StarTalk Radio - Homesteading on the Moon with Kevin Espiritu

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Could you grow your own food on the moon? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly sit down with Kevin Espiritu, the gardening YouTuber behind Epic Gardening, to dig into backyard farming, the future of sustainable food, and what it would actually take to feed yourself on Earth or anywhere else. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:  https://startalkmedia.com/show/homesteading-on-the-moon-with-kevin-espiritu/ Thanks to our Patrons Show more11:17 PMClaude responded: Raime Dayton, Giulian Minichiello, Peggy C, Pamela Knab, Randy Gladney, George Lett, Madeline Belton, Lio, Nick White, Michael, Shiwam Bandhoe, Catherine Spale…Raime Dayton, Giulian Minichiello, Peggy C, Pamela Knab, Randy Gladney, George Lett, Madeline Belton, Lio, Nick White, Michael, Shiwam Bandhoe, Catherine Spale, Lori Largent, Newton T, M.K, Louis Stern, Justin Maly, Andrew Kagan, Jeff, Robin Green, Boris Bayerman, Joe Verstraete, Jakob Ludwig, Eric Monley, Paul Kulessa, Rich C, Ben Davenport, User101010111010, Ian C, Dereck Wood Sr, Brittany Cloud, William Santiago, Randall Price, EvieJoy, Aaron Bailey, Shiva Kumar, Kenny Watts, Jayden Sundar, Maggie Ruh, Farruh Mahamadjanov, João Costa, Alex & Alicia Celcis, Prajesh Patel, Armando Luna, Chris Kessinger, Deon Johnson, Father Bills' Glue Gun Baptism, Nic Hoover, Jonny Porto, Noah Race, Nikita Mikhailevich, MichelleEcume, Janet La Valley, Myriam Robichaud, Lilly Carrillo, Matthew Robinson, Mark Fremmerlid, Emilia D., Michael Giacchino, Jose Javier, Wishah, TIM, Alex Frias, DukeOfBees, Cherry Speicher, Joe, Chris Sinn, Michael de la Morena, Gina Rapp, Testcellman, Jay Valiano, Mara Long, Terry Burgess, Matthew Ross, Jacob Keeling, Leah, Alex, Michael Neal, Lauri Boyd, Wes Ward, Antonio Westphalen, Chris Hopper, Malzerath, Anita Bowers, Antonia Staikova, Glenn Thomas Stokdal, Y K, Alexander Simone, Dot, Chris, 𖤐 Emily 𖤐, Thomas V, Ryan Scotto, Suzette Salvati, Mauricio Lago Magro, Joyce Stamper, Linden Wise, and Dr Venkateshwaran S for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You mean I can grow my own food and not have to go to the store? Yeah, make the best of your backyard. Can I do it in the moon? I don't believe Fresh Direct goes there. Coming up, all the things you can do to grow food in your backyard on StarTalk, special edition. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, special edition, which of course means I got Gary O'Reilly. I know, Chuckie Baby. Hey, man. How you doing? I'm doing great. Lord Chuck Nice. Lord Chuck Nice. All right.

That's right. We got a special edition here. What do we got? This is on the future of growing food. I like it because I like food. Keeps me alive. So, see, I would say it's the future of growing vegetables because you're not growing a cow. Well, not right now.

We're not growing right now. There might be a cow plant. Maybe we will be planting cows one day. Genetically modified. Okay. So that you can grow them in a pot. That's right. I would love it.

Go water the cow. So Gary, take us into this. What do you have? All right. Let me just stop laughing. Right. At home farming or homesteading has seen an uptick in popularity in the past few years, which begs the question, where can we grow plants?

Is there a limit to where we can? We'll get into fake-like versus real light. Soil science and the science of why our guest, who you'll introduce shortly, can grow a whole farm in his backyard? How big he's down? And with some of us can hardly keep a cactus alive, this guy's growing a farm in his backyard, amazing. Where does the future of farming and sustainability actually take us?

I'm ready to get all in this, because I think about this topic all the time. Right. Because when I go to Mars, yes. You don't want to eat poop potatoes? You want something more than poop potatoes when you go to Mars? Yeah, I think we can be a little more innovative than that.

So we've got gardening YouTuber extraordinaire. Kevin Espiritu. Kevin, welcome to StarTalk. What is up, gentlemen? Glad to be here. All right. You're calling in from where? Where are you?

I'm in San Diego, California, which in gardening world is called Zone 10B. And I'll get to that in a second, but it's a great climate for growing. Oh, it's a great climate for everything. Yes. Zone San Diego. 10B.

I miss San Diego, man. Isn't there a movie called Zone 10B or was that the... District 11? District 11. Yeah. Thank you for helping me. I don't think of as much growing plonks in District 11. Great, great movie, too.

Is Zone 10B next to District 11? I don't know. I don't know. So, but first, how big is your backyard? Yeah. The backyard I'm growing in now, it's about a third of an acre lot. Oh my gosh. It's not the back 40.

No. A third of an acre. Yeah, we've never got that 40 acres, by the way. Just trying to let you know. I'm still waiting on mine. Okay. Well, he's working out of a third of an acre here. I'm delighted to learn that because that means it's hope for people who don't have large real estate that's out there.

And you can have a garden anywhere, man. Yeah, because when I think of farming, I think of huge fields, you know, factory farming, agrib, you know, big aggregate business. Yeah. So tell us what, where do you come to this with what you do when you're back one-third? And let me tell you people, when you hear Kevin to answer, Kevin does not look like he grows anything. He actually looks like he grows weed to be honest.

Like marijuana. That's what, like in a closet. Yeah, he's got the gimme hat and the unshaved face. Yeah, he's got the beer. I mean, he looks like a totally like laid back chilled dude. And he's a guy in the corner, so I need some weed. Right. Yeah, exactly.

Give me a dime bag. Exactly. So is he still there? All I'm going to say, guys, is I've grown a lot of plants. I'll just put it out. Oh. A little secret for you guys. And there's a reason why marijuana is called weed.

All right. So just give us an overview of what you got going in the back one third. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it didn't start out that way. I started grown in an apartment. Then I moved to like a small kind of front yard lot, like 15 by 30 feet. I grew enough in that space to poorly survive off for about a month. But we could talk about that in a bit.

I do. Yeah, now I'm on a third of an acre. And because we have a YouTube channel and we grow a lot of different crops, we're not necessarily growing it like an urban farm might, but we definitely could. Like there's enough space there to grow hundreds and hundreds of pounds of produce per year. And if you're living there with yourself and a partner or something, that's enough produce to live off of.

But I've got, let's see, 30 fruit trees. Did you say 30 fruit trees? Yeah, 30 different fruit trees. Excellent. About half of them are citrus because it's San Diego and you know, you can pull citrus off there. And then I've got maybe like 40 or 50 different annual crops that I'm growing depending on the season. Remind me annual you have to replant every year. Annuals, yeah, they're going to live and die in a single spring to fall cycle.

Whereas perennials come back every year. Got you. Predinies are going to come back every year. And then, you know, you get into some like weird, weird. weird sort of situations where there's like a self-sewing annual, like camomile. That'll produce its seed at the end of the season. It's going to drop, go dormant. It'll come back.

Still an annual. It still lives and dies. Not when Monsanto finds out. No. No, that's very true. Monsanto was now Bayer, just so, you know. Oh, really? Bontented, yeah.

Okay. Okay. Please. Yeah. So the whole project was like this idea of how far can you take being so-called self-sufficient on like a standard urban lot. So I've got chickens on the property. I've got rainwater capture.

