a few days ago with my good friend and one of my mentors on the farm, especially Daniel Firth Griffith. Daniel's been on the show before. This is his second time. He was a keynote speaker at a recent event that we went to

called What Good Shall I Do? put on by the homies at Rome Ranch and Force of Nature. I had an excellent time speaking there. I was on a panel, but felt like I could have, with Taylor's questions, just could have ripped it by myself for fucking all day, probably. And got to meet some really other cool people that easily could have been there, up there all day. And I love conferences like that because there's people from all walks of life. At this conference,

there were old school cattle ranchers that were not farming regenerative leave that wanted to convert. There were people from the field of health and wellness that were looking to eat better, which was what drew me to regenerative agriculture and beyond that, permaculture designs from Sepp Holzer, biodynamics from Rudolf Steiner. Anything that had some weight to it in changing the way we grow and interact with our food and changing the health of what goes into our bodies. And so there's lots of awesome people there. I had a blast. There was incredible food. I didn't get to see Daniel's closing speech,

but we podcasted Thursday before this event and he wanted to make sure this podcast came out after the event, which you'll see why during the podcast. He has a lot to say about the regenerative movement and a lot to say about mother culture versus mother nature. And if you're unfamiliar

with some of these ideas, obviously I've listed a ton of different books on regenerative agriculture. Alan Savory is holistic management is one of the key ones if you're going to actually do the damn thing,

but it's not necessary to fully understand it. If you want to have a deeper understanding of nature, dive into Daniel's books. He's a poet. He's by all stretches of the imagination, a Renaissance man, a polymath, whatever you want to call that. Somebody who has a great degree of mastery

in many different systems. And he applies those poetically in his books, Wild Like Flowers, which is available on Audible. He reads it. And then his latest, Dark Cloud Country, which is mind-blowing and awesome and really points to some of the key issues we're facing right now in society in a beautiful and poetic way. And Daniel's just, you know, he's one of my favorite people, like period. I don't know how much, what else I can say about that. If you're involved in this movement, this conversation might be jarring for you. I mean, I'm just going to put that out there.

There's a lot we can do right in this. And there's a few slippery slopes that this can take where it just ends up being another cog in the machine. And I think his warning shots are pretty important to take heed from. From a top-down perspective, and that's not always the best move. We don't want top-down government. We don't want top-down control.

We don't want centralization of things. But from a top-down understanding, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is probably one of the best places to start. And I'm going to link to all these books in the show notes. There'll be quite a bit here. Daniel's books, as well as Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, The Story of B, and My Ishmael. And if you're like me, they're all available on Audible.

So you can just chew through those. They're excellent novels on kind of the trials and tribulations of where we're at in society and some of the ways that we can proceed and really how we got here. So there's a lot to chew on, especially in those first two books, Ishmael and the story of B. And then any book that I mentioned in here, because there will be more you can dive into as well. We'll have those all linked in the show notes. Thank you, Jose, for doing such a brilliant job and staying on top of that. There are a number of ways you can support the show. First and foremost, share it with a friend, share it with anybody who's kind of big in this movement and sees only white puffy clouds and rainbows and good stuff.

And hopefully this can get them to pay attention a little bit more into some of the ways that we are practicing our management of the land and are co-relating with one another. A bigger piece of this topic that we've dived into before

on different episodes is the systems that are being put in place from say, or desirably so from a World Economic Forum standpoint or something like that. A lot of those are going to happen, you know, unfortunately. So we see cameras on every streetlight. We see them on, and not just, you know, stoplights. I mean, streetlights. In my neighborhood in Austin, every streetlight has a camera. We see in part, some of the 1984 signs showing up already. Now this isn't China yet, but facial recognition coming on board through AI, whether that's super intelligent or not, or AGI or super intelligent general AI.

I don't know what the fuck they're naming it these days, but bottom line is we are going to see that as it is already in China, whether or not social credit gets implemented here or not remains to be seen. Smart grid cities are being built. Austin is one of them. If you live in a city, you are in one of them, period, period,

period. How that pans out is really up to us. What will we say yes to? What will we say yes to? What will we say no to? And one of the books, I'm not sure if I mentioned on this podcast, but one of the books that really lies an under theme of what Daniel and I are speaking to is a book called Power for the People. Let me see if I got that right. Vyklav Havel. Vyklav Havel was imprisoned during the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia. And when he got out, he actually became president. Not sure what they were called then, Czech Republic, something like that.

But when he got out, he became the president. One of the things that he points to is that the reason they were able to stave off a socialist takeover was because of the fact that they had parallel systems in place. So how does that pan out in the modern world? Well, how it pans out is you decentralize through creating vertical infrastructure and power to the people by vertical systems locally, right? So you make communities stronger. How do you make communities stronger? This is a big conversation I've been having with Charles Eisenstein and many different thought leaders in the world.

You must produce more than you consume, first and foremost. And if that's not you, you know the person who's producing more than they consume, right? You meet your local farmer. And Daniel has some brilliant, brilliant, kind of not the way you'd think from a regenerative organic standpoint, ways in which you work with your local farmers. In addition to that, and very simple too, by the way,

in addition to that, you know everywhere you're getting your stuff from. You can produce your own energy to some regard. You know of people that produce the things that you don't, right? So one example is at our farm, Gardner's Veeden in Lockhart, we've got cows, sheep. We've got exotic animals like red stag and black buck. We've got honeybees. We've got 400 fruit and nut trees, which are probably four or five years away from producing

much, but we have those. They're in the ground and they're growing. We really, from an annual perspective, we have a small market garden, but we do a lot on sweet potatoes and Japanese yams. And we've got several chickens we're adding quite a bit more because last year during this egg shit, it was really nice having our own flawless, beautifully orange egg yolks and eggs that were of the best quality. You know, when people couldn't find eggs in stores, that made a lot of sense to why we started this.

And we want to produce more than we consume. Right now we're eating all the eggs. So we're going to add more chickens. What we don't do is pork. What we don't do is meat birds. And I still like that stuff. I got a buddy in Bastrop who does. That's the only thing that he does.

So knowing him allows us to carry some of those things at our farm stand and also allows us to eat those things. We can trade, we can barter, we can work. That's a form of a parallel system, right? And it's one very low-hanging fruit or low-hanging testicle, whatever you want to call it, but it's there. And it's knowing these things that actually matters. It's knowing like, hey, I'm never going to participate in this one aspect, but I still want it. And my buddy does. Cool.

That means that I don't have to do that, right? That goes for other things too. Like if you're really good at fixing equipment, but you don't want to grow food, you don't have to become a farmer. I still highly recommend that people, and it's tricky because going through a deep dive on ayahuasca can become a slippery slope into becoming a preacher. And I've witnessed this. I had my 28th, 29th, and 30th journeys on this last two weeks ago. And I was very careful, because the way I was wording things in my mind was like, there's no preach, right? And Dr. Dan said this beautiful quote, and I forget who it is, but I'm sure you could Google it and find out in one second.

It's preach the gospel wherever you go, and only when necessary, use words. And it's absolutely beautiful. And it's completely apropos. It's really nice to garden, you know, and I'll just put it that way. You know, we started off when I was living in my mom's garage. We had a quarter acre lot in California

and I asked her, can I put some trees in the ground? She said, absolutely, just no cannabis. And I was like, all right, that's cool. I want cannabis, but I'll put some trees in the ground instead and some other stuff. And that built my connection to nature.

It rehabilitated something that was lost in the modern world. When we got to Austin, we bought our first house. We're on a 10th of an acre, much smaller. Now, I realize a lot of us are in apartments and things like that. Well, what can I do? Well, get a fucking house plant. Put a raised bed on your patio. There's any small act

where you start to engage with nature, with nature, with nature, you're going to have the ability to draw yourself into a different world, one that is a stronger connection

to the mechanics, to timing, to the cycles, to something outside of yourself that requires, at least in the mechanics, to timing, to the cycles, to something outside of yourself that requires, at least in the interim, your help. In many ways, our food forest is a lot like a child. It needs all the help and babying in the world right now. And when it's about 15, we could fucking die.

And that thing's still going to be around 50 years later. It's just going to hold up because of the permaculture design. Oh, but don't die in 15 years. But that said, you know, it is a lot like looking after an infant. When I caught Wolf, my wife was in a full squat on the edge of the bed and our midwives were out on both sides of the room looking in, I realized she's coming out right now. There was no crowning. I knee-jerk reaction intuitively put both my hands under her before there was any crowning and she shot right into them. And I was like, holy shit. And any description will not do it justice, similar to a deep dive on plant medicines. But I remember looking at her and the first thought is, is she healthy? Is she safe?

Is she going to live? And the second I recognized with her first breath, she's perfect. She's healthy. She's going to live. The remembering of, because it had been five years since Bear was born. Oh, fuck. I got to keep her alive. She needs me. That's part of the, fuck. I got to keep her alive. She needs me.

That's part of the role of the father is to keep her alive. And that's part of the role of the gardener is to keep the plants alive until they're robust enough to do very well by themselves, even on auto timers and all the other things we set up to make it as neat and packaged and an aromantic and systematic as possible. We still got to observe.

We got to be in the garden. And that's probably the biggest medicine is that whatever you're planting to be in that thing. You know, I've talked about this before, but on my wife's birthday, uh, the three months after we moved into this house in Austin, I put a bunch of four different bunch bamboos in the back. They only grow three feet in each direction, so they won't take over the yard. And that became, it gave us a sanctuary with houses and suburbs stacked on top of each

other. It gave us privacy. We put a bunch of fruit trees in. What do you want to put in? What do you want to eat, really, as part of it? What's your gut telling you? Do you love apples? Do you love, and that's not a Goodwill hunting reference, even though I can use it as that

double entendre. We got banana trees. They die every freeze and they grow back. It's a pain in the ass. We don't have bananas, but they're fucking awesome to watch grow. They grow very quickly. Our ice cream bananas grow 15, 20 feet tall. Many banana trees, three, four feet, but they look great.

It feels tropical. We've got a lot of vining flowers that bring in the hummingbirds and the bees and the butterflies. And all of these things help draw us in further to something that's larger than ourselves, something that's deeper, that's more majestic than ourselves. And it's incredibly grounding. And it's a whole lot of other things that I'm not even describing right now that you'll find for yourself when you start doing that, if you say yes to that. So enough preaching on the gardening, but you don't have to have a food forest. You don't have to have all these things. You should know whether that's through a farmer's market or some direct contact, going to your local farm, just as I did four years ago. I went out to Rome

Ranch and I had Bear sit on my lap for a bison harvest. We made a seven directions prayer and out of the herd of 80 bison, the one that was going to get shot came over to us at 15, 20 yards and presented herself broadside to Cody, who was working as the ranch hand to take the shot. Bear was sitting on my lap and we watched that animal go down right in front of us. We walked over to her. When she stopped moving, we held her warm body.

We put tobacco on the ground. We prayed and we thanked her. We thanked her for becoming us. We thanked her for giving ourselves to us. And she did, you know, like contrary to what people think about hunting or harvesting or any of these things, that prayer was heard and she did come over, you know, and, and really present it with, there was no challenge in it.

