The Dr. Hyman Show - Can Eating Regenerative Meat Help Reverse Climate Change? with Tom Newmark

Episode Date: September 25, 2019

Soil is the most important answer to climate change, and also one of the most underappreciated. Without soil, we have no food, and I don’t think I need to elaborate on how catastrophic that would be. The positive news is that we can work on our soil integrity right now to preserve it for many future generations to come—you might be surprised that using regeneratively raised cattle is part of that solution. There is still hope for our children and grandchildren to inherit a balanced and beautiful planet with abundant food production.  Because we rely on soil for food production, big companies are starting to pay attention to the work that needs to be done to preserve it. My guest on this week’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, Tom Newmark, is helping them understand what they can do and how to get involved in saving our soils. Tom was CEO of the dietary supplement brand New Chapter, which was acquired by Proctor & Gamble about seven years ago. Since that time Tom has focused on environmental activism with specific attention on regenerative agriculture. He is the co-owner of Finca Luna Nueva Lodge, an organic and biodynamic farm and ecolodge in the mountainous rainforest of Costa Rica that teaches regenerative agriculture. Tom is the co-founder and board chair of The Carbon Underground, co-founder of the Soil Carbon Initiative, and a founding member of the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative of California State University – Chico. This episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy is brought to you by ButcherBox. Now through September 29, 2019, new subscribers to ButcherBox will receive ground beef for life. When you sign up today, ButcherBox will send you 2lbs of 100% pasture-raised grass-fed, grass finished beef free in every box for the life of your subscription. Plus listeners will get an additional $20 off their first box. All you have to do is head over to ButcherBox.com/farmacy

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Industrial agriculture is killing the planet. Regenerative agriculture is the hope for the future. Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Traveling between jobs in Ohio, Massachusetts, and New York, I'm always being asked, how do I get enough high quality protein in my diet and where do I find it? Well, with all the conventionally raised animal products available at the supermarket, it's kind of hard to find meat that actually supports your health goals. Instead of taking you away from them, being filled with antibiotics and hormones and all sorts of unnatural stuff. And that's really why I love grass fedfed, grass-finished ground beef from

ButcherBox. Now, ground beef is probably the most dynamic protein out there, and I love how quickly it makes up a healthy meal without a lot of fuss or muss. Grass-fed beef is also better for the environment and actually can help reverse climate change, so you can feel better about eating it. Now, with ButcherBox, I get 100% grass-fed, grass-finished beef delivered right to my doorstep, no matter where I am. And they also offer free-range organic chicken, wild-caught Alaskan salmon, which are also part of my weekly meals, too. Now, grass-fed beef is the first protein I recommend for people trying to get more comfortable in the kitchen because you can just throw it in a pan with some sea salt, herbs, spices, and make a great meal. If you use ground beef, it's super easy.

My favorite way to cook grass-fed ground beef is by sauteing it with lots of garlic and onions, peppers, cumin, chili powder, oregano, and then tossing over a bed of greens for a super easy homemade taco salad. I mean, just talking about this makes me hungry. Now, if you're looking for a way to get higher quality protein in your own diet, be sure to check out the grass-fed beef from ButcherBox. Now, along with all their other humanely raised meats that are never given

antibiotics and hormones, they make eating well really easy, delicious, and super accessible, and I love it. Now, through September 30th, 2019, new subscribers to ButcherBox are going to receive ground beef for life. That's right. Sign up today and ButcherBox will send you two pounds of 100% grass-fed, grass-finished ground beef free in every box for the life of your subscription. Plus, listeners are going to get an additional $20 off their first box. To receive this limited time offer of two pounds of 100% grass fed, grass finished ground beef free in every box for the life of your subscription, plus $20 off your first box, go to butcherbox.com forward slash pharmacy. That's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y.