I've got gray water conversions. So taking like shower and laundry water and actually using that on the property. In the apocalypse, what's your address so we can all move in with you? It's redacted. I hit it from Google Maps. No one can see it.

Yeah, when the grid goes down, the water goes down, everything goes down. When infrastructure fails completely, we're knocking on the Kevin's house. I got you guys. I got you guys. All right. So let me ask you about the gray water

because that's interesting. Isn't gray water contaminated? and what exactly do you use it for? It is like semi-contaminated, hence the gray. Because like if you were going to use sink water, which is considered black water, you wouldn't use that. You're not really allowed to. So what I did is for my indoor shower and an outdoor shower that I have,

I have a valve that I can turn. It's like a three-way valve. So I can either shunt the water to the city or I can go into, in my case, my orchard is where I send it because for a lot of water. The only thing you have to do is change the detergents that you're using. So you can't use standard detergions. That was my concern is, you know, I'm not sure if, and I want, you know, tied tangerines. No.

Wait, wait. So you're saying sink water is called black water? Yeah, because I think it's just because of the different things that end up going down the sink ends up being not something. Oh, sorry. The water that comes out of the sink. Out of the sink. I thought you were talking about the water goes in the sink and black water. Not the faucet.

Not the stuff you drink. Okay, got it, got it, got it. Okay, where's rainwater off your roof? What's that? Rainwater off your roof, I think it's just captured rainwater. That's captured rain. The beauty of that is like the house I bought is like a thousand square feet. It's not big.

So the roof is a thousand square feet. And I believe it's like an inch of water on a thousand square foot roof is 600 gallons. Yeah. Which is a crazy amount when you think about it because the inch isn't that much rain. And so what I did is I built a system to pull that water off the roof, filter it because you're going to get like particulate matter. You're going to get leaves and stuff like that. Yeah, so it'll filter it. And then it goes under the ground to a huge cistern in my backyard.

Okay, so you have a cistern. Because the other way you can do it is a bladder. There are some people that use, like it's just a flat, looks like a hot water bottle. And then the captured rainwater ends up going into that. And then they somehow pump it out to whatever they have to use. Yeah, yeah. You can do it that way or you can do like rain barrels off of certain areas.

Like I've got a shed that isn't connected to that roof system, so I've got a rain barrel on that shed. Very nice. That's cool, man. And you said you could send water back to the city. Do they pay you for that water? You can't send water back to the city. What I mean by that is like, let's say my laundry machine,

which has a gray water system on it, if I'm running, let's say a load of laundry that requires a detergent that I don't really want in the ground, then I'll just turn the valve and it'll send that water output to the city. Oh, that's what you meant the city. To the rest of the filthy animals. We don't know any better. It goes into the gutter of the city.

Exactly. Okay. Okay, God, now I think I'm up with all your lingo there. So let me ask you a conservation question. Are you seeing, because some people just don't give a damn, let's be honest. They just don't care, all right? Are you, everybody cares about their money, all right? Are you seeing any significant savings in doing all of this?

In water, so I did the math. I have it on our second YouTube channel where I kind of chronicled it over the years. I put a bunch of solar on the roof. That has ended up being a good investment. That's paid itself off over the last five. years or so. The water, water ends up being so inexpensive that putting in, let's say, a $2,000 gallon or $2,000 cistern, you will not pay that off for a very long time. So it's more of like a security or sustainability move that you're actually paying for rather than like saving money.

And just to understand, your solar panels when it's raining are not gathering sunlight, but they are directing water that falls upon them into your gutters so that you can collect it. Right. Yeah, exactly. Just to be clear. Interesting, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, people, just if you don't mind, if you'll indulge me, solar energy is the cheapest energy on the planet. Don't let anybody tell you differently.

There's nothing cheaper than solar energy. Just wanted to say that, you know, just in case somebody out there might want to drill, baby drill. Okay. You know, that's all. Okay. Kevin, are you finding people are following your lead with this sort of project? Because it's not so much the financial investment, which we've kind of touched on, but people may not understand just how easy or how complicated it can be to install this sort of facility.

Yeah, I mean, I think showing it from the perspective of me who, like I was saying, prior to buying the house, I had a 15 by 30 square foot garden in my urban yard in San Diego. So when I bought the house, I was learning everything about owning a house at the same time as I was putting out all the videos. And so I think just learning in public, which is always what I've done on the channel, has inspired people like, it's really not that hard. It seems overwhelming. It's really not that bad. You could start small.

Obviously, I went extreme. Our channel is called Epic Gardening after all. But, you know, condensing that back down to like a simple barrel or, you know, a little cistern here or there. People have, I mean, I've gotten tons and tons of pictures of people doing it. And by the way, let me just reaffirm what you just said. If you learn along with your viewers, that's a bond that is forever. Because you're like garden buds at that point. And, yeah.

I mean, I don't have like a formal training and gardening. I just got into it because I was addicted to playing video games. And I wanted to get off the computer. Okay. And so once I got into it. Admit, your mama kicked you out of the basement. Let's be honest. Just tell us.

Come on, Neil. I told you that in confidence, Neil. Oh, I'm sorry. He said it offline and now it just came out. But that's great. I mean, the fact is that, so, okay, here we go, guys. And so I'm an avid gardener. I love it.

It doesn't show. I know it does not. It does not. You would never look at me and think this guy gardens. And I don't plant vegetables. My mother had an awesome vegetable garden growing up, but she also had a rose garden as well, which roses, F them.

They suck because I tried to plant one, and they hate me. But anyway, gardening is probably one of the most relaxing, rewarding endeavors that anyone can partake. at period. I don't know why I'm saying this. You're happy now, aren't you? I just,

this first time I've ever told anybody I love going to me. I'm here for this, man. I'm here for your choice. I'm the first time I've ever done it. So, Kevin, are you old school? Drill a hole, plant a seed, water, something, walk away, come back, rinse, repeat. Or are we into some very more modern techniques? Are you inventing new methods, tools, and tactics?

I wouldn't say, I wouldn't be as bold as to say I've invented anything all that crazy in the gardening world. Definitely some weird tactics. Like we put a video up a couple days ago about growing zucchini vertically, which is a curcubit squash-style plant so it wants to kind of sprawl out. Yes.

Which can be annoying. And then there's this whole meme in the gardening world of leave a squash on your neighbor's like doorstep day because by the end of summer, you just get so many squash that you're sick of them. Okay, so you're not being kind, you're being, take my shit I wouldn't have eaten anywhere.

Absolutely. Yeah. Because squash is like a weed too. Yeah, you get it, Chuck, right? As a gardener, you're like, okay, I have way too many squash. I don't need these. But if you go to someone who doesn't garden and you give it to them, you look like this saint. You know, oh, they grew this for me.

And you're like, this is just my. Yeah, and really it's your trash. It's a garden trash. Squash is garden trash. And he's giving up the orange squash and not the oranges from his orange tree. Oh, yeah. Well, you know. No one's taking my citrus, baby.

No, I mean, I think, you know, when I started gardening, I didn't even have the 15 by 30 spot that I was telling you guys about. I was living in a condo townhouse with a north-facing balcony. There was no light whatsoever. All right. Well, talk about that, man, because honestly, I'm going to say for a lot of people listening to us, you know, our concentrations are in cities, big audiences. I mean, that I've never done as much as I love gardening. It sounds like more of a pain than anything to have a box garden on a balcony.