Um, and in that was one of the most beautiful gifts that we've received. And it built my daughter's body literally while she was in the womb and it built my son while he was young. And it built me as an old, an old already maybe not that old, but somebody who had finished growing but still needed replenishment and repair. That went into my body. It became a part of me. And we have that animal's uro-skull on our altar.

She sat in ceremony with us. We have her bison robe. We ate the liver. We made as much as we could nose to tail. We used as much of her as possible in the regenerating of us. And that is a part of regeneration. Death is a part of life and a necessary component of it. All right, that's enough ramble. I will certainly keep rambling. Support this podcast by sharing it with a friend who's interested. Daniel is awesome.

And you should deep dive his books. Even if you don't understand this conversation, all the more reason to dive into his books and to Daniel Quinn's and really get a deeper understanding of where we're at culturally and some of the best ways that we can go forward. Super important. And support our sponsors because they make this show possible, fiscally possible. They're awesome. They're all handpicked.

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nicotine, you should definitely check out Lucy's products at lucy.co. That is L-U-C-Y dot C-O and use promo code KKP at checkout. And I got to read this verbatim. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. So remember, if you're interested in a better way to use nicotine, visit lucy.co, lucy.co, and be sure to use that promo code KKP. Without further ado, for this very long intro and ramble, my brother, Daniel Firth Griffith. All right, we're back on the land here. Daniel Griffith, second time on the podcast with me.

One of our mentors, head of the Rabinia Institute out in Wingina, Virginia. The one and only. The one and only. And what is the name of the Timshel Wildland? That's right. Timshel Wildland. That's right. Talk a bit about your process in creating that. And there will be some overlay from our first podcast.

That's fine. And we're going to dive into your new book and maybe some of your older books. So we'll take it wherever, wherever it goes. If you hear wind, there's a bit of wind here in Lockhart, but it's too, it's too scenic to go inside it. And I certainly wouldn't have it any other way with you. So yeah, talk a bit about, talk a little bit about the birth of a wildland and some of the differences between that model and the model of a farm. Yeah, that's a good place to start. You know, in the first episode we did,

I went into a little bit of our story and how we started farming, which I'll leave there. Basically, an athlete that was diagnosed with some severe degenerative genetic diseases went through seven years of health trials and ultimately landed in food and farming as a solution to those problems. You know, we farmed, you know, as all good regenerative and proper regenerative farmers do for a number of years. And, you know, for a time was just getting our feet, you know, underneath of us and, you know,

doing the Joel Salatin pasture poultry model of 100 birds in these little, you know, rotational cages, if you know, doing the Joel Salatin pasture poultry model of a hundred birds in these little, you know, rotational cages, if you will, or open bottom pens as he insists that they're called. You know, and rotating cattle on the, you know, this pasture to this pasture using polywire and step in posts. And, you know, we were just good regenerative farmers in the universal sense. And, you know, the more we got into it, the more we realized that we had a lot more questions than this regenerative movement had answers to. For instance, we talk about the regeneration of place,

like the Wildlands is a 400-acre project and we talk about the regeneration of those 400 acres. But we look around us and we see degradation and degeneration and desertification all around us. And then we go online to these feed stores and we buy minerals and feed for our chickens and our pigs and our ducks and our turkeys. And we buy minerals for our cattle and our sheep and our goats. And we have no idea where these things are coming from. long time, you know, the conversation has surrounded this idea of, well, is it certified

organic, you know, chicken feed or is it non-GMO? Is it soy-free or corn-free or is it local or is it milled locally? Or, you know, you have that stream of rhetoric and, you know, a lot of those things are certifications. And we decided to get lulled or just bored of the law of these conversations. And we were looking at our animals and we would put them in a particular place and say, okay, today, because we're good rotational grazing farmers, this is the place you're gonna go today.

And then tomorrow we're gonna move you here. And then the next day we're gonna move you here. And we sure as hell hope that everything you need today to survive is here. But that hope is unfounded immediately because you immediately have to start supplementing their diets. And I don't mean with grains and I don't mean with like local alfalfa or soybean meal, like,

you know, the conventional set stock cattle commercial model. But if you just break for a second breakdown and, you know, do a little bit of botany or ecology. And so the soil has nutrients and minerals. Let's just leave it at that. And you have this whole soil food web with nematodes eating, you know, migrating fungi that get their, you know, food from photosynthesizing plants. And you have all of that food web that I'm not going to talk about. It's a little bit complex and there's no reason to here. But out of that, that nutritious cycle, that relationship, as I call it, the soil food web is just a relationship between the life of the soil, the soil itself, with is life

again in photosynthesis and plants' roots. All of that is what we call in the space mining of nutrients and minerals. And so there's nutrients and minerals in the soil, plants undergo photosynthesis, they take CO2 out of the atmosphere, they bring that through this wonderful action of photosynthesis, and they create energy via the catalyzation of minerals. So I feel like I'm getting a little bit technical, but stay here for a second. This catalyzation of energy via minerals is the foundation of rotational grazing and holistic management in herbivory, right? Herbivores, cattle, sheep, goats, and pastures eating photosynthesizing plants, herbaceous material, creating energy then for humans to consume.

This is the story of nutritious food. Well, the question of nutrient-dense food comes from the soil. And does the soil, therefore, that we should be focused on, does the soil contain enough nutrient and minerals to grow nutrient-rich forage, then feed cattle to then feed us, or sheep and goats, or I'm going to pick on cattle here. Because we fall into this highly reductionistic, and I'm kind of playing the card here, but because regenerative farming plays into this highly reductionistic, highly linearistic approach of the cattle go here, and then they go here, and then they go there. Or maybe it's a pastured poultry model where we bring in feed, and we feed them here, and then we feed them there, and then we feed them there. Because we occupy that system, we are denuding or reducing the abundance of that system proportionally, directly. And so we started to see

these patterns arise where no matter how grass-fed, no matter how regenerative our systems were, and we were trying, we were the good regenerative farmers doing everything we possibly can to regenerate the soil because soil health matters beyond all else. We couldn't supply what the land needed without relying on other people's land. And why that matters, you know, I was in a conversation with Charles Eisenstein the other day about this, and we were discussing this idea that all life needs other life. Like, it's fine that you depend upon me and I depend upon you. But you, in your life, do not depend upon the degradation of my life right but if i'm raising pasture poultry and passion i'm relying on supplemental input i'm relying upon monocrop

commercial industrial machines of production to produce that grain so that i can regenerate and we started to see this narrative arise in it arose in the passion model of imports, of exports and inputs into the system, but it also arose in our own management, right? Because all of our management was producing an animal that still depended upon, you know, the industrial systems mining and leveling of mountains to produce calcium that we can then provide to our cows, right? Or something similar to that.

And out of all of these questions, Morgan and I, my wife, who co-runs the farm with me, and I do a lot of traveling, a lot of speaking, a lot of educating. So I should really say I co-run the farm with her. She's the badass of the place. Believe me, if you show up at Timshel on any random day, you'll see Morgan driving a herd of way too many cows all by herself with three kids in tow. So I farm with her. I can attest to that. Yeah, you've been there. You've seen it. It's amazing. No, she's the real beast behind the

wildland. We started to see this in these narratives that were arising. So for instance, so in conventional cattle care and regenerative cattle care, you have this idea that the bull breeds the cows, right? And you have heifers, and you have all these different herds. You have non-breedable-aged heifers, you have irregular-aged heifers that need to get bred, and you have the bull that you want to do the industrial machine, if she were to collapse or become reduced in size, that our farm would fail. That's what I mean by relying on our farm inputs. We became obsessed with that question. And then we looked at ourselves, like I'm saying here in the management, and we realized that our management was just as mother culture infused as mother culture is, right? We take the bull, we look at the cow and we say, yeah, I want you guys to breed together and produce this offspring so that I can then raise it up and breed it to this bull. And it's all controlled and it's mechanistic. And you look at the natural world and you see

the exact opposite, right? Mother, mother culture and mother earth, mother earth is entirely the opposite of this process. And it was interesting. We, we, you know, I tell the story in wildlife flowers, a book I wrote back in 2020, 2021. And this moment where it was a blizzard, middle of a horrible, horrible day on the farm. And we had separated the bull away from the herd of brood cows. And brood cows would just mean cows that were cycling. They were in heat, right? And we pulled the bull out and he was going apeshit nuts. And our boots were stuck in the February mud. And it was just no business of being there there and he was running at us and tearing at us. And Morgan looked at me and she said, Daniel, and don't get me wrong, a lot of the story, just like the management of the

wildland, a lot of the story depends upon Morgan's questioning. So like you're talking to me, but we could also just give the mic to Morgan over there. But Morgan looked at me and she said, Daniel, we call this natural farming, right? We call this regenerative agriculture as if we're some better system than the conventional model. How is this any better, right? We have bulls that are separated out of herds. We separate families. We castrate, you know, bulls into steers

and their endocrine and hormone systems just collapse after the fact. Look at a two-year-old steer and look at a two-year-old bull and tell me they're the same species, right? It's an endocrine and hormone system that has totally been checked and it's a totally different animal. And we push in these production systems of separation and force and reductionism. And then we look at cows and we

look at colfat or steers really, you know, production of meat. And we look at colfat and beef marbling. When all the scientists around us tell us that a beef, when it marbles, is really just early stage ketoacidosis. It's early stage diabetes. It's cardiovascular disease that is forming. And we look at all of these things and say, but it's natural, right? It's a natural system. There's nothing natural about it. And all of that is just to say a long story towards, you know, at Timshel, what our mission is, is to truly co-create with the wild as an active member. We say not a patriarch, but a progenitor of creation, a child of creation like nature is.

And what our focus is, is in the question, in the modern world, is it possible to regenerate Mother Earth as Mother Earth wants to be regenerated without depending upon mother culture, this industrial machine? And so the way it looks a little bit different, people come and like we had the senior editor for the Reader's Digest came out,

wanted to write a piece on us and give her a little tour. And after the fact, she said, I just don't understand. It seems like you guys just don't do anything. And I said, yeah, you got, yes, that's it, right? Like we're not out there, you know, no-till drilling cover crops. Instead, we're looking at emergence. We're not out there planting trees.

We're utilizing our animals in a particular way so that they plant the trees. And we see literally thousands of oaks and poplars and beach trees and American persimmons popping up in all these magnificent ways. And yeah, we're constructing ponds, but that's about as much intensive action that we participate in. But yeah, we don't do things.

We don't get in nature's way of healing. Like, yeah, we have fence lines, we have neighbors, our cows can't get on the road because shit hits the fan. And, you know, we have some restrictions. But the question is, in this world of restrictions, in this world of private property ownership and fence lines, is it possible to truly nurture and cultivate, that is to say, nurture with a capital N, a truly wild world as much as possible, right? on the farm. This year, we're piloting this amazing open grazing tendency. We were talking to a good friend of mine last night, and they compared it to the Maasai of Africa and other

places. It's just, how can we utilize this landscape in such a way that the cattle and the sheep and the goats and the... Now, we're co-farming with a chicken and pig farmer simultaneously. Clara of the Wild Way Farm is on our land, living there and farming with us, which is part of the whole complexity of the thing. How can on our land living there and farming with us which is part of the whole complexity of the thing you know how can we create a system that doesn't rely upon reductionistic control right and I don't know we can dive into some specifics but I mean that that's it's really what the wildlands all about yeah it's massive it's massive because it's it's massive. It's massive because it's a paradigm shift from, you know, like every, I think we're basically relearning how to map the way it works, the way it's once worked, right? And so the, as we shift through time, and we'll talk about cycles and regeneration in your new book in a minute, but it feels like the doorway into the future is from the past. It's in the remembrance of how things worked in the past and how things were self-sustained. And, you know,

one of the biggest lessons from 2020 and 2021, a lot of people talk about, you know, vertical infrastructure and things like that. And it's like, yeah, like how can we bulletproof ourself against supply chain issues that are ever present? Like there's no, you know, as, as much as I have a distaste for the government, there is no back to normal. There is no back to the way it was. Like it's changing at a rapid pace.