Again, go to butcherbox.com forward slash pharmacy for the special offers from Butcherbox. You know, 15 years ago, I started my private practice, the Ultra Wellness Center, with the intention of creating a place for individuals to come and be seen and heard by world-class doctors and practitioners trained in the practice of functional medicine. And it's been one of my greatest honors to serve thousands of my patients with my colleagues at the Ultra Wellness Center and to help individuals get to the root cause of their illnesses. We believe that every patient is unique and that every patient deserves a personalized, customized plan specific to their bodies and their needs. So I want to take a minute to tell you about some of the services that we offer and that we can use to help you take your health to the next level.

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And you get a comprehensive health and family history. We determine what labs you need and what are right for you to figure out. Like a medical detective, what's underlying the things that make you feel poorly? So as part of your functional medicine consult, you're also going to have an in-depth nutrition consult where you walk away with a dietary plan that's tailored to you. Our next option is a functional nutrition consult, you're also going to have an in-depth nutrition consult where you walk away with a dietary plan that's tailored to you. Our next option is a functional nutrition consult, which you can actually do remotely. You're going to get an individualized meal plan from an experienced nutritionist and expert guidance on supplements and mindful eating and lots more. Your nutritionist

can also recommend what labs you may need to help uncover the best diet for your genetic makeup and to optimize your nutritional status. And the third service we also offer is remote. We offer wellness consults, which are a great choice if you want to pursue a functional medicine avenue but aren't able to commit to seeing us in person. Now during this virtual appointment with one of our physicians, you can discuss your health history, you can ask questions about your current treatment plan. You'll be able to discuss your health goals and the doctor is going to provide direction on what's going on with you, including lifestyle and diet recommendations and other things you can do to get to the root of your problem. And then you can take this information and work with your current primary care doctor or a local physician to implement the testing, the supplements, and other treatments that are mapped out for you.

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Hi, I'm Kaya Perot, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy. what it's like to rediscover health and vitality. Hi, I'm Kaya Perot, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Just a quick note before we dive into this week's episode. The audio quality of this recording declines shortly into the interview, but we think it's still very much worth listening to. Thanks for your patience. Now on to the episode. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation matters a lot because it's about something most of us

don't think about too much, which is soil. And soil, it turns out, may be the solution to all of our problems. We have as our guest, extraordinary man, Tom Newmark, who is the CEO of the dietary supplement brand, New Chapter, which I recommend a lot to my patients. He retired from that seven years ago and has been on a mission to get the world to wake up to the power of soil, to save the planet, and to reverse climate change. He also runs a biodynamic farm in Costa Rica, Finca Luna Nueva Lodge, which is beautiful. It's in the rainforest of the mountains of Costa Rica. And he teaches regenerative agriculture there. You can go learn about regenerative agriculture, have a great vacation. I checked it out. It's not very

expensive. It looks beautiful. I want to go there. But more importantly, he's the co-founder and the board chair of an organization called the Carbon Underground, which sounds kind of like a revolutionary group, right? But it's about how do we get the carbon that's in the atmosphere underground again, where we've released it. He's the co-founder of the Soil Carbon Initiative, and he's the past board chair of the Green Peace Fund and a founding member of Regenerative Agriculture Initiative of California State University of Chico.

He's also the past board chair of the American Botanical Council, publisher of the peer-reviewed journal Herbalgram, which I subscribe to and use many years of my practice. He was also in the past a corporate attorney and entrepreneur, and now he's recovering from those professions, which I think we all should be in some way. So welcome to the doctor's pharmacy, Tom. Pleasure to be here, Mark. So let's jump right in. Last night, you gave a brilliant, clear, simple, short presentation that rocked my world. And in it, you described... Hopefully it soiled your world. It soiled my world. It maybe almost soiled my pants because it was so frightening. But, yeah, it was compelling.

And in it, you talked about the big picture of what's going on in our climate today, why it's a problem, and how to fix it. And the stats you shared were pretty striking. In 1800, you said there were 270 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. Right. When you and I were young folk, there was 320 or 50, and now there's 415 parts per million. Now, that seems like an obtuse number. What does it mean?