What did you grow and how did you maintain it? I mean, I really didn't even have much of a balcony. to get light. And so I was Googling around back then. This was like maybe 13 years ago. I was like, well, how do you grow plants without light from the sun? And the answer was hydroponics. And I being like a kid who grew up with an obsession of like growing crystals and all sorts of different science things. I was like, okay, let's go ahead and do it. So I did it with my brother. And I got a five gallon bucket, filled that bucket with water. I put something called an airstone in, kind of like the thing you'd see in an aquarium that's oxygenating the water. I put some nutrients in that water.

and I put a grow light on top of it, and I grew probably the world's worst-tasting cucumbers of all time. Nice. And I fed him to my brother, and he said he almost threw up. But I got hooked on, you know, that aspect of, like, watching a plant grow and cultivating it. Well, tell me more about hydroponics. Yeah.

And what works in hydroponics? And what strain of marijuana is best to grow hydroponically? Now I know why you've got a love for gardening. I got these hydroponics, aeroponics, aeroponics, vertical, farming, just these things people are doing with plants. And now we're here at my office at the Hayden Planetarium. We're in Manhattan. There are buildings in Midtown Manhattan where plants are growing on the wall.

And then others, the people are growing on their roof? Nice. So it's like, is Earth not good enough for you? Are these solutions to problems that people had encountered? I think yes and no. I think if you go to hydroponics and aeroponics, those first two, hydro, of course, meaning water, arrow meaning air.

Ponix coming from a ponos, which means work. So these are methods of growing where either the water or air does the work instead of what, instead of soil, right? Which is where pretty much every plant is. Neither are soil-based ways to grow. And so if you, it's kind of weird

because if you think about it, you think, of course a plant needs soil to grow. And I might even argue as a gardener, that is kind of true. I do prefer it. But what a plant really needs is what's in the soil or what the soil is providing. And the soil is almost a medium for oxygen, water, and nutrients. And so when you're growing in a hydroponic environment, like my cucumbers, well, there's no soil.

So the plant, you start a seed in like a little growing medium. In this case, it was something like called Rockwell, kind of like spun molten rock and like this little fibrous cube. You put a cucumber seed in that. It grows up, the plant, you know, the tissue grows up. but the roots grow down. And those roots grow down and hit the water. That water does have to be oxygenated, which is crazy because you think, well, you know,

plants are taking in CO2 and releasing oxygen, right? Roots, though, respire. They're not photosynthesizing. So the roots are breathing. So the roots actually need oxygen. Otherwise, they'll simply drown in the water. You can drown them in soil. You can drown them in hydroponics.

And then, of course, the plant needs nutrients, which would have been in the soil. So you have to add these synthetic nutrients in a hydroponic environment. And so the roots, in a hydroponic environment, you open that five-gallon bucket up, and you just see these perfect white roots kind of sprawling out in an almost unnatural way, because they're not fighting against anything. They're not kind of crawling through the soil. And they look amazing. Like there's a whole thing in hydroponics of like showing your roots and like the people

will show pictures of them, all those kinds of stuff. Who's got the most beautiful roots? Yeah. Totally. Yeah. But the crazy part is it grows, plants grown hydroponically tend to grow faster. and they tend to have roughly the same kind of macronutrient profile, like if you were to eat that food.

But the flavor is kind of up for debate. I think to me at least the flavor just feel like a little bit flatter. Kevin, it seems to me that if you have some control over what's feeding the plant, then there's no end of ways you can manipulate that to create whatever flavor profile you might want in a food and possibly even patent that. Nice. How does this work with air? Because with the fluid such as water, I can see you can dissolve something in it,

new nutrients can hang out. But air, how does it pull nutrients out of the air in aeroponics? Yeah, in aeroponics, I messed around with this, I would say, a little bit back in the early days of starting at the gardening. The whole logic behind the aeroponic method is, well, the plant roots don't really need to be bathed in water. They're, you know, in soil, they're not bathed in water. And, of course, you have to oxygenate that water with one of these.

airstones kind of pumping the dissolved oxygen level up. So why don't we just separate the water from the system? Imagine that same five-gallon bucket and we'll actually bring in sprayers that will spray or mist in like a nebulized sort of level, like very small droplets of nutrient-rich water. And we just will, they'll mostly be sitting in air most of the time. So it's not that there's not water used. It's just that the roots aren't sitting in water. And I don't know off the top of my head, like, is that more efficient than hydroponics or not? Are you nebulizing the leaves as well as the roots or just the roots? I think most people would just do the roots,

but then there's this whole concept of what's called foliar feeding or feeding the leaves, where some things are uptaken by the leaves and used in certain ways. But of course, the roots are like the most common way that things are being uptake. Doesn't it nebulize you sound like some weapon on Star Trek? I love it.

Yep. I will nebulize you. Imagine this. An alien spacecraft lands, an alien comes out and you are the first human it ever meets. What do you do? What do you say? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I offer a guide to how to survive that first alien contact, not only scientifically, technologically, culturally, and even socially. Not only for yourself, but in that

moment, you are a representative of the entire human species. You want to leave a good impression. Let's go back to you mentioned the zucchini and the vertical farming. Is that just another way of saying this is a space saver? Because we've got the old traditional, it's flatland, it's acreage. This now we can stack and stack and stack and stack and you don't have anywhere near the real estate that you would otherwise have. 100%. Yeah, I mean the zucchini method I was using was just in soil

like with a little steak growing it up, but you're totally right. Like some of the... So instead of like imagine you can, have your soil like this, that's one plane. It's just one plane that you can grow on. And of course, when you're out in the Midwest farming soy, that's fine. Like, you can just do that forever. But in Manhattan or in Brooklyn, if you're trying to grow, I don't know, a very high-end

basil or something like that, that'd be really inefficient use of probably the most expensive real estate on earth. And so what they'll do is they'll create, usually it's like a hydroponic or aeroponic type system because then they don't have to deal with the soil. And they'll create like little channels or little grids or some sort of way of growing it, and then they'll just stack those on top of one another. The problem then becomes the light. Like you're blocking off.

How to get light in there. Yeah, exactly. What about yields? Because do you get the same amount of yield from the same amount of space vertically, then you do horizontally, or does it change? Well, you'd get more yield on like a per square foot basis because you've got the Z dimension, right? Or the Y dimension now that you're dealing with.

We'll take the Z. Z is good. Yeah, we took it. X, Y, Z go straight up. We're good. Zs up. Okay, great. We good. And then, you know, you also got like the density at which you can plant. So like if you were, I'll just go back to my house, for example. Let's say I'm growing peaches and citrus in my yard. If I'm a commercial peach grower, I'm growing those trees out to like 15 feet wide, 15 feet tall, basically expressing their full genetic potential. So I can only space these trees maybe like 15 feet apart or so. But here in my yard, I've got my trees like four or five feet apart and I'm doing a little more active pruning, a little more active management. And so my yield per square foot probably beats out the orchard, but it's just a tradeoff, you know. Yeah, Chuck, the way you pose the question, I think you meant what's the yield per plant?

Yes. But that's not the metric of measure here. Right. It's what the yield per square foot. Right. And that makes sense. And that wins. No, that wins.

If you add a dimension to something, right, you're always going to win. You win. I mean, it's not like they wouldn't try to squeeze out more yield per plant, too. Like, let's say hydroponics is going to get you a little more efficient growing. like that's also going to happen but they're i mean you're talking like pretty raised within margins i would imagine on some of those setups like i know that these companies have raised like a bunch of money you know so they're going to do everything they can is this more intensive in terms of your management or anyone's management if you're vertically farming for sure yeah i mean otherwise you

just let mother nature do her thing and you can sit back and go read a book or whatever it is yeah totally i mean i always like to say like well people will say i grew this or i can't grow this and the The way I think about it, at least is the truth is no one's really ever grown a plant. Like, as a gardener, what you're really doing is you're putting a plant in the environment in which it knows how to grow best. And so you're not growing it. Of course, it's growing itself. You just have to kind of cultivate that right environment. So in soil, yeah, it's a lot easier.