And in addition to that, there are people in power that want it to change, not for the better. There are people in power that want vertical farming based on hydroponics and chemical inputs. There's people, which doesn't regenerate anything. It's all input. A large group of people want us eating insects

and things like that. And then claiming that food from the land, which we've relied upon since the dawn of time, since the dawn of our existence, that that is not the way, that that's causing climate change and things of that nature. So it appears there is an uphill battle.

There is perhaps the ever-present opponent, Um, so, you know, it appears there is an uphill battle. There is, uh, perhaps the, the ever present opponent, if you want to call it that. But at the end of the day, it is in this, the remembrance of what is wild. It's in the remembrance of what is truly vertical, where, where we can be self-sustained without the inputs of other things and, and allow that to, to co-create something immaculate, something perfect, something that has everything that it needs. Yeah, I think there's a couple key points there that you're getting at. And I think they're brilliant. Number one is this conversation around the idea of a regenerating world needs to start encapsulating the further notion that if we're looking at regenerating 400 acres, we sure as flying hell can't degenerate 1,000 acres.

Right? That's not good math. Not just that, but on the previous podcast I did with you, I remember a lot of people had issue with this when I said it, but I'll say it again and I'll say it happily. We can't regenerate our world by enslaving theirs, right? And theirs is always somebody a little bit farther off than my eyes can see. And that's so much of the narrative surrounding the idea of regeneration right now. It's I'm regenerating my place. Look at me, right? Like not to drop names, but like any name you and I could drop in this moment sits at that place. Look at this landscape. Look at what we're doing. Don't look at those, right? I just had to enslave those to deal with these. I mean, think about it. If you're actually no-till drilling cover crops

in any sort of scale, I mean, if you don't go to the local feed store and buy a half a pound of white clover, even then you still can't exclude yourself from this conversation. But if you are a farmer not buying a half a pound, you're buying more than half a pound, or even the person buying a half a pound, if you're participating in that system, you are buying those seeds from a chemically infused Northwest Oregon, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 acre white clover field that lacks diversity, right? It lacks the idea of holism. It's chemically infused. And it's not, you know, I think a lot of people when they think about cover crops, because like cover cropping and no-till drilling is a huge component right now in the regenerative space. And they think about cover crops, because like cover cropping and no-till drilling is a huge component right now in the regenerative space. And they think about cover cropping as look at

the life that I'm adding to the soil. Number one, we have to check that sentence, right? Humans don't add life to the soil. Humans are the life of the soil, right? There's no way for us to add something into this tertiary entity unless it's tertiary. We have to be separate from it in order to even have that sentence. So check our language. But also too, all we're doing is raping another area of the world in thousands of acres so that I can quote unquote regenerate mine. That's a huge problem, right? Like there's a lot of primitivism or improper terminology using like the Luddite type of ideology. Like that's not who the Luddites were. We don't have to get into that. But there's all of this idea that like I'm homesteading, I'm a primitivist, I'm a Luddite, look at me, I'm just separate, right? From the evil of this world, right?

But then number one, that has issues and maybe we can talk about that. But number two, like you're not, right? You're not actually separate from the world, right? You still rely upon diesel or carbon infused fossil fuel engines. You're still relying on thousand-acre cover crop farms, thousands and thousands of acres of monocrop cover crop farms,

producing your white clover seeds harvested by technologically tethered machines. And then you're showing them in your field saying, look at the diversity. But in order for me to have diversity, I have to monocrop and singularize that landscape over there just farther than my eyes can see. And as long as it's out of my purview, right, it's totally okay. And that's part of the rhetoric that, you know, what we're trying to look at here at Tim Schull is, I mean, it's not sustainable, right? But that's an easy thing to say. It's not sovereign in any way, right? I rely upon machines and FedEx two-day air packages to fly 4,000 miles across the country to get it here. I rely upon this mother culture and industrial machine in order to make this all happen.

But first and foremost, and there's conversations to be had there, but first and foremost, I think the key concept that we have to start realizing is that our language is the problem, right? And like all of my books, no matter what I write, I always find that I'm just making the same claim over and over and over again. Our language is a problem, right? In order for me to look at the system and say, I'm regenerative because they're not,

or I'm regenerative, don't you dare look over there and prove that my regeneration is a scam. It is founded from this language of disconnection. Like, you know, in my most recent book, Dark Cloud Country, I write that, and this is not revolutionary, but, you know, we don't have relationship with the earth. We are a relationship. We don't, you know, inspire harmony or harmonize with the natural world or with other people. We are the harmony. This thing that we're inhabiting in this moment is the harmony. And all we can do is inhabit it that

much more fully and it becomes that much more whole, right? It's interesting, like, you know, I'm presenting at the force of nature conference two days from now here in Texas. And I'm sure this episode is going to air many days later than that, but, um, three or four days later. Cool. So it just happened. Cool. So we got this cool, like before and after moment. So if you're listening to this, it's after, in this moment, I'm thinking about it. And one of the aspects, my wife and I, we're Messianic. We practice Messianic Judaism.

And over the last year, I've been really interested in the Hebrew, ancient Hebrew language, biblical Hebrew language, that is. And it's this really cool moment. I'll share this with you. I'll share it with everybody else on Saturday evening. But in Genesis 1-2, or in the Tanakh, it's called Bereshit. Bereshit 1-2, it reads, Beautiful language.

And it's this cool moment where at the very beginning of creation, the ancient Hebrew Bible, which is really just oral tradition written down from many hundreds of thousands of years previous, that's an accepted fact in some sense in our community. And it says, and in her darkness, she hovered over the formless deep. And the divine hovered over the formless deep. It gets differently translated in the Septuagint,

the Greek versions, and later in life. But it's this moment of creation, the very beginning in the formless deep. It gets differently translated in the Septuagint, the Greek versions, and later in life. But it's this moment of creation, the very beginning in the formless darkness, and it says her spirit. Evararak Elohim is a feminine, it really is translated the feminine divine, right?

It's hovering over this formless deep. And, you know, I can say a lot more and all these other little things that I'll say on Saturday night. But creation, the creation story, according to Bereshit in the Tanakh, is at the very tail end of it,

the creation is still lacking. Humankind is still lonely and God creates a woman. And he doesn't call the woman Eve. That's the Greek version of the ancient Tanakh. He calls her a Kava. Eve's name in the actual Hebrew Bible is Kava, which means breath. It also means the giver of breath.

So the very beginning of creation and the very end of creation, we have this idea of this female giver of life hovering as though a breath or a spirit over the formless deep. And then she continues to give the breath at the very end. There's a lot there to unpack. It's unbelievably pregnant.

But the point that I'm bringing it up here is just to say, you know, from our religious understandings, but also just ancient mythology, regardless if you see it as true history or just ancient mythology, I'm good either way. Because the resultant is still the same. Humanity and this idea of co-creation with this world is implicit, right? There's this teleological link between the idea of life and that which is life.

And, you know, Long has regeneration and the regenerative narrative try to separate these two holes. You have mankind, and now we have to prove that mankind is a viable and valuable addition to the natural world. Like that's the rhetoric we see now turn on the news. That's what's the conversation that's happening. And instead of changing that narrative, creating a more beautiful story, the regenerative world, I think,

is just playing right into it. You know, no, no, no, no. What mankind actually has to do is control the natural world. And no till drill out the diversity and we have to control what grows and we have to remove invasive species and we sure as hell got to produce cattle

with a 13% call fat in 24 months and they better be certified black angus or else force of nature doesn't want them, right? And just drop in another CPG company and it's exactly the same, I know of them all. The point is we're still controlling nature as if the question to be asked is, what is the role of humanity?

It's the wrong question, right? There is no role of humanity as if there's this thing called a role in humanity outside of the natural world and we're trying to decide how mankind interacts with that. To separate mankind out of the natural world is to knew the entire potential of the entire, you know, problem set, if you will. And so, like, you know, we we at the Tim Schawadlin Project, as we call it, we're not trying to solve the world's problems. And I'm not here offering solutions. Like the book I just wrote,

Dark Cloud Country, that came out at the beginning of April, we pitched it to a lot of publishers and all of them accepted it and then denied it when their one request wasn't made. And that was, there's no practices. There's no practice.

You're not telling me how to regenerate, you know, this idea of relationship in the natural world. And so we just took it. We self-published it because I'm sure as hell not going to talk about practices. And I'm sure as hell not going to talk about practices here. Like, I have no interest in that. We have a lot of co-creation work to do

and it happens in the community at the most local level. And so we're just trying to look at can you regenerate in the natural world, truly regenerate? Is it possible? And so far, I don't know. It's interesting. There's a lot of problems.

There's a lot of problems. And if I can just highlight one just because of the group of people I'm talking to, I usually wouldn't highlight this one. But it's the consumer's palette. The biggest problem the Timshel Wildland Project is currently running into is the consumer's palette. plants growing in our pastures. About four or five years later, we did the same biological assay or survey, if you will, and there were 73 plants growing in those same pastures. And we didn't plant a single one of those. None of those are blowing in from other fields. Maybe some of them are being carried in by birds and other species, but very few. These are species that none of our neighbors has. They're just reawakened from the soil profile, the soil seedbed, as ecologists would call it. And when you have cattle grazing in an open environment and you have different breeds of those cattle, more ancient varieties, and they're

eating wood and they're eating weeds and they're eating all of this undulating and truly rhythmic diversity, they taste different. And we have a lot of customers that just have no idea what actual meat tastes like, right? The know, the Rubinia Institute, you mentioned that, you know, my wife and I, we co-operate, co-own Rubinia and we, you know, manage literally tens and tens of thousands of acres of, you know, regenerating landscapes on the East Coast.

And we train hundreds of people a year and I speak all over the country, you know, underneath that umbrella and we publish books and things like that. And one of the things that we work on is this thing called EOV, ecological outcome verification, which is basically just a way of giving voice to the land, adding a scientific ecological monitoring layer to management. Is it trackable? Yeah, it's trackable. It's trackable. But also in some sense, it's like

not to be the regeneration is relationship guy, as I'm increasingly known, but like think about your wife or your relationship to your wife or my relationship to Morgan. I use that as an example. You know, I might think I want to love Morgan, show love to Morgan. And if I don't know her love language or how she likes to receive that love,

if you don't want to reduce it down to those five or four languages, if I don't know how she wants to receive such love, I might miss the boat, right? I might totally shoot the wrong target. And after a long day, like I said, we cooperate the wildland. It might be a hundred degrees.

We've been fencing or moving cattle all day. We're tired. It's 10 p.m. We've been working since 6 a.m. And I might want to thank her for being with me that day or thank her for putting up with me that day. It's probably a better way of saying it. I might massage her shoulders because I like touch. I love it. It really helps me feel grounded

and everything else. She hates it. So I might try to love her in a way that she hates and drive her away. I do it all the time. It's horrible. She has a much better way. It's easy for me and Tosh because we're both touch. Okay, there you go. That's easy. That's much easier. Way easier. But years could go by, right? And I think, hey, I'm really loving Morgan. I'm really going out of my way to love,

show love to Morgan. And all I'm doing is driving her away. And it's a pithy little weird sort of example, but I cannot tell you when we do EOV, I cannot tell you, we've done EOV on hundreds of farms and I can only give you a handful of farms where this was not the case, literally less than a handful. They believe they're regenerating. You know, we've been a regenerative farm for 20 years and they're growing

less grass year over year. They believe they're regenerating and the leaf material, the actively, you know, we call them solar panels or, you know, photosynthesizing solar panels onto the plant. The leaf is what's photosynthesizing and transpiring. It's part of being a part of the water and hydrologic cycle. That's very important. The leaves are getting smaller year over year. The soil is getting more depleted year over year. You're getting more bare soil, not covered soil year over year over year. We see the opposite of regeneration happening. It's not because the heart isn't there. Going back to my wife and I's example, like I want to show the love.

I think I'm showing the love, but I've never asked, how am I doing, right? And so when we teach EOV courses or we do EOV when we're thinking from this paradigm or from this perspective of management that we've been talking about on this podcast thus far, or I've been rambling about on this podcast thus far, we have to approach it from the question, when was the last time you walked in a pasture and asked what it wanted to be?

When was the last time you listened? And if it could speak, could you understand it? These are all critical and vital components of having a relationship, right? Me asking Morgan, Morgan, how am I doing? It's important, but what's the most important? Listening, right? But not being too busy in my mind that even though I might be listening or appearing that I'm listening, I'm not actually understanding. Those are three components that we have to get in terms of our ecological literacy, not just social human relationship sort of literacy. And I bring that up to say that a lot of the EOV we're doing, I bet a grand 90% of it is demonstrating that the farms that believe they're regenerative are not. We're totally missing the boat.

And I think it comes down to this understanding of our ability to control. A lot of regenerative farms today still operate underneath that paradigm. That we're able to control what grows, how it grows, how fast it grows. We're able to control the production process and the markets as a huge component. We can talk about that too. We right now are being pushed as farmers, in the force of nature speech, I'm going to call them paupers and prostitutes, farmers are becoming because of markets, right? We're being forced in these linearistic production models that are really just industrial machines writ in a regenerative world or slapped with a regenerative label.

And so the whole thing is still mother culture, right? But the rhetoric is mother earth. It's a new story, right? But it looks like mother culture. And Timshel, we're nowhere close. Like, you know, unbelievable hurdles in our way. Fence lines, right? Neighbors that don't want cows in their fields.

Like there's some things that I don't know if we're ever going to be able to beat. Maybe I think we can build a truly communal society in the future where everything is a little bit different. But like right now, we're just starting to ask the questions and, you know, really working on our ecological literacy so we can make sure that we at least can start

to formulate an understanding of the language of, you know, these feedback loops. I've kind of rambled on and on. No, I love that. Yeah, please, please don't stop rambling. It's, I think a lot of people are, I mean, if they're privy to the language around regenerative and they understand, you know, the story behind that and the story behind the soil. You know, I was recently at, um, force of nature's been at hop dotty and, and I, you know, uh, I remember when Paul Saladino was in town, the carnivore doc,

and he went through a bunch of different places and he's like, these guys are cooking their fries and fucking soybean oil. They're not cooking what they're cooking with this. They're cooking with that, you know? And, and, uh, I think there's a website. I'll have, um, I'll have Jose find it for us for the show notes. But it shows you where they're not using any seed oils whatsoever. But one of my questions was like, we have this Mother Nature burger, which is using regenerative beef. And obviously, according to the prescription there, it's probably got to be the Angus that

you're talking about from a very certain number of farms that can provide that. But it's a step in the right direction and they're using Vital Farms eggs. And that in and of itself is taken from a conglomerate of farms and done better than most, but probably not in the way that we want it yet. Right. But I think it is a step in the right direction. And their goal is to be the first ever 100% regenerative restaurant chain. And I was like, that's fucking cool because I haven't even heard people talking about that. You know, like that's a step. Supply chains will be an issue with that. And it may be something, as we talked about in the first podcast, where

some of the goals on how we fit this into mother culture actually can't work. It actually might not be possible. It actually might take, instead of the 4,000-acre regenerative, quote-unquote, regenerative farm providing food for the masses, it might just be 100-acre farms to 400-acre farms that are serving only locally. And if you want to eat the right food for you, you're going to get it from a neighbor. You're going to get it at the farmer's market. You're not going to get it at a grocery store, and you're not going to get it at a restaurant. That said, it is inspiring to see people trying in

that way. And Ryland Englehart, who I've had on the podcast, who did the Kiss the Ground documentary, and he's got another one coming out this summer on Netflix called Common Ground. Love his story. Quick recap, his parents were vegan and they were into biodynamics and some good things, but they started Cafe, or I think it was Cafe Gratitude and another one. And they were pretty much the largest vegan restaurant in LA. All the celebrities were going there and it was a big movement. And then at 35 years old,

as he was getting into regenerative, he ate his first burger. And because he understood, you know, the loop, the closed system loop of that is, I do take the life of this eight-year-old cow that I've known for eight years, that had a name that I loved, and I honor it by eating it and giving that back to the land. And he had people out in front of his restaurants, you know,

murderer signs and shit like that. And it's pretty, it's just jarring to see, you know, the, how wrapped up people are in their own dogma. And then at the same time to see him break free of that is really beautiful. And I love, I really like what they're doing with presenting these ideas on a larger scale for people to start to wrap their head around. But with that, you know, if you're first coming into this, say you watch Kiss the Ground, you read The Soil Will Save Us, and we have this, you know, this kind of a speed bump in language with Charles Eisenstein, you know, around like the importance of the soil. And that was such an important piece for people coming into this that are like, well, I thought regenerative was regenerative. And I thought this was, you know, the way that,

and I thought the soil was the move because, you know, that should be the most important thing. That's going to sequester the carbon and it's going to give all the fucking things back to the plants. And then that's how we get the most nutrient dense food. Talk a little bit about, you know, the, the, what's now known as the correct way and, and what you're learning, you know, as different in terms of like, you're not there yet, but you know, because you're asking these questions and it's because of the relationship that you're building. What comes to mind for me, you know, and it came to mind too, when you were talking about the publisher's issue on not giving practices, right? What you're giving is like a download of how we are in relationship with nature, right? And that perhaps is the key code that's more important than

any do it this way, here's your one through 10, right? It's far more important than that. And that key code for me happened through ayahuasca and yours happened through being on the land, right? So there's no one way up the mountain. But it is important that we have that remembrance and that knowing, the gnosis, right? Where it's not an idea, it's visceral, it's through us. For people that are tuning into this that maybe haven't farmed or maybe haven't gone to the jungle and done plant medicines and they don't yet have that relationship, what in your opinion is the way to start to build that relationship? Yeah, that's a really, really good question.

There's so many ways to go. And I want to say this simply because it's really the question. Not everybody is running a 400-acre wildland. many ways to go. And I want to say this simply because it's really the question. You know, not everybody is running a 400-acre wildland. Not everyone literally spends their life getting to spend the time asking these questions or sit next to like thighs that are as big as my head that I can't stop staring at. In the short shorts. Yeah. I know I'm wearing long pants. I should have worn shorts. It's Texas. Come on. Yeah, that's true. You know, it's like, you know, I know I'm wearing long pants. I should have worn shorts. It's Texas, come on. Yeah, that's true. You know, it's like, you know, I get it.

There's a lot of us, you know, I was on a mutual friend, what's his name? Anthony Gustin's podcast recently and he asked a very similar question. And what I would like to do is defer it to somebody else who I've asked the question to and I really liked the answer from. I was talking with a good and dear friend of mine,

Precious Fury. She's a tribal member in an agricultural community, the Zawahange, I think, if I can pronounce it right, community in Zimbabwe. And she just has this unbelievable story. Orphaned, raised by her grandmother, literally ate mushrooms for years just to survive in just a truly poor and truly degraded area of the world. And they're bringing it back

through tribal communities and regenerative agriculture in a very holistic management sort of sense. And just a brilliant, a brilliant woman. And I asked, okay, so what do we do? Where do we start? And she said, I'll never forget this, you know, because like, I think we're so keen to immediately dawn the apparel of, it's like this hidden colonizer mode. We're like, oh, let me help, right? Let me be the white guy helping, right? Like the flag of Massachusetts. It's this indigenous person with the thing like, someone, please come save me. Like that's our mentality, right? This colonizer mindset is often hidden in our desire to like, oh, can I go to Zimbabwe and help? Right? And I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. But when I asked her this question, she returned, she says, look down at your feet and start there. Now, I just thought that was beautiful. So unbelievably simple. The mind that she has to have

to be able to get to that simplicity to me is just paralyzing. But like, look down at your feet and start there. What does it mean to have relationship to a more beautiful, truly resilient and regenerating world? Look down at your feet and start there. For us, it looks like regenerating a wildland,

trying to build truly no input animals so that if mother culture were to collapse, we still can have food on the table. To me, it means the complete deconstruction of the USDA's processing system because we can have a whole podcast about the atrocities of that system. Any acronym. Any acronym. They need to be out. I'm patiently waiting for those systems to absolutely crumble. It appears they're doing a fairly good job of that. Yeah, themselves, especially in recent, you know, the last two weeks with the dairy and everything else that's just exploded. You know, for us, in addition to the complete dismantling of the how we actually turn food in the pasture to food on the plate, that's what I mean by the

dismantling of the USDA processing system and truly making it more sovereign, more local, more understandable, more human scale. In addition to that, I think we have a lot of work that currently we're working through with CPG companies and aggregators. And it's just like if the modern consumer, if I can just put a pin in my sentence and stay here for a second, if the modern consumer would actually get to understand what's going on in the quotequote regenerative aggregation slash market, I think they would immediately second-guess their participation in it and look for an alternative. I really do.

I think knowledge is power, and sometimes knowledge can't get us enough power to be able to make true change. But I think this is a fine example of where this knowledge is perfectly capable enough to inspire and facilitate this change. So, you know, so for instance, unknown company reaches out to me for some unknown reason that we don't have to talk about this podcast. And they say, hey, we want to source 35 cows a week from your network. We have a network of verified regenerative human scale local farms that we work

as it's like this decentralized democracy. And anyways, another podcast, another time. And I said, okay, well, you know, let us know cost and let's talk about the purchase protocol. All CPG companies, all, you know, meat aggregators have purchasing protocols. So this would be like, you know, you're an athlete, you know, like imagine you're going on to a college and you're a high school senior right now, and they want you to run the 40. They want you to do the bench 20, you know, 225. They want you to do these things. It's a purchase protocol, right? To make sure that according to these understandings of what the human body should be able to do on their football team or their wrestling team or whatever, that they want to know where you fit. And the same

thing is true in meat aggregation. So this unknown company trying to buy 35 cows a week from our network, they send us the purchasing protocol. And this is what it looks like. They want only certified black Angus. So we've introduced the entire panoply of all breeds of cows from all over the world for all adaptive epigenetic or climactic reasons that they've developed over the last 10,000 years. Screw them all. We want one. We want a certified black Angus. And don't dare be a non-certified black Angus. The certified black Angus association has to make the money through the certification. So now we're prostrating the idea of regeneration to that system. So it has to be certified black Angus. It has to be 24 months old. It has to have 13% call fat. So call fat for those non-agricultural among us listening, call fat is the last place in the cow's body that develops a fat cap. It's

underneath the tailbone of the cow. If you're looking at a cow and you're looking at the back end, the tail sits on top of the call fat. So if you see a tail that sinks into the pelvic cavity, it has no call fat, which probably means that the meat isn't marbled. And if it has call fat, you'll see the tail raise out as if it's sitting on a ball of meat right on top of the behind of the cow.