Great. So looking at the nutrients, the one thing we always think of is going to need some sunlight. Or light. You mentioned in your balcony, you had your own little grow lamp. Why is it that you've got some plants that will flourish? with less and some just won't flourish unless they have 12 hours a day? Yeah, this one is kind of interesting. So take like an eggplant.

That's like a classic summer crop. It loves a lot of sun. And then take something like maybe spinach, which it's a leafy green. It grows low to the ground. If you were to give it a lot of sun, it might actually, the leaves might actually bleach and get damaged. And you think about it, it's like, well, they're both photosynthesizing. So would it more light just equal better growth?

across the spectrum. Naively, that's exactly what I would think. Right. And that's, I think really, that's what I would think too. But when you think about it, like all these plants that we grow in a traditional garden, like even take a salsa garden, which we think of as a group of plants that make sense together. Like you got your jalapenos, you got your tomatoes, you got your peppers, your onions, whatever. From an evolutionary perspective, though, these plants did not just like grow up as a salsa garden somewhere in the world. You know, we sort of cherry pick them from around the world in all these different environments where they adapted to. But you have to grow tortilla chips, too.

Do you have a tortilla chip. Well, you just get that corn, baby. Just grow that corn, you know? No, I want it to come out as chips. Right. Little chips. We might need to go into GMOs for that. Little triangle leaves that you can just pull off.

Become chips. All right. So if you think about that, like, take that spinach. I don't know where that's, where it's endemic to, but regardless, wherever it evolved, it was low in the canopy. It was low in the entire sort of hierarchy of the plants around it, right? So it was basically fighting for folks. to photosynthesize with, whereas like a nice tall banana plant or something like that that's

growing in the tropics, it has no problem with that. So of course, it can tolerate more. And what ends up happening with like a shade plant that gets too much sun, if you put it in the wrong spot, is what once was good, the light actually starts producing, I forgot what it is in the plant, but basically it starts producing too much of a certain compound that starts damaging the plant's ability to photosynthesize. So basically too much of a good thing. So what you're saying is, if the plant wanted to survive but didn't have much light, it evolves to use that much light. Right.

And then it has less or more light than what it evolved to have, that can't be good for the plant. Because it didn't evolve that way. Absolutely. And you see that even in some flowering plants, not even for consumption, but when you plant certain flowering plants that need what they'll say partial shade, that's where it grows best. I've seen them say that. They'll say it, a partial shade. And the reason is you end up kind of frying the plant. plant if it's in the sun all day long.

So tell me, with the switch over to LED lights, has this changed the response of the plants to the light? Because the sun, at least what the sun gives off that gets through our atmosphere, includes some infrared, some ultraviolet, and the pure LED lighting systems we have today, you have the blue, you have the green, you have the red, the RGB. But it's not giving you information. and it's not giving you ultraviolet. Whereas the sun has some of that reaching Earth's surface.

So are there plants that will not do as well under your LED grow lights than they would out under the authentic sunlight? I mean, I wouldn't go as far to make a bold claim to say, like, all of them would do better under normal sunlight, but I kind of do think that's the case, because there are studies that prove not only do plants use far red, so like above the 700 nanometer range. Just to be clear, the 700 nanometers is like the accepted edge of the visible spectrum where we would identify it as red light.

Okay. And you can have light energy beyond that. And we call it infrared, but your eye can't see it. Right. But, of course, the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, they have different sensors than we do. So we should not be defining what they care about and what they want. Don't tell me what I can see and what I can see. I'm a plant.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're right. The first sort of LEDs that came out back when I was growing cucumbers, Chuck, back in my old place, they came out and they were called like blurple lights, blue, purple, red, because basically whoever was designing them back then was like, well, plants mostly use light between 400 and 700 nanometers, kind of like the visible spectrum. So they'll use blue light for vegetative growth. They'll use red light to signal flowering and stuff like that. So whoever was designing the lights back then was like, well, let's just give them exactly these ranges.

like 450 nanometers or 660 nanometers, whatever it is. And then these days, lights that are coming out LED or otherwise are trying to express, like put out more of that spectrum because it's been proven. Like you said, Neil, like they're using light in the far red spectrum. They're even using green light, which we didn't know for like a century. Because you know, you always hear like, well, plants are green because they reflect green. And it's not entirely true. Yeah, just to put some punctuation on that.

So if we see a plant and it's green, it means it's sending green light back to you. And it's not using the green light by and large, right, which is a fascinating, we think green as nature. Green is the color it's rejecting. So what you're saying is not all plants are rejecting all green. Not all plants rejecting all green. So if you take red and blue, just colloquially, those ranges, I think the plant is using somewhere between like 91 and 95. depending on which color it is. Green, you would think, like, well, it's reflecting green,

so it's using like 0% or maybe 10%. It's still absorbing in the range of like 70% to 80% of green light. Are we talking mood lighting here for plants? Pretty much. Because we hear about plant stress. Are we now creating the right kind of light bath for specific plants? Are we at that point now?

Yes, yes. Should we also allow them to have a little Marvin Gaye while we're at it? Play them a little music. man. Why not? Oh, now I know if he talks to his plants. Now I need to know if he talks to his plants. I don't. I get it all the time.

Like, do you talk to them? Do you name them? I don't. I'm a little bit brutal to them sometimes. All right. Yeah, I mean, if you're going to eat them, there's no sense in like, you know, getting to know them. Cereinating them. Right. Yeah. No. So are you saying or implying that even though plants are green, they're not reflecting back

all the green that they're receiving. They're keeping some of it. Yeah, I mean that whole leaves, like normal plant leaves, are absorbing maybe about 80% of green light or so. So they're reflecting back at 20, which is pretty much what we're seeing. But the way it ended up working in the study that kind of turned everyone on their head, realizing that we actually do use green light with plants, is that it's penetrating deeper into the canopy. So like the red and the blue light is getting used up first, absorbed at a really high efficiency. The green light gets deeper into the leaf, gets lower into the canopy. So it is being used.

It's just that it's not being used as efficiently. Okay. All right. Again, plants just doing the best they can in this situation. They can do with what they got. Do with what you got. Plants are like black people. I don't have no money, but we're going to make the rent, baby.

Don't you worry about it. All right, we hear about plants being able to adapt and survive in extreme conditions. I suppose it wouldn't be the same unless we are. you about growing plants in space and the extremes of the environments that would be encountered. And before you answer that, can I tell you when I was in high school, I grew a plant upside down? It was Australian. Because I said to myself, well, does it really know which way gravity is? And does it really know which way the light is in advance?

because if I take a plant, turn it upside down, hold it with saran wrap, the soil, so it doesn't come out. And I have all my light at the bottom. From behind? From behind. That's correct.

So the plant, it kept trying to go up, but the light kept it coming down. So it didn't grow in a straight way. It was like confused. Right. On its way in. What plant was it?

Do you remember? I have to look. I'm sure I kept the notes. And then were you growing it in like a chamber where the only light source was below it? It was the only light source. It was a bottom.

It was a box. Oh, that is interesting. Because I'd grown peas upside down, and I grew tomatoes upside down. The same thing happened, but my experiment was not one in which there was a controlled light source at the bottom. So it was just outside. And so it, but it did basically, gravity was pulling it down. And then it kept pulling itself back up towards the stronger lights. It was almost this weird stair stepping type of fact.