That's what you call call fat. It has to have at least 13% call fat. It has to be a hang weight. A hang weight is when the cape of the head and the entrails are all out of the body. They hang it and they weigh it. The USDA processors in their majestic wisdom, they do these things.

And it has to be above 550 pound hang weight. So 24 months old, 13% call fat, hang weight of 550. And you have to demonstrate 3.1 pounds of weight gain per day during a finishing period. So now you need a finishing period. Now listen, there's a lot of details there, but let me just focus on one. And we can spend an entire podcast focusing on all of them, but let me just focus on one. The idea of being 24 months old. This is the most benign. I guarantee most of our listeners forgot that I even said it.

We're talking about 30% call fat, all these other things, hang weights and things, but 24 months old. What this means is 24 months before this organization backs up a trailer to our network's farms, I have to be birthing a cow and it has to be a boy, which means that nine months before the 24 months, I have to have a particular bull breeding a particular female without question. Now I have regulated and mathematically computed the life of, or the existence of life, right? To a T. Because if I'm wrong, right? Just think about this.

If it's a 550 pound hang weight and I gain 3.1 pounds of weight gain per day, and I have to demonstrate this to this company, right? I have a finite, a limited amount of time to put that weight on that animal, else they don't buy it, right? So I am sure as hell reducing the entire panoply of life down to the singular moment of a cow breeding or a bull breeding a cow right now. And it better be this one. Totally reductionistic. Totally reductionistic. And by the way, almost impossible for a farmer to truly, truly do. And worst case is you make less money selling verified regenerative, grass-born,

grass-fed, grass-finished, vaccine-free, antibiotic-free meat to that company, right? That consumers then go buy at the store for $10 a pound at Whole Foods than you make selling to the conventional cattle market on a Thursday afternoon or Friday afternoon between 3 and 4 p.m. where the only thing you have to demonstrate in order to make more money there is that the cow is living, check. The cow is locomotive. It has locomotive abilities. It's alive and it's mobile, right? It has feet that move, check. And it can't just have an active bacterial infection. So let's look at this for a second, right? McDonald's, who is buying the meat from that market, is selling a dollar cheeseburger, right, for meat that demonstrates those three characteristics. It's alive, it can move,

and it's not about to die, right? And the farmer makes more money from that system than he does a system that's verified, regenerative, vaccine, antibiotic-free, grass-born, fed, and finished. That's for sale for not $1, but $10 at the local grocery store. And they have to fit within a 24-month-old, two-year-old, certified Black Angus, 13% call fat, 550-pound hang weight, demonstrating a 3.1-pound weight gain in the finishing period, which is the last three or four months of its life per day. It's almost impossible, but you make less money than if you were to just sell into the conventional cattle market. But there's something better about regeneration, right? As if what I'm describing is even regeneration, which is obviously not the case looking at

the rest of this podcast that we've discussed. That's a problem. That's a broken system through and through, right? And unfortunately, I don't think that system can be improved. I think it has to be demolished and rebuilt, or at least rebuilt from using older stories like you got at the very beginning. The consumer could only realize the system that they were participating in, spending $9 more a pound for beef than McDonald's, and the system is still that degenerative and that control-based and that colonizing base and that dictatorial and that

patriarchal, and we're still spending nine times more on a pound of ground beef than a McDonald's cheeseburger, that they would immediately change. And so let's say you take my word for it. You want to immediately change. You ask the question again, what does the consumer do? What do these people do right here and now? Find a local farm. Look down at your feet, find the closest one and develop a relationship with them. And let me be the thought leader in the regenerative space that says this live and on the air, and I will get emails. I'm going to have to start an email auto-reply

just being like I'm not listening again because I had to do that the first time we had an interview. Let me be the first one to say, I don't care about their soil health. I don't care about the nutrient richness of their soil producing the nutrient dense beef that the Biological Food Association and Fred Prevenza and all these other people

right now are looking at. Those things matter. Yes, hold on. But don't worry about that. Don't. Look down at your feet, find the closest farm that your feet can carry you to and develop a relationship.

Because what I've seen, managing literally tens of thousands of acres all across the East Coast and trading literally thousands of farms and speaking all over the country and meeting all of these farms and doing EOV, ecological outcome verification, on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of farms, what I know is this. Most people in the regenerative food space want to be better. But there's no market for better food, right?

There's just no market for better food. They either have to slum it at the local farmer's market where you have to compete, right? And we have this race to the bottom where I'm trying to sell chicken at $5 and you're selling it at $4.75. So I reduce mine to $4.50 because capitalism is real even at farmer's markets. And all of a sudden, I'm making less money, right? But if I had a customer that said, hey, listen, I was listening to this podcast and I really want to change the world. And I was told to look down at my feet and find the closest farm. You're the closest farm.

How can I help you? Can I pay for my meat up front? Can I participate in your system by helping you fix some fence lines? Can I help you? Can I invest some money into your farm so that you can go buy some actually better stocks? You stop going to the local stockyard and buying stock orangus cows and just finishing for a couple months. How can I help you? Right? That's where a more beautiful future is going to be created through co-creation and emergence, not looking around saying, oh, White Oak Pastures is the best goddamn farm in the United States. I'm going to go on their site and ship their meat from South Georgia, which questionably comes from South Georgia all the way to Ohio, right? Or even Force of Nature. I'm glad this is going to air after the

fact because I'll say this on Saturday, but it's healthy that this isn't live now. But even Force of Nature, right? So there's this wonderful grocery store in central Virginia. It's a mom and pop owned stop. They only have one location. You walk in there and it feels like home style herb or herbary, if that's a word, just like this urban fuse, local, like raw food inspired hippie meets home style grocery store. You just walk in, it smells amazing. Kind of smells like in there,. They just really care. It's not whole food. Just inside the building here, it smells so good. And they used to be a purveyor of local meats. They had this huge wall of freezers about the size of this porch we're on. And there was 20, 30 farms represented in there. And Timshel,

our meat, our chicken used to be in there. there was just all of this this this this great panoply of like local vigor right and i went in the the in there there the other day and um half of that whole thing is um force of nature now which comes from not central virginia obviously half of its force of nature and the other half is polyface joel salatin's farm and i walk none local now none Well, there was like one chicken. Like there was like maybe one, right? But like none. I'm talking about like, and I'm using my hands here, which the person listening to this can't see,

but like just 30, 40 feet of freezers that used to be like a local understanding of food production. And now it comes from, you know, force of nature and Polyface. And I walked into the manager and I, you know, I walked through the sales clerk and I found the manager and I asked, I said, listen, manager lady, you guys are the opposite of commercialism. I literally have to bring my own bags and boxes. I can buy some dope Chinese

medical herbs in here that are all locally grown and you have herbalists. But the meat is entirely commercialized and singularized. And she said, I know, but our customers love the brand. Literally word for word what she said to me. And so when we're thinking about having relationship, when we're thinking about a human being participating, or I don't want to say participating in the natural world as if human beings have the ability to not participate in their world. The idea of a human world v. natural world, the domestic world, the wild world, like none of these things actually exist. It's just world, right? And the entire story of humankind

has been trying to, in my opinion, separate us and then reenter us and then separate us from that understanding. And so if you're that individual and you're sitting here and you're wondering, how can I be relationship in my community? Right. Like, don't buy force of nature. Don't I mean, don't buy polyface unless they're your local farmer. Right. And you better be in Swoop, Virginia of about 50 people that live in. So you better be one of those 50 people. Right. Find your local farm.

Don't ask them about soil health. Don't ask them about their practices. Just ask, how can I help? Start there and emerge from there because I guarantee you their heart's desire is to see their land and their community flourish. You would not be in the regenerative farming world if that was not the case. Why? In 2021, we did a study, surveyed about a thousand local farms under about 500, 600 acres in the entire mid-Atlantic. So we're talking Pennsylvania to South Carolina as far west as the Mississippi. We surveyed them all.

We asked them a couple of key questions. And these are the three findings. I think I said this in the last episode. 2021 into 2022, the average Virginia or mid-Atlantic farmer makes $18,000 a year. That's pre-tax. That's pre-expenses. That-expenses, that's cash flow. They work 87 hours a week on the farm and about 30 to 35 hours a week off the farm, marketing the farm, farmer's markets, online, writing emails, doing all the social media stuff.

So they work a beyond full-time job. They work three full-time jobs, if you're just looking at a 40-hour work week, and they're making $18,000 a year. So don't walk onto their farm and ask, well, what's the nutrient density of this beef? That's, in my opinion, the people like Fred Provenza and Stefan, whatever his last name is, like the scientist, the Biological Food Association, Dan Krichich, with their role in this, looking at the nutrient density of beef from a truly scientific and viability perspective, that's over here. And it's unbelievably valuable. But in our conversation we're having now, it has nothing to do with it, right? These local farms making $18,000 a year, working hundreds of hours a week, don't ask them about nutrient density. Don't ask them about soil health. This is why

our institute last year made the video, you know, soil health doesn't matter. It just doesn't. Because you can have soil health by enslaving your neighbor, right? And you can have soil health because you just put it there, right? Like you want 6% organic matter on your soil, buy it. Literally, just start trucking in loads of compost and spread it. You'll have 6%. It's good, right? You want more diversity, plant it. Go to Northwest Oregon and fly in tons of technologically tethered white clover and perennial rye like we were pulling in here. It seems that smooth brome and perennial rye is about what your highway department seeds on the roadsides, right? Where are they getting all of their seeds? The same places these regenerative farms are getting their seeds. It's no different story. If you want diversity, right now you plant

it. If you want more soil organic matter, you plant it. If you want more carbon in the soil, sequester it. It's not hard. Those are very easy things. But walking into your community, looking at your tired, broken, incredibly abused farmer and saying, okay, I'm here. Let's go. I want to help. How can I help? And their response might be, buy our food. Their response might be, hey, I need some help with fence lines. Their response might be, hey, I need an investment. Do you have $3,000? Because I don't. Right?

And go from there and see what emerges. That's massive. I had a next question and then I just got hung up on the fact that I've probably gone through 200 pounds of white clover. It's the only thing I can think of. I got a 50-pound sack in the back of my truck right now. Every time we cut and clear with the scythe, scythe? I don't know what the hell it's called.

Scythe is fine. The scythe, yeah. We're cutting and clearing out on the berm here because one of the first hays we got in here was Johnson grass. And it was the only no-spray hay we could find in Texas. So we're like, we'll take it, you know? And of course it had tons of seeds. So Johnson grass has basically taken over the whole food forest. And so we're just, we pull it, we're losing too much soil. So we just started chop and drop and anywhere where it's clear, I'm just going through and I got the kids out there. We're

just broadcasting this, you know this supposedly organic white clover, crimson clover, those kind of things, trying to get the green manure down. Yeah, that totally derailed me because it's the second time you brought it up and I was like, man, I'm that guy. Yeah, no, well, it gets down into context. I think I can't let a podcast go by

without talking about Alan Savory and what his work and relationship has had in my life. But, you know, the foundation of Alan Savory's work, the founder of Holistic Management, the co-founder of the Savory Institute, is that context matters. That's it. It's done, right? Just 60 years of his life was just put in 13 seconds. But the power of what that means is, I mean, in my opinion, it's world-changing. And I hope it does change the world. We have a lot of really good work to do.

But there's a difference between planting a food forest and trying to bring back life under this context and regeneration as a thing, right? Those are two different holes. We confuse these holes quite often, right? We call this a regenerative farm that we're sitting on and the food forest fits within that idea of true regeneration.

No, no, no, no, it fits within the idea of sustainability, of creating food for ourselves in this incredibly degenerating world. It's very important, right? Like, yeah, spread the grass seed, right? But if you look at this and say, I'm regenerative, I'm a regenerative farm because my clover is dope as hell.

Well, no, that's a different comment, right? It has to do with your holistic context, but it's a different comment. Especially when we start to extrapolate and we look at regeneration as a thing, right? You know, I'm regenerative because I planted it. That's a really, really big problem, especially when that which you're planting at that scale is really just eroding and degenerating and enslaving or denuding, you know, the neighbors

just beyond your eyesight's reach. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, absolutely. I want to bring up, I want to circle back to force of nature because, you know, I think it's pertinent. You know, I had Robbie on the podcast, one of the co-founders. I'll also be speaking a little earlier than you on Saturday at their event. Like the new farmer panel, right? Or like the emerging farmer panel? Yeah, first year homesteaders or something. I was like, let's go, baby, let's go. We got a year in the game, lots of lessons. And Robbie said the exact same thing you did. He said, force of nature products, I put third on the list.

He goes, first, you hunt something that spent its entire life in the wild, like an elk, right? And the last thing, if it's an ethical kill, the last thing it knows is it's filling its belly full of food with its family. Lights go out, right? And the last thing, if it's an ethical kill, the last thing it knows is it's filling its belly full of food with its family. Lights go out, right? That's number one. Number two is you go to a local farm like we did at your place and you kill the animal yourself. You have a relationship with that animal and you take its life in the most ethical way that you can. You participate in the field dressing and the harvesting and you eat that thing nose to tail. That's number two. Number three is you go pick up Forza Nature products

because there's nothing better where you live. And you may reorder that in some different way, but I found that astonishing that one of the co-founders of that company put it that way. He put himself that far down the ladder in terms of what is the best thing you can put in your body. And it was really, it felt very, very honest and authentic, you know, from a take, you know, from him, you know, so I get that. And yeah, you know, like when you start to factor in shit that most people have no idea about, like Steiner's understanding and not even diving into biodynamics, which is just a mind-blowing field in and of itself. But the understanding of energetics and not even diving into spirituality, which he does quite deeply, but the location of where we are, the location of the sunlight,

the amount of rain, all these things. I was telling you about Joaquin, this amazing third generation cheesemaker from Venezuela that we've been introduced to at our local dairy farm that we love, Strick Farm. It's a Jersey cow farm down in Schulenburg, Texas. It's fucking phenomenal. He was showing me his different cheeses that he's aged, all raw, using all A2A2 Jersey cows.

And he's like, this is when we went through the drought in 2021. And you could see, because the grass had less rainfall, it had less carotenoids. So the cheese was whiter, right? And then the big rains come and the cheese is like golden yellow. It's like the best egg yolk, right? Almost orange, right? And like, as you start to map that, that's eating with the seasons, that's eating the local, whatever's provided, right? And we're a part of that, you know, and I had something that's coming up,

you know, in relation to, and it might seem like a kind of a wide swooping analogy, but we first moved into our house in Austin as the first house that I've ever bought. And it was brand new. And I was like, cool, man, no one else's energy's in here. It's just ours.

We came through, you know, as they were framing it, we put all the kids, you know, it was just bare at the time, but we drew like, you know, we drew our hands on there. We wrote different things, love, abundance, whatever, just to imprint the house with those energetic signatures. And then when it finished, I realized like we had already been in Texas for two years. You know, we'd been working with cedar, burning it, smelling it. So we could work with that plant, which is a phenomenal way if you have cedar allergies to actually attenuate that, like talk to cedar, work with cedar, smell the smoke of cedar. And all of us started getting, you know, like really

nasally and the kids were, you know, bear specifically was starting to get sick more often and just really nasally, you know, eyes got a little puffy. And so I was like, I think we need to get some houseplants for here, you know, and Charles Eisenstein is brilliant on houseplants. You know, he's like, you leave for two weeks, your houseplants are all dead, yet you can't get rid of dandelions in your yard. There's something to that. But at the same time, I realized we got to clear out these VOCs. The house is off-gassing and the plants are going to help us. And then after that, we had freaking like 20 houseplants. I was like, oh, we're helping the off-gassing. It's us that's gonna help that off-gassing, right?

And it's a shit job, but we have to do it to be in this space. And that's kind of the hard reality, the hard lesson that we have with our food too, with all of it that we see in the earth is the big medicine in, we're gonna do the dirty work that's required, that's necessary. And it might not mean eating the most medicine in, we're going to do the dirty work that's required, that's necessary.

And it might not mean eating the most pristine, perfect, you know, Fred Provenza's gold star, who's going to come on the podcast. I loved him on Paul Chex. Whatever the healthiest, most diverse food range of the most, you know, regenerative version and the most nutrient dense food that you could possibly eat,

you know, the best raw liver, whatever that looks like, if it's not from here, that's not mine to eat. And if I can get it from here, then it's going to be us. It's going to be us on the local level that actually build the system in the way that we want it. And that comes through how we consume. Food Inc. had it right. You vote with your dollar. That's one of the most important things. And it's not so Walmart will carry organic yogurt. It's so the local farm actually can improve itself and can heal the soil and can do all the things necessary so that over time, now you have access to the very best food.

Because you participated in that. You voted for it with your money. Yeah, I think so. I think maybe one way that I would like to put it is when you truly look down at your feet and you go find the local farm that we talked about that I won't reiterate, what you realize is that the dollar

has very little ramifications to the success of that relationship. And so what you're doing is you're voting with your connection, your community, your ability to co-create. And the dollar becomes almost a mute point, almost an undesirable side effect, if you will. And so in my opinion, in a more beautiful world,

the idea of voting with your dollar dies. And it's voting with the soul of the thing. It's just a community that operates in and of itself. I think, though, that's exactly what you're saying. I do want to say, it's an interesting world we live in where what you just said is true while simultaneously the question of whether or not

an organization like a force of nature exists. Does it exist or not? This is the question in a more beautiful, truly resilient and regenerating world. Do these organizations that buy meat from Northwest Montana and it's questionable and they ship it to Texas or, you know, let's use a different example. They ship it to Denver, you know, and then that's, that meat is sitting there in a, in a distribution facility than an organ, than a, an individual from, you know, central Virginia where I'm located. God forbid it's this natural food store in Charlottesville, Virginia. They say,

you know what? It's too hard to work with a bunch of local farmers. If I have the ability to work with an organization that is large and has a better price point, and I can work with one organization, not 20 local farms, I'm just going to do it. So does the access to that thought denude and reduce and degenerate the entire system? That's what I'm focused on. Because at this moment, you know, this is not a definitive answer, but I'm leaning yes, right? Because that option exists, people are obviously choosing it, right? This whole food or this natural food store in Charlottesville obviously have made their decision. The oldest butchery in Richmond, Virginia, we were talking with them as well, trying to get more. Part of our work is outreach type advocacy work for local regenerative farms.

And they're at the oldest corner of Richmond. They're the oldest butcher shop, and they're selling Force of Nature now. They have no interest in working with local regenerative farms. Because that option exists, our convenient, reductionistic, and way too tired as hell modern minds overcome with all of the technology and all of the communication and all of the things they give a shit about, that's the easiest and most best option, unequivocally, right? And that's why organizations like Force of Nature are thriving. They're not thriving because they're going into food deserts or areas of the world that don't have access to local food and supporting them, right? They're thriving because they're the easiest and best, most sexy option. And, you know, sexy is a weird

word to place in that sentence, but it's true, right? Like that store manager told me people like the brand, like their packaging costs more than some of the farms that farm in your local community. Let's just be honest, right? And then we have this idea of production, production at all costs, production on a conveyor belt. And just like we talked about last episode, in the 1920s, we had the idea of maximizing our yield of corn, right? How many bushels of corn could we produce per acre?

That created the monocrop industrial system that we have today that's just diesel intensive, etc. In the 2020s, as I said in that episode, we now have carbon. We're trying to sequester as many tons of carbon per acre, just like we were trying to produce as much corn per acre. But that's not the full story. In the last six months, really in writing this book, Dark Cloud Country, I really had to wrestle with the concept, is that it? Is the carbon narrative really the solve-all, end-all climate emergency where we become the messiah of the world to save the world as long as we oppose that which opposes carbon?

Like, is that the story we live in today? I think it's true, but it's not the most negative aspect of the story. In my opinion, the most negative aspect of the story and really what our work and what the entire book centers around is the concept or it's the questioning of the concept, can our slavery to the industrial model, can this enclosure around the idea of economics stand in a regenerative future? Can it? Right? Does our access to cheaper, and I mean that from a quality, and I mean that from a human,

and I mean that from a land perspective, can our access to cheaper, more denuded options that are more convenient, but better than Walmart and McDonald's, potentially, and there's a huge potentially there, can our access to those things actually erode local farms? In the state of Virginia in 2021, we lost 801 farms. These are not commercial farms. These are farmers that just own their little 500 acre or less little quote unquote regenerative farm. 801 farms, and that's not an anomaly. That's 1.7 million acres taken out of local management. With Bill Gates coming on board, we have this whole technocratic, political, global scene coming in to commercialize and aggregate food production. We have that threat above us.

And we don't yet, I don't think, feel that threat, right? And then we have the consumer who believes that buying, again, just take force of nature out of it, pick on anybody else, Paleo Valley, Applegate, these are all organizations of equal value to me. In this conversation, they believe that buying a verified regenerative, grass-born, grass-fed, grass-finished, vaccine and antibiotic-free meat stick or pound of ground beef that was shipped 8,000 miles where FedEx and the distribution system made all of the money is actually a part of that more beautiful world, right? And so you have this customer journey. God forbid you call it the hero's journey. Don't even go that far, please. But you have this customer journey that's currently buying McDonald's or they're not

caring about their health or they're going to Walmart to buy cheap meat. And then they hear, oh my God, there's this thing called regeneration. It's a little bit better. Like I can be a part of the saving of the world, right? As if you can even formulate that sentence. But for now, that's where they're at in their journey. And then they go, oh my God, force of nature. They sell online verified, regenerative, grass-born, grass-fed, grass-finished products. And it's amazing. And they're leading the regenerative revolution and it's best meat on the planet for the planet. Their tagline, their mantra on their website. And then they start buying from it, right? Then you have somebody like me saying, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's not. Hold on, right? And we've already educated the consumer's consciousness to get

away from their current status quo. They're already accepting this new paradigm. It's already hard enough. It's already not at Walmart, right? It's already not accessible in regenerative restaurants, right? Like McDonald's and other places that are very far from that concept. And are we going to be able to educate them a third time, right? To say, no, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I know force of nature said that the best meats for the planet on the planet or on the planet for the planet or whatever their tagline is, but they're not, right? Do we have the time as a people in the modern world where technocracies and everything else is really coming in to consolidate the food system to take the consumer through another phase, right?