Yes. Yes. That's basically the results I got. And I got an A plus on it, too. Oh, very nice. Yeah. Did you mark your own work? No, just to be clear, in high school, you normally take biology, then chemistry, than physics.

Right. But in my high school, I took physics first. Okay. And then I took chemistry, and I took biology as a senior with all of these freshmen. Right. So I was like the oldest kid in the biology class. Neil deGrasse Tyson, biology bully. All right, Kevin, we're going to throw you into space.

Let's go back to space. Yeah, metaphorically. Are we going to just take what we do here on Earth and just say, yeah, we can do that? in space, or we're going to have to think a lot differently. Because, Kevin, you know, we speak of the lunar surface. It's not soil. No. It's what the geologist is called regolith, which is powderized rock created by micrometerites

that on Earth would be what? Burned up in the atmosphere. Exactly, as a shooting star. No such thing on the moon. Oh, right. They hit, and they pulverize the rock. And it's been doing that for a billion years. So all you have on the moon is,

rock soil. And as I understand, rock soil. I'm sorry. So as I've come to understand it, the good earth is rich in microbes that the plant needs. So how are you going to grow something where you don't have the microbes or the fertilizer? What are you going to do? I mean, I honestly think you just can't. Like, you're right.

Bummer, dude. Okay, we're stuck on earth here. going. Regolith. Like, that's basically dirt, right? And the difference between dirt and soil is soil is dirt plus the life that you talked about. The microbes, the fungi bacteria. And so if you can't do that on the moon, well, first of all, there's no oxygen.

There's no atmosphere, right? You'd have to figure that out, too. Well, if we're growing plants here on Earth. That's a side detail. I think we bury the lead here, guys. So if you're growing plants without soil here on Earth, we just replicate that kind of practice. I think you'd have to grow them hydroponically or aeroponically in like a pressurized chamber. And I think you'd have to use artificial light. Because what's the moon's like night cycle?

No, no, no problem with light. Oh, moon, sorry. Moon has a moonthly cycle. So a day on the moon lasts a moonth. Yeah. So then you're in trouble because plants evolve for a 24 hour light cycle, right? And so you would need to supplement with light. They can't, they wouldn't survive for what, like 14 days of It's a 14 days in darkness. Right. Okay, so you have to like phase that somehow. Yeah. Well, just bring grow lamps.

I mean, come on it. I think you just got to bring growlamps. You do that. Well, that's what they do in every sci-fi film. It's the, you know, the horticultural deck. Okay, yes. They all have the horticultural deck. Thank you.

That's it. But aren't we going to just take genetically modified plant material with us? Yeah. Why not? It has been built, constructed to grow in extremities, to maybe deal with muth. I've learned a new word. Well, that's where the word month comes from.

Yes. The moon. But let me tighten that question. So as far as I know, plants like carbon dioxide. So if we're on the moon and we're all exhaling carbon dioxide, why don't we just capture that and stick it in the, in the, chamber where it holds the plant? Where it holds the plant.

Do we exhale enough carbon dioxide to serve plants? And then it's a cycle of life. We exhale, they absorb our CO2, they give us the oxygen. Can that be sustained? In fact, let me ask another way. how much plant life do you need to satisfy your daily ingestion of oxygen? That is such a good question. We want to know that, right?

I wish I knew. I don't know it, but I think there is, there's definitely an amount that, like, on a per person basis. Is it one tree per person? That's a lot of, because a lot of trees on earth. I just learned there are three trillion trees on earth. I said, I don't believe that. I ran some math on it. Yeah.

It was like, yeah. Three trillion? Yeah. Not for love. That's right. We'll be cutting them down. You know what else you could do on the moon? I just thought about it is you could go aquaponics.

So we talked about hydroponics and aeroponics. We didn't talk about aquaponics yet. All right. Which basically is, because you remember in hydroponics, aeroponics, you don't have the soils, you don't have the nutrients, right? Do you need to input those nutrients synthetically? If you go aquaponics, though, you have fish in that water medium. Those fish excrete, ammonia, that converts to nitrites and nitrates,

which is used as nitrogen by the plant. So basically the fish become the fertilizer. So on the moon, you could feed the fish. The fish excrete. They feed the plants. And you can eat the plants and the fish. Wait, so the aqua refers to what in that context? Good question.

I think just... Just the water. Yeah, but you just said hydroponics, the hydro referred to the water. That's probably why they made it aqua because they're like, you know, Aquaman talks to fish. Okay.

I think that's actually scientifically why. That's the idea. Okay, so that's interesting. so you bring some fish with you. Now you've really got the circle of... Circle of much. Okay, that's interesting. I don't think NASA's thought about that.

No, it's a pretty cool idea. I wonder, however... Water and weight. Everything is about... It has a fish ever been brought to space? Do you guys know? I don't know, and I'd hate to be that fish. Because fish align themselves vertically

because they're skinny and long, vertically because they know which way gravity is. Yes. In zero-g... Oh, you're going to mess with that fish. Yeah, that fish is. is going to be totally. Oh, man.

It's hard enough when you pull them out of the water and they have to explain what happened back to their friends. That's why they all look surprised. With their eyes are all fish. You ain't never seen a fish that doesn't look surprised. It's like, what?

So now you take a fish, not only out of water, you put them back in water in zero G. They'll be flopping. They wouldn't know which way to us up. There is no up. That's why they don't know which way is up. But what you could do,

this is all kind of, pointless conversation. Because sci-fi people have figured this out forever. Right. You just rotate the spaceship. Rotate the spaceship. There's your gravity. There's a gravity. You got it. Right. Okay. That's that. So Kevin, if they use your recipe

for cucumbers on the moon, is there going to be a mutiny on the first moon colony? Yes. It's got you off right there. Yes. It's going to be terrible. Because you make a nasty cucumber. Can you imagine? I mean, I grew the worst cucumbers of maybe anyone's ever grown. They were yellow. They were deformed. Like they had all these deficiency.

I still ate it, but, you know, it was bad. I mean, are we going to have to just, if we're interstellar travel, just come to the conclusion that, you know, flavors at something in the past? No, you get a flavor capsule. Flavor is just chemistry. Thank you. It's just a flavor thing attaching to your taste buds. Who cares what's delivering the flavor?

So basically, flavors become a condiment. Yes. Oh, flavor as a condiment. Yeah, all right. Put some more flavor on it. Yeah, maybe you just grow, like, like the most efficient vegetable you can grow and just flavor capsule it with like grow potatoes and just flavor capsule it.

Oh, no. That's true. We're back to the potatoes. Land of the potatoes. The poop potatoes always goes. Yeah. The poop potatoes. So before, I want to take this into a sustainability question.

And maybe the transition to that is tell me about the plot of land that you experimented on where you fed yourself for 30 days and that was all the food you ate. So did you get your protein? Did you lose weight? Did you look pale and sickly? Did you look healthy? How much land and what was the mixture of fruit and vegetables that was on that land? Okay, let me lay this out for you guys.

And were you the only one consuming that food? I have to tell you the set of rules I gave myself. Good. Love it. So I came up the idea. It was like February of 2019. Love it. Brilliant idea.

Love it. Right? I go, can I do this? And remember, back then I was in a 15 by 30 foot gross space with like some raised beds and containers and stuff like that. So I gave myself that amount of space and then I also utilized like one of my friends' little terraces. And I say, okay, I want 30, I'm giving myself 90 days of lead time. So by June, I'm going to start the challenge. So I have to survive from June 1st to June 30th off of everything I can either grow, fish, or forage for. Because I knew right away, just off the

quick math, I was like, there's no way I can get enough calories out of, out of this space for a man of my size. I think I needed 78,000 calories for the month. month. What do you mean by fish? Use the fish as a verb. What do you mean? Like literally go fishing. Well, that's allowed? I allowed it in the challenge. If you can fish, then, no, but hold on, hold on, hold on. This is why. This is why. Because, okay, name a plant with a ton of protein. Well, you know, what's interesting. Legumes. What's interesting is that potatoes are like one fourth protein. The problem is, they're a way higher percent water. So if you took the, water out of potato? They have...

You have a dense protein source? So it just... Potatoes are just full of water. That's the problem. But otherwise, yeah. So... Well, you look at nuts for protein. Yeah, so you didn't grow nuts. Tandio, that's a nut country, isn't it? I mean, but I had 90 days.

So I can't grow a tree from scratch, right? So it had to be produced from that moment on, right? Oh, okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. So here's where I go. I go, okay, I need 78,000 calories to live for 30 days and not lose weight. I even got a Dexas scan before. four just to see what I was at, even my body comp to the point of losing muscle. And so I said, okay, well, I basically have to grow calories. I don't really, I can't really worry about the macronutrients of it, protein fat carbs.

I just need literally calories. And in 90 days, the only things you can do that are going to get you enough calories are going to be beans and potatoes. And so I maxed out on potatoes like crazy. The starches. Yeah, yeah. It's like carbohydrate heavy. But beans have protein too.

Yeah. But anyway, so I grew about 80, 100 pounds of potatoes. and some amount of beans, I forgot what it was. Because the protein and fat, specifically fat actually harder than protein to grow quickly, if you think about plants with a lot of fat, you're thinking about like there's like a coconut or an avocado or something. You can't grow those in 90 days. And so I did allow myself to fish just because I was like, I think I will seriously

struggle nutritionally if I don't get enough fat. In San Diego, there's, and actually along the whole western coast of California, there's a fish called a grunion. And they'll do something called a grunion run. and they'll basically flop themselves, like hundreds of thousands of them on the beach, and you're allowed to go harvest them with your hands. You can't use, like, tools.

And that was happening in June. So I was like, okay, I'm going to bank on the Grunion Run for my fat. What kind of dumb-ass species is this to say, let me go on and flop around so people can take me, eat me? Life is too hard. I think it's one of those where, like, there's just so many it doesn't matter kind of approaches. Yeah.

Because there's like tens of thousands of them. And do they flop around only because when the tide pole? out? Or they just purposely do this? I think it's the full moons or something like that. Well, that would be the tide, you get a strong tide. They beach. Yeah. Okay. Maybe they beach, yeah. Well, what happens is the females come up and, like, dig a hole

and, like, lay their eggs in it, and then the males come up and drop their sperm on the hole. Yeah, exactly. Look at that. Always sex that is the end of a man. 100%. Yeah. I scooped them up. So, yeah, I mean, a huge part of my meals that month were

what I called grunion potato pancakes. where I like mash the potatoes and put them in a pan and like put the fish in that and then just ate that. And that's pretty much what I ate the whole month. I ended up losing 13 pounds in 30 days. And nine of the pounds, this is the part that made me so mad, nine of the pounds were muscle. I just, I just ate my muscle away. Although I did make it to the end of the challenge. Basically what I learned is that you need way more time than that. And honestly, you need like being fully self-sufficient on your own property is sort of a fool's errand. Like, it's much

better to have a community anyways. I grow this, you grow that, I get my eggs from you, that kind of thing. I mean, that's the way it was before we had our modern-day capitalist society. It was cool. Agrarian and trade and... Totally. Yeah. ...thealthus system.

Hey, this is Kevin the Somalié and I support StarTalk on Patreon. You're listening to StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Are we just screwed when the apocalypse comes? We're just screwed, right? Yeah, and what about like the victory gardens that people had in the Second World War

to show your solidarity with the rationing? So in apocalyptic earth, you're one of the survivors, right? I would make it, yeah. I mean, you'd put me in your apocalypse crew, I think, because I could feed you. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Give us you that address again.

Yeah. Because, yeah, no, I mean, canned food can last essentially forever until at least the next civilization comes around. But you can dry your grunions if you have a cool damp basement and just hang them out, you know. Hang them out and dry. You're back in the salt. Yeah, you need the salt. Okay. So tell me about sustainability going forward.

With mega-aggar, what do you call it, farming? Big ag. Big ag. Big ag. You know, that is the solution to our own problem, yet people are saying we shouldn't do that. It's feeding everyone. No longer is anyone saying, one day, We're going to run out of food.

That is gone. Yeah. Whereas in our childhood, I don't know how old you are. I think we're older than you. In our childhood, that was the woolly. The big fear with the population explosion would strip us of all of food on the planet. This was very Malthusian thinking at the time, but science has cured that. We can produce more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before.

So how should people think of? about this problem. Should we cheer the fact that everyone is being fed, or should we lament the fact of what it's doing to the environment in order to accomplish this goal? Man, I think it has to be a both, right? I mean, you're right. We grow, we grow corn, soy, wheat across most of the Midwest of the USA. California grows like 80% of the produce of the country, especially like... I did not know that. Yeah. We grow such an incredible amount here, you know. So, Kevin, my whole life I've heard. about top soil, but I don't have any understanding of it, even as a scientist, because the seed

grows up into the air, goes down with roots into the soil. Who cares about the top three or four inches? Yeah, I mean, we should all care about the top three or four inches. The top three or four inches is basically where everything actually happens for the plant. So you're right, like the roots are down in the soil, right? And yes, sometimes those roots go pretty deep and they can mine for specific minerals or nutrients that they might need. But in contrast to like hydroponics, like we've been talking about, in the soil, there's basically what's called a soil food web. There's bacteria. There's fungi. There's insects. There's all sorts of creatures that are mobilizing the organic matter. Because think about like a forest floor. Things are going to fall

from the forest. Animals are going to die. Insects are going to die or be consumed and defecate and all that kind of stuff. All of that material needs to be broken down to smaller and smaller particles to the point where it's effectively at the elemental level to be used by the plant roots, that's happening in a natural ecosystem by the environment in the topsoil. All of that is in that first three, four, six inches or something like that. Why isn't it in the six inches below that? I wouldn't know the exact maybe evolutionary ecosystem reason for this, but my hypothesis, I guess, would be that it's because it's efficient for the plant roots to not have to go that far to get the nutrients. That makes sense. That feels right. That feels right. Well,

So what's happening to the topsoil? So we're losing it dramatically faster than it's being regenerated. Why? Because the way that we farm in industrial agriculture is we're effectively, it's almost like you're growing hydroponically in the soil. Because you've now, let's say you've stripped all the topsoil, just hypothetically, right? Well, now you're growing in effectively dirt. There's not a lot of life in it.

There's not a lot of nutrient content in it anymore. So what do you do? You big, huge machines come in. till in the synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium that you need. So you're basically saying the dirt's now the growing medium, and I'm taking these synthetics that I've maybe mined from some cave somewhere, and transported with fossil fuels, right? The phosphates, too, and things?

I mean, is that problem? It can, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so we're sort of like taxing the earth and not repaying it enough. And there will be a point at which there's like, you've crossed the sort of horizon of being able to do that. and then you may actually see yields fall off like crazy because we're just losing it way too fast.

But you just said we can manufacture what the topsoil would have done if we till it back into the soil. So who cares at this point? We've outsmarted nature. But what he's talking about is sustainability because what happens once you get dirt is now you must do that all the time. So what? I'll do it all the time.

So what? But that's solving one problem to create another whole lot of downstream problems? I just solved that problem. What's the downstream problem? So the downstream problem with that is... We don't let the man... Oh, I'm sorry.