Like what happens when the consumer realizes that regenerative foods coming from this land, if not done to a particular standard, and it might be the standard discussed on this podcast earlier with the Tim Shawadlin project, degenerate the land over here. Like what happens when the consumer starts to realize that by supporting you, I have to kill you or degenerate the land over here? What happens when the consumer starts to realize that by supporting

you, I have to kill you or degenerate your landscape? That's what I mean by kill, not to speak out of turn. I don't think it's healthy. I don't think it's a good way to go. I don't think it's proper. And I don't know if it has an end to it. To me, all we're doing is just making our slavery to the industrial system just a little bit better, right? It's still the industrial system. It's still the economic machine that enslaves and erodes and destroys and grinds the beauty of nature to turn out and print out, you know, money or, you know, whatever the thing is that they're trying to accomplish. It's still a clear-cutting organization that walks in and clear-cuts 2,500 acres in a matter of two or three weeks for the point of money, right? That's what these purchasing protocols, that's what this centralization and commodification

of the natural world really leans into, right? Like Robin Wall Kimmerer, the beautiful author, unbelievable mind of books like Gathering Moss or Braiding Sweetgrass, she says, the earth doesn't have resources. Those are our relations or something like that. It's not resources. It's just relations. And so just like I wouldn't look at my three children and call those relations resources that I could just sell out to the highest bidder, right? We can't look at the world, right? With our human world glasses taken off, because now we actually see the world for what it is. It's us and we are it. We take those modern spectacles,

technologically tethered spectacles to mother culture and our slavery to industry. We take those spectacles off and we see that we're doing the same thing to the natural world, the world all around us. We see this. And I think that the conversation that we need to have because we can't have it here.

I think it's a huge conversation that the regenerative agricultural scene has to start having inside of it. Because I think it's a very proper conversation to have inside of it. As soon as the outsiders start to realize that these things are true and that we're not talking about them,

now we're in a difficult and different position. But I think when the internal thinkers and movers, these farmers, if you will, inside of this regenerative world, we have to start questioning what is actually regenerative. And does our desire to give the consumer a better version of the slavery they're currently participating in in the modern industrial world, is that better? Is that a part of the solution? Or is it distracting us from looking down at our freaking feet and going to our local farm right because i'll tell you absolutely it is so easy to you know so like i have a lot of food issues and like we were traveling for this trip or preparing for the

traveling of this trip you know i brought all of my food with me um prepared it canned it freeze dried it dehydrated it whatever it was We just flew down with a massive suitcase of all of our food. But I do that because I have to. What if I didn't have to, right? But then I would show up, I would go to get everything that I need. And I mean, it's a story.

And like, yeah, as soon as we landed, we went to Whole Foods, we bought some carrots because I didn't bring any, right? We had the option to do that, right? And therefore, what did we do? We did it. That's what we did, right? Go to our local Airbnb, open the therefore, what did we do? We did it. That's what we did, right?

Go to our local Airbnb, open the fridge, and you'll see Whole Foods in there to some degree for some of my things that we couldn't bring or my wife's food or whatever. But it's only because that option exists that we could do it. And with the question, I think we have to start asking is, do these organizations that promote their foods

being the best for the planet, of the planet, or of the planet, and for the planet, or a seriously really good option? Or if they do say, like Robbie, like, I struggle with him saying those things. I just do, to be perfectly honest. Because if number one is hunting and number two is local farms and number three is them, what are they doing as number three to promote the number twos? Right? three to promote the number twos, right? Because all I see is the local grocery store serving the local community of Charlottesville, Virginia, with a bunch of local farmers kicked out, which is technically more important than force of nature, according to force of nature, but all I see is force of nature, right? So we have this disparity, this mixed match between what is possible and what

is actually happening. And I think Robbie's in a really good place. Like I have all the respect for Taylor and Robbie and the force of nature crew. Like I think their hearts are in the right place, just like a lot of farmers' hearts are in the right place, but they're not regenerating. I think we need to retune this narrative, right? Like I said, a lot of local farmers are really interested in the idea of regeneration. They just don't know how,

or they don't have the community around them to support them. So I think the hope, I think the next phase of this action, which is hope, is exactly that. We need to stop competing with force of nature, V. Reprovisions, V. Paleo Valley, V. all these other people, and white oak pastures being the greatest regenerative farm. And I think we need to come together and we need to start understanding that the success of all of us depends upon the

all of us. And we need to co-create a much more emergent and beautiful future where we work together, where we singularize that vision into this unbelievably diverse in appearance, but streamlined in vision approach to truly creating a new world that doesn't depend upon industry, that doesn't depend upon industry, that doesn't depend upon technocratic global political leaders pouring money into it. And I think we have a great, this is strange for me to say,

but I think we have a great model in terms of McDonald's. Like, I do. I really think McDonald's is a great mentor for this moment to look towards. Be McDonald's. Be a dollar cheeseburger, right? Like McDonald's never says, the best meat on the planet for the planet, right? McDonald's never says, this tastes amazing, right? Like McDonald's is never saying like, our fries are the best fries in the world. No, no, no. What do they say? They say this cheeseburger will taste the same in Austin, Texas as it does Charlottesville, Virginia.

This cheeseburger tastes a dollar in Austin, Texas as it does in Charlottesville, Virginia. When you buy our medium fry, it's going to taste the exact same because we geoengineered the russet potato and the yellow potato into this marvelous union where we can now streamline the entire production of that new potato called the McDonald's potato to fit our manufacturing process, which happens to look like cooking and restauranteering. And then we can provide you the exact same experience for the exact same price with the exact same taste verbatim. And they're not making any claims to the value of their product outside of convenience, right? Like the first non-human restaurant just opened and it was McDonald's.

It's totally by machines and AI. There's not a single human being that works in there. You go in, you hit some buttons, a robot makes your food and they give it to you. It's convenience and they're not shapeshifting it, right? They're not putting a mask on it and calling it something else. It is straight line convenience. We understand that you don't have a lot of money. You want this fast. It's

cheap. It's fast. Here you go. They're not claiming it's good, right? And we have a lot of people in this regenerative movement, you know, that are claiming, oh, I can build 6% soil organic matter from 1% or 0.1% in two years, right? And they're claiming it's good and it's fast and they say it's totally possible, right? It's totally cheap. We can totally, like, there's a wrong narrative here, right? And I think it's a rubber band effect, if you will. And we're just being whiplashed by this idea of commercialism and mother culture. And I don't think, you know, I've been a part of it. Absolutely. And so I put myself in that boat. You know, I don't think that we're doing it consciously, just like I don't think regenerative farmers are degenerating consciously. I think it's all

subconscious. I think it's the world that we've been built into is a really hard world to escape. But I think what we should be doing now is as I tell people to look down at their feet, find their local farm and say, hello, I'm John, I'm Daniel, whatever. I'm here to help. What do you need? Like, do you need more customers? Do you need more time? Do you need more money? Like, how can I help you? I think simultaneously, this regenerative movement needs to do the exact same thing. We need to turn inwards. We need to look at our feet and we need to start analyzing is the commercialization and the commoditization of the natural world getting us closer to a more beautiful world

or further away from it? And that's the question. And if the answer is closer, let's keep going. And if the answer is further, let's stop. Reanalyze, understand that we have the exact same vision here for a more beautiful world. Realize that like Daniel Quinn in the story of B, the world will not be saved by new programs,

but new visions and old minds. And I can't remember the whole quote, but no programs, but visions. Right now we are being smacked with new programs. CPG, consumer packaged goods, organizations like Paleo Valley, Wild Pastures, Epic Provisions, Rep Provisions, Force of Nature, 4P Foods, Hickory Nut Gap Meats,

like all of these organizations, these are programs. Okay, and maybe Quinn is wrong and they're going to work. Maybe. I'm not going to be the one that challenges Quinn. And I'm also not going to be one that challenges the idea that just furthering our enslavement to mother culture is the correct decision. And so again, as the consumer looks down to their feet and finds local solutions, I think us regenerative farmers and regenerative thinkers in this movement need to look down and understand that right now we're throwing programs instead of visions. We have to revision or re-singularize our understanding of what a more beautiful world looks like and start funneling

our vigor that way, right? Like this force of nature conference you and I are going to this week. If we took the money that surrounds this conference and threw it down a singular vision of solving food deserts around central Texas, what would happen? That's a question I'm interested in. And so I think there's work to be done. It's hard. And it's really hard to live in the modern world and also have these conversations. There's batteries in this little thing full of lithium. It's hard, you know, and it's really hard to live in the modern world and also have these conversations, right? Like there's batteries in this little thing full of lithium, right?

There's millions of people in the northern Congo mining lithium so that we can have a podcast. Like there's some serious shit. Yeah, the cell phones. Right. Everyone's listening from a cell phone. Exactly. Or you're on your computer listening, but most of you are on your cell phone. It's very hard. Self-included.

And so what I think, and listen, this is not the total solution, of course. This is not even an aspect of a minute little particle of a thought of the solution, but we have to start controlling what we can control, right? Like this podcast is a great way to get the message out. Unfortunately, we rely on lithium and cobalt to get the message out. There's work there to be done. Absolutely. Oh my God. Right? There's more slaves today in the world than there ever has been. And yet we live in a world that obviously detests chattel slavery and the understanding, and we rejoice with the understanding of equality and equity and liberty and libertas and freedom. There's some big, huge problems there. But right now we sit in a world that needs also regeneration. And right now we sit in a world where those

conversations can be had civically in a really wonderful environment. And I also think like I was talking to Maren Morgan of the Death in the Garden podcast, and the documentary they're making is just absolutely brilliant just last night. And she was talking about social media. Right now, social media is, and this is just absolutely brilliant. And I give the thought to her, but she said, social media, hopefully I can represent the thought well, but social media is, and this is just absolutely brilliant, and I give the thought to her, but she said, social media, hopefully I can represent the thought well, but social media is too late to be abandoned. But there was a moment in time, because of its negative effects, but there was a moment in time where it was capable. It had not yet encapsulated the entirety of our society, right? There's actual people today that have incomes and livelihoods and

they feed their family and they participate in the economy and their community because of their work through social media. And so in some sense, it's too late. It exists. It's become ingrained in the system like an invasive plant. Once an invasive plant becomes ingrained in the system, is it really invasive anymore? Social media has been an invasive plant that is now, quote unquote, here. It's ingrained. It's not going anywhere.