The one who has a YouTube channel on this? Okay, okay. I was going to go to an ecological, a climate and sustainability. But Kevin, go ahead. Well, we'll riff off of it, Chuck. Like, I've got one for you. So California grows a ton of almonds, right? We grow most of the almonds in the country.

So the way to do it efficiently in the industrial, you know, Neil method, I'm going to call it for now. I'm just being... Go ahead. He's devil's advocate. Yeah, I know, I know. Go ahead. Is you're going to put only almond trees in the orchard, right?

You're going to strip away everything else. And what do almond trees need to produce the almonds? Well, they have a flower. That flower needs to get pollinated. How is that flower going to get pollinated by the bees that are native to that area, typically? Well, there are no bees anymore because there's no other crop in that area that the bees would naturally forge from. So what has to happen as a result? This is just one example of a second order effect.

There's a whole industry now called managed bee pollination, where people will produce bees. put them in hives, drive them around the country. And allow them to pollinate. Exactly. But the bees are no longer naturally there because what you did was the other flora, you eliminate it. And that's what keeps the bees in the place.

So it created an industry. You know, how bee will travel. Have bee will travel. Okay, so that's all. But here's another reason. Wait, but here's another reason why. Because when those chemicals go in, a lot of times, they run off as well.

So what you get is farm, runoff of all of these chemicals that you put in, and everything's a chemical, so you know what I mean when I say. Where's it going to go? It's going to go into the ecosystem. The stuff that's needed. And what that does, it goes into our water systems. It goes into our groundwater.

I mean, you know, it's not... Because now I filter the water, so then it's back to the right. So now what? Now we've got a other industry. Right? So now you've put another industry in there. This goes into groundwater. It goes into the rivers.

The rivers will go into the sea. Right. And then we're just moving stuff into the... We have a mouse problem. That's okay. Let's get some hawks. All right. Now we've got to...

Let's get the snakes. All right. Now we need mongoose. Like it never ends. It never ends. And then in the end, you end up, like, manually reinventing what nature already was doing. It is the way that I think about. Oh.

And how do we... Wait, wait. That's a profound thing. Could you just say that again? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sure.

So if you try to solve everything. problem that you created from these large-scale agricultural systems, you end up basically just recreating what nature already was doing. Right. That's a great way to put at it, to look at it. I mean, you go around in a circle and come back to the point you originally were to realize you had it good and then you just changed it. Kind of like the war in Iran. So what did they do before we did this commercial farming, which is commercial agri? Did they just rotate fields and not use them and then you come back to them and, you know. Totally.

And so, yeah, please. I mean, in the past, I guess you're kind of right, Neil, like 100 years ago, you would have spent part of your actual life producing the food, right? Right, let alone buying it. But, you know, in the past, we used effectively like regenerative agriculture principles where you're not taking more from the land than you are putting back into it, which right now we are doing. And when I say taking more, putting back at what are these things that we're taking and pudding?

It's the nutrient inputs. It's the topsoil loss. It's the organic matter that you're taking. Because if you think about like a garden, let's say you grow a plot of corn. That corn, when you harvest it out, you're taking mass from the system. You're taking it out. And yeah, some of that is being generated by, you know, photosynthesis and carbon that's being sort of sequestered from the air.

But still. From the CO2 in the air. Yeah. up. But what people will do these days are stuff that, stuff that like we'll do in our, in our backyard or we'll promote is regenerative practices where you are adding back as much as you are. And yeah, maybe you are leaving something for a crop called a cover crop, which you're basically just growing to generate biomass that you will cut and leave in place. Leave in place. Interesting. Right. So with corn, lately I've noticed, by the way, I was

astonished, forgive me for even being so ignorant, that every, stalk of corn makes only one ear of corn. That felt so wrong to me. I didn't believe it until he made me go look at a stock. You didn't believe it. I did not believe it. We were driving down the road. A whole thing. Near your house. Yeah. It's where all that corn grows? And he goes like this. You know, each one of those stalks, there's only one piece of corn. I was like, no, that's not true. Is it one thing? Okay, so now what I've seen them doing is you harvest up the ear of corn and the rest of the stock gets sort of mulched back into the field because all that came out of the field at some level, right? Yes, of course.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I think corn's an interesting one because corn is one of the crops, of course, that we've modified, right? So most of the corn that you're seeing, like, in those fields is like a single-eer hybrid corn variety that is only going to produce one per stock. There are corn that produces more than one. Like two. Like two.

You know, like two, you know? But yeah, like people will do that. I mean, we'll do that sometimes. You'll cover crop and you'll let. like barley or rye or oats or something like that or some sort of legume, because legumes do something called nitrogen fixation, where not only will they take CO2, like every plant will from the air, they'll fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil. Into the soil. Which is great. And so you grow something like that. That's called nitrogen

fixation. Yeah. They're like a pump. Okay, because the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. Yep. So we got the nitrogen. And so it takes that and puts it back into the soil, which serves as in some way as a fertilizer. Well, yeah, nitrogen. nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are the three major elements that plants need to grow. Nitrogen being probably the most is needed. I love that. I never heard that term cover crop, but it makes sense. That makes complete sense.

Yeah. Kevin, I mean, way back, you know, when the agricultural revolution took hold, they would leave a field fallow to let it rest. I remember that. We don't hear about that anymore. Right. And I'm going to get to that follow-up question. Then when you say cover crop, would that be, you'd plant that crop in that field,

and then that would then become absorbed back into the soil, you wouldn't harvest it? You wouldn't harvest it? Are people out there still practicing these old, old traditional farming methods, or is that just gone? Just give it chemicals and let's grow everything. The group that's doing it the most are these urban farming folks who are farming on maybe a third of an acre like me,

although I'm not traditionally farming. I've got a buddy here in San Diego. He farms on an acre. I think he makes about 100, 50 grand a year selling his produce at market. He loves that lifestyle. Give us his address too. Yeah, I got you. When you ever come down? We'll do a whole tour. But he'll do a lot of that stuff, Gary. He'll run his chickens through, which of course, they're going to be eating, they're going to be eating insects, right? They're going to be taking a little bit of fords here. What are they doing? They're making

droppings. Those droppings are extremely high in nitrogen, right? So you're using animals. People will do something called, like, I think, silvo pasture where they'll run like pigs through forest. There's like all these weird combinations people are coming up with to try to get sympathetic and a symbiotic relationship between maybe animals, the plants and growing other crops around other crops. Oh, yeah, yeah. What's that called? Nature? Yeah, I mean, that's where I get to.

I go, nature's kind of doing it already, but you can come up with like really creative techniques, like running the chickens through the field, right? instead of solving the problem that you created by creating this problem, by creating that problem, you know? So the Jonathan Swift, who's famous for authoring Gulliver's Travels. Oh. Okay. One of Gulliver's Travels, is 1726, I think it was.

One of his visits was to the Legato Academy, which was an academy where there's just scientists doing completely bat-shit crazy things. Okay. And, but one of them was, you read their experiment, it sounded kind of like, but then you think about it's like, no. So one of them was they didn't want to have to till the soil. So they said, let's bury apples in the soil and then send pigs out onto the soil. They'll sniff, find the apples, dig up the apples, poop, and they'll keep doing this.

And that way they can till the soil and fertilize the soil at the same time. Okay? And how'd that work out? It didn't. How about that? They were already tilling the soils to dig up the soil to plant the apple. Yeah. See?

So at first, it sounds clever at first. Right. But it's not. So you were saying, try to double duty on the chickens, if they just poop on the top, does that get down into the soil or does that get washed away? Well, they'll scratch through.

So, like, you know, my hens will come out in the garden, they'll scratch through like three, four inches deep sometimes, hunting for little bugs and grubs. And so, yeah, it's not like the most efficient. You heard that? These are my hens.

My hens. Well, they are. I know. I'll come up my hands, Neil. You come to my address for some produce. You're not giving my hens. Do you name your hens and then slaughter them and eat them? I don't eat them.

If I ate them, I probably wouldn't name them, which probably sounds irrational, but it just is what it is. That's what we're just checking here. They do give eggs, though, right? Oh, yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah.

So obviously not everyone has a plot of land to grow food, but everyone who pays rent has some household square footage and in principle can buy a grow light for not much money. So how much of a difference can everyone growing something to eat make in this world? It's such a good question. I mean, you brought up Victory Gardens earlier. I think back in those times, we produce something like 15 to 20 percent of our produce as a nation from the Victory Garden movement.

But that took like a world war to galvanize everyone to do. So like what would it? take? I'm not really sure. If everyone did it, what do I think would happen to the food system? I mean, it would meaningfully change, but then you've got to remember, like, what are most of the crops being produced in America? It's like soy, corn and wheat. Even though, like, those aren't probably going to be grown a ton, even if like tens of millions of people started home gardening, they'd probably be hitting the tomatoes, the basil, the this, the that. I would say what you'd see the biggest impact is, is probably like the entire culture's attitude toward sustainability and food systems would change for the

better in a meaningful way. I don't necessarily know you'd like solve the pop soul crisis by doing that. But it could, it could create a sea change in how people think about the environment that could have other beneficial decision making consequences in people's lives. Completely. Absolutely. I mean, before I started gardening, like I said, I was like addicted to playing video games. You know, I didn't know anything about this. Now I have changed my entire life and habits because of just getting into the hobby. Because your mother kicked you out of the basement. Yeah. we've established that. That's it.

That's it. All right. We've got to land this plane. Yeah, but before we do, Neil, let's wrap up with the final question. So, Kevin, what's the question about plants or food systems, if you like, that you think science hasn't answered yet? Ooh, I like that.

Yeah. What do you wait for scientists to figure out on your behalf? There's a lot of them, man. But the one that just selfishly I'd be interested in is how to impact flavor at a deeper level. Because when you think about crops that are like wine, right? People get very snobby about their wine. Oh, the terwar of this land, this or that. It's true for all crops, though.

Just because it's wine, of course, that's a high value crop. I would love to know, like, what is impacting the flavor, let's say, of a tomato. I actually went to Bayer Monsanto once in the belly of the beast, and I did a 50 tomato test. And there's this whole wheel you're tasting these tomatoes on. I would love to know, like, what can I do as a home gardener to impact the acidity of that tomato more or bring out certain flavonoids. You need a home genetically modified organism laboratory.

Or something. Or something like that. Or something. Wow. Yeah, so flavor. And by the way, the counterpart to that in the grown meat movement. Right. I don't know where that is now, but last I checked, there were a lot of investment money

going into the, what's it called? Grown meat. Laboratory meat. Laboratory synthesize meat, but it's actual meat proteins. It's meat protein. It's just grown in a dish. It's grown in a dish that you didn't have to kill an animal to provide. All right.

Maybe the first one to get the stock. Right. But after that, you didn't have to. But they found out is all the flavor is released when you kill the animal. So it doesn't work without killing the animal. But if I in my laboratory develop a cocktail of flavors that I infuse into those meat fibers, and then I sell it as my, you know, the first of these would probably be a ground beef substitute.

It's going to be a burger. It's definitely going to be a burger. Right. And so I'm going to have a proprietary burger flavor. Right. And I think that's the next frontier. Because like I said, flavor is just chemistry. It's true.

It's just what is the flavor molecule intersecting with your taste buds? That's so true. That's all it is. Back to AI. And in fact, there's one molecule. I learned this and I think it's true. that the molecule for mint, it has a certain chirality to it.

A mirror image? It would be the opposite of a mirror image of it. It turns in a way that the mirror image of that molecule is not the same. It's not the same. It's just a mirror image of it, okay? All right. That mint tastes one way on your palate.

If you make the mirror image molecule of mint, you get the flavor of. of caraway. Really? Okay. So the caraway and mint are flavor profiles of the same molecule written flipped. Flipped in a mirror. Right.

So we need a flavor wheel like you get a color wheel. Yeah, and you get two of this and three of that and put it through this. Can I have a cotton candy burger, please? Wow. That's not interesting. Because caraway's in the like the carrot or parsley family and mince in its own group. Yeah, they got, but I'm just talking about the flavor. Just the flavor.

Yeah. Still, that's still fascinating. Just to be clear, I heard that multiple times, but I've never officially read it in a journal, and I've never seen anything to counter it. So I'm putting it out there. But whether or not what I just said is true. No, it's true, because there's the same thing with banana

and I forget the other flavor, but it's the exact same thing. Okay, our crack team of researchers just verified what I just said. Yeah, definitely. I believe it. Same thing with banana. The banana molecule, which gives you the flavor of banana. It's the same thing, the flip of it gives you something else. And I can't remember what it is.

Cheez. I don't know, Rokeford. Well, Mr. Espiritu, you've been highly illuminating and enlightening to this conversation and we're delighted that such as you exist in this world. And you have an ever-growing YouTube channel on this topic. And tell me about your second YouTube channel real quick. Yeah, that one's called Epic Homesteading. It was just the story of building out that property that I would have been telling you guys about.

Okay, all right. So we can find you in two ways there. Mm-hmm. Cool. And so we can find you. What's the name of your YouTube channel? Epic gardening. Epic gardening.

Godding. Epic gardening and epic homesteading. There you go. That works. Yeah. That totally works. Well, congratulations on your following and the success that you've produced. And I love people just getting a job done themselves.

Yeah. And now with YouTube and other platforms, we can all participate vicariously with your experiments and your successes. And vicarious is the word, because I'm going to whole food. Buy your food. All right, dude, we got to call it quits there. But this entire show, you kept saying we. So who's behind the scenes there, or are you a puppet?

I'm simply the face, nail, the beautiful face. The face of what? Well, who do you have behind the scenes there? Well, no, I mean, Epic Gardening, it started as a little blog back. in the day, became a YouTube channel. It's now a team of 55 people. We actually, yeah, we own a seed company. So we sell 750, 800 varieties of seed around the whole country. And so when I say we, I mean like the team of gardeners at Epic, which includes master horticulturists, master gardeners, et cetera, and me, the guy who. Well, we got stuck with you when we could have had a

master horticulturist. You could have. I know. I know. I know. They just put the face on for you guys. Nice. All right, dude. Keep up the good word. Keep it up. Keep it up. Keep it up. Keep it. Keep it's going. It was delight to have you. And good to see that it's become an empire, a seed empire. Yeah. We're all behind you on this.

And next time, give us your address. So in the apocalypse, we're bunking at your place. I'll send you guys an email. I got you guys covered. All right, take care.

All right, so this has been another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. You're coming up with these special editions. Yeah, I mean, you've got to credit the Lane over in L.A. Yeah, we have a LA office is part of this,

part of the special edition. Totally. Portfolio. But there's still so much to land on. Yeah. Amazing. All right. Well, Chuck, good to have you always.

Always a pleasure. This has been StarTalk Special Edition. All about farming in your back 40. Nice. Except if you don't have 40, you do it in your back one-third. Yeah. Of an acre. And if you don't have 40 acres in a mule, don't expect it.

As always, Neil de Grass Tyson bidding you to keep looking after.