We can't just take social media out until the world did not collapse, right? I think what you and I are talking about now, we are at the beginning stages of this idea of social media. I think we have the ability to pivot. I think the regenerative movement isn't yet big enough that we have the ability to slowly and fluidly and very adeptly have it navigate a program-less and vision-infused future where it could be beautiful and it could be resilient. The time is now, right? And, you know, in some sense, it's like Hitler's at the door. That's the way I see it in our life, right? Like Hitler, they attacked, Germany attacked Poland

and all of the Northern states there and came into France and in three weeks took over all of France, right? And Chamberlain, the prime minister of the UK is like, oh my God, peace talks with Hitler. They're gonna take over the British Isles. And Churchill's like, wait, stop, hold on, right? Churchill has some serious problems

in his colonial policy and other ways of his thought, but he's brilliant in this moment. He says, wait, stop, hold on, right? Churchill has some serious problems in his colonial policy and other ways of his thought, but he's brilliant in this moment. He says, wait, wait, we can't capitulate. I understand Germany owns the entirety of mainland Europe in this moment. They took France in three weeks and to some degree, right?

We just had a huge battle in the evacuation of Britain's army and we're alone. The United States has declared neutrality, right? We just had a huge battle in the evacuation of Britain's army and we're alone. The United States has declared neutrality, right? Japan is over there attacking Russia and China and about to attack the United States. And Italy is with, is with Germany, the Axis powers and Hitler. Literally it's the UK, England against the world, right? And a lot of the people in the UK at the time wanted to capitulate. They wanted to have peace talks. Like, yeah, we'll be a subservient power.

We'll be a subservient vassal state to Germany. Just don't blow us to smithereens. And Churchill says, wait a second, stop, wait. It's not over. We still have time. Germany and Hitler does not own the world yet. We still have a moment. And they fight like hell, right?

We'll fight on the beaches. We'll fight in the mountains. We'll fight in the air. Like his amazing speech, just like we're going to fight until death because this is something worth dying for. And I think right now, this regenerative movement, we're there.

I think it's time that we have to start understanding what we'll die for. You know, I'll conclude with this because I'm rambling and there's so much to say. But I was in a conversation with Alan Savory years ago. We were in this small little room. Alan Savory again. He's 88, 89 years old now, whatever he is.

He's been teaching holistic management in this concept of holism writ in the environment which has created the regenerative movement since the 1950s and 60s. He has aged. He is tired. Now, especially in this moment years ago, and I asked him, I said, okay, Alan, before your time on this earth ends, I want to have asked you this question

and I'm just going to do it. It was awkward. I said, what is holistic management? You've dedicated 60 years to doing this. What is holistic management? What is the idea of a holistic context? Because holistic management, to skip all the details, is undergird What is the idea of a holistic context? Because holistic management, to skip all the details, is undergirded by this concept of a holistic context. That is,

that which we vision our future to be is what we manage for, right? So I envision a world where the streams are flowing clean and free of chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides for my children to play in. So I don't manage for a world that might participate in the creation. I manage for that world. That's what he teaches in holistic management. And he said, Daniel, he says a lot of things, but one of the things he said was holistic management in its holistic context is something you means the world to you. And what that very pithy, completely overused sentence truly means when you unpack it, like this means the world to me, is if this would not exist,

I don't want the world, right? It's something I would die for. This means the world to me is another way of saying that's what I would die for. And he says that which you put in your holistic context, that which you live your life to create and co-create and manage and nurture and be is what you would die for. I think the regenerative movement is a pivotal point where

it has to decide what it'll die for. And what we teach in holistic management when Alan has constructed over the last 50, 60 years is the formation of that thing or the elucidation of that thing is a vision. And it can't be a program. When we teach holistic management courses, I go up to a whiteboard and I draw a vertical line down the middle and I don't put any titles on either side and I have people ask, what matters to them? And they give me programs and they give me visions, right?

I imagine a world flowing with clean water. That's a vision. I believe in clean water through hydroponic energy systems. That's a program, right? Whatever. And we separate those two things. And everything on the program side, we delete. Everything on the vision side, we encapsulate into our lives.

What we're saying is the world will only be saved through visions, not through programs. And it is those visions that we will die for that's holistic management. That's how these two worlds of Alan Savory and Daniel Quinn come together in a very strange way. And maybe I'm the only one putting this together and it's totally wrong, but that's how I see the world. No, this is fucking rad. Okay, cool. Cool. And I just, I don't know.

I'm not trying to be here to be this iconoclastic, you know, Virginia wildland rebel farmer with long hair and a weird relationship to the earth and, like, you know, saying that CPG companies need to die and people need to start finding local farms and that nutrient density and soil health doesn't matter. Because I've said all of those things and I think it could be misconstrued that I actually believe that in totality. But then again, I think we really have to start understanding

as a people who are trying to understand what regeneration looks like in the modern world and how it participates in a truly co-creative and emergent new world, what I would just call Mother Earth, right? Throw away Mother Culture, we have Mother Earth, again, very Daniel Quinian. We have to understand what regeneration stands for,

which is to understand what it dies for. And when we're talking about death, like in my book, Dark Cloud Country, we have to understand what regeneration stands for, which is to understand what it dies for. And when we're talking about death, like in my book, Dark Cloud Country, I write that right now, the perception of death is you have birth, you have life, you have growth, you have this beautiful accentuation of all of that,

and then it dies and it's reborn. Well, you've read Dark Cloud Country. I think we're totally missing an entire aspect of that. I think you were born. I think you grow. I think you live. You have this huge emergent of everything that you live for. You die, And then there's a moment of chaos, right? It's the dawn darkness. It's the gray before the sunlight. It's this moment that I

call pre-birth. It's chaos. It's unknown. It's unmoldable. It's unknowable. We have to start looking there, right? And I'm not saying we have to die to be reborn. We have to have CPG companies die for a new world to be reborn. Like we have to have CPG companies die for a new world to be reborn. But I think when we start to think about what does consumerism actually look like in a regenerative world, we have to start looking at chaos.

And it petrifies us. This dawn darkness, this unbelievably unmoldable middle ground between harvest and consumption, between death and new birth or life. And it's in those conversations that I think will be the beginning of the conception where we question or conception of the questions of what this future looks like.

It's the very beginning. It's the chaotic little space that we need. And if we simply sit back and look at this little natural whole food store in Charlottesville, Virginia and say, oh, well, if people like brands, let's just cater that, right? Let's just build more brands then. I think we'll totally have missed the mark. Man, we went absolutely deep and I absolutely love it. We got rained on a little bit. That was dope. I hope my audio was good. It was a little windy.

Oh, it doesn't matter. Just delete it. No, when you got going, the wind picked up and the rain started and I was like, yep, nature agrees. Little God nod there. Big God nod. I'm going to link to all of your books

in the show notes. They're absolutely fantastic. You are, you know, to describe you as a Renaissance man doesn't do it justice, a polymath, whatever the fuck, then the new language on a guy who is way too tired in many things. In many things, truly, the poetic nature of your writing is mind-blowing in and of itself. But the fact that the heart of what you're speaking to, it is the thing that matters. It is the thing that's

necessary for us to... let me add this one little piece and i promise i'll make it very quick but your comment makes me think of it and i think this is a fine way of concluding masanobu fukuoka was a japanese farmer he called himself a do nothing farmer the father of permaculture in some sense uh good friends with bill mollison the quote-unquote originator or whatever he calls himself of permaculture back in like the 1930s 40s and 50s wrote this book one straw revolution masanobu did and in in that book it begins in the first 20 or 30 pages uh fukuoka's lamentation of the conventional or commercial agricultural scene and it's always so interesting to me because his lament of this monocrop, chemically infused, right, post-war.

Think about that. That's really important. We're in the post-war era of conventional agriculture. So we're seeing the rise of chemical pollutants like we've never seen before. The rise of production, right, feeding and what happens in the Cold War, right? Like this is a pivotal moment in conventional agriculture's history in terms of a global emergence into this thought of control and colonization of the land

and resources and such. And he writes, and he doesn't lament any of the things that I just said. He doesn't even bring them up in his book. And he says, the problem of modern agriculture is that the farmer doesn't have time

to write poetry. Poetry is what we lack in agriculture. And he says, if there's going to be a culture that arises to solve for the ills of itself, plus its agricultural stepsister, we need to become poets. And I'm not saying everybody has to become a physical poet, right? I don't think that's what Fukuoka is saying either.

What I think we have to start understanding is that the quietness and the peace and the ability to truly look via introspection into things, that is the role of the poet, right? And I also think that the role of the poet is to put together novel phrases from very simple words. Read the best poem in the world, you will understand every word in that poem. Maybe one or two comes down to an old English vernacular that you're going to have to look up like though being T-H-O, right? Just like silly little things. But in essence, that poet even made that word though even shorter and more simple, right? And so in a sense, what a poet is doing, a very good poet, is he's taking these novel and unbelievably

otherworldly concepts and he's conveying them to you in simple little rhyming phrases. He takes the complex and he gives it to you in this simple little boat. That's the power of poetry and I think that's what the regenerative world in 1940 when Fukuoka was writing needs

and I think we still have time to deploy poetry to save us. Right now everybody's like, I was talking to one guy recently recently and he said oh blockchain is going to save the regenerative whatever and i said blockchain poetry is what we need and he pretty much just hung up on me and that's and that's fine but i i you know what polymath renaissance man whatever i think we all need to turn into poets again what that means to you is different. Ask the questions, listen to the land, go for a walk. Before you plant out your cover crops, ask what the land wants to be and pretend like you listen. Take that step, right? Even if you don't listen and even if you still

plant out your little 20 pound bag of white clover seeds in your food forest, ask. And that asking forces you to slow down. It forces you to be humble It forces you to even subconsciously assume that you could be wrong Because if you ask a question you have to be open that you didn't have the answer The very action of asking the question even if you ask it from a non-humble perspective forces humility. So ask be a poet Now read poetry. I think it's one of the best thing a human mind could do is read poetry I think it's absolutely beautiful but poetry that's what we need I love love it, brother. Well, I'm going to link to everything you mentioned here in the show notes, One Struggle Evolution, all of your works. There's something I'm forgetting now, but I'll link to that as well. So you're going to have a book list here. Maybe a workout

for legs like yours. I think my legs are your arms and your legs are my head. Oh, shit. I know what's coming to me. Martine Prechtel, one of my favorite teachers. The Unlikely Piece at Kuchumakik. And it's brilliant on Audible because he's reading it himself. He can hear the pages turn. He doesn't give a fuck. He doesn't do retakes.

He just spits it out. And it's pure medicine. And I think, you know think the concepts of these things alongside the story of Bea and Ishmael and Daniel Quinn's work is that it gives us a greater context of what the holistic thing is that we're looking at and our part in it.

And I think without that, conversations like this can be missed. So if you care to do the deep dive with us, I can assure you that it is worth the deep dive. And that rabbit hole can open you to deeper understandings and meaning and purpose in your life and where we find ourselves in it, in the hole, not separate from it. Absolutely. We are the relationship. To say anything else is to be separate from it.

Beautiful, brother. Well, it's been excellent having you on the podcast again. This will be one of many, I'm certain. And now we get the beautiful chance here to sit and eat and then dive deep into the land here and explore more together. I'm excited. Thank you, brother. Thank you.