I don't even know. But each part per million accounts for, you said, 2 billion tons of carbon that was underground that got released in some way. Yeah, right. Whether through the combustion of fossil fuels or through the destruction of soil and the respiration of CO2 because of destructive agricultural malpractice. And isn't just fossil fuels just old trees and plant matter that got fossilized? Sure. So there are these things called carbon sinks. So in the planetary carbon cycles, the carbon in the atmosphere can make its way into the fossil fuel reserves, which was a giant sink of carbon.

It can make its up into the ocean. It can make its way into the above ground biomass, the grasses, trees, prairies of the planet, or it can be in the soil itself. So those are the carbon sinks that we want to be using because we don't want to put more carbon dioxide in the other carbon sink, which is the atmosphere. So go through those things in the reverse order. How have we affected all of those systems to release more carbon in the environment? All right, so we're at 270 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution. And maybe 10,000 years ago, we were at 260 parts per million before the Neolithic Revolution. But it was pretty stable. And then all of a sudden we have the advent of industrial manufacturing, the burning of fossil fuels and industrial agriculture, the widespread plowing of the soil and the widespread application of synthetic fertility, synthetic nutrients, like nitrogen fertilizer.

Let's use that as an example. So the convergence of those industrial extractive destructive mechanisms led to the release of carbon that was in those carbon sinks, whether fossil fuel reserves or in the soil or in trees, they were released into the atmosphere. And 2 billion tons of carbon translates to almost 10 billion tons of CO2 a year. And over the decades, over the centuries, we're at 415 parts per million. Which accounts for like 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide this year. We've introduced it.

We, humans. Human beings. Anthropogenic climate change. Human activity that has transferred carbon that was beneficial, that was in a stable reserve. I mean, we're carbon-based life forms. Carbon's not the enemy. Carbon's our best friend if it's in the right place. We like our friends to come over, but we don't like our friends to come over

and have all of them occupy our home and stay too long. It's all about time and place, and carbon in the right place at the right time. It's the basis for life. But what we didn't want to have happen is all of our friendly carbon in the soil end up in the atmosphere. And the last time that this planet saw 415 parts per million of CO2. There were trees growing at the South Pole. There were hippos swimming in the hot swamps of London. Oceans were 25 meters higher than they are right now, and there were no humans. So we're engaged in this vast planetary experiment of putting a life form, humans, into an environment in which we have never existed, in which we did not evolve to co-exist in comfortably.

So that's the existential challenge. And we're not going to engage in existential crisis porn in this conversation. We're not going to try that. Everybody who's listening is aware that we're facing a severe threat. And how severe that is, it's fairly known that we're in a mass extinction and that species are disappearing. We just don't want us to disappear, and we want our children and our grandchildren to inhabit a beautiful world i mean that that's really the truth of it right so we the uh thing i remember was i when i was

in college i heard this native american activist john trudell speak and we were all young kind of activists and environmentalists and we were talking about, oh, you know, save the earth and save the planet. He's like, listen, the planet's going to be fine. We're the ones we should worry about. We're going to become extinct. The planet will heal, regenerate, rebuild, do its thing over billions or millions of years. We're the ones that are going to be in trouble.

And I accept that, and I say that. And there was a brilliant book that i read about 10 years ago called impossible extinction by an exobiologist from nasa about as long as there are bacteria as long as we've got those those genetic seeds in in our ecosystem then there'll be a next iteration of creation. Yes. And it might take 25 million years, but at some point, there'll be the next pinnacle life forms on the planet. And so we shouldn't lament life on the planet.

But sometimes Mars happens. Yeah. Sometimes Venus happens. And, you know, Venus was a very rich planet with vegetation and water, and it was like a semi-earth, right? Right. And so there is this wonderful hypothesis called the Gaia hypothesis,

which is that the earth, that the living planet creates conditions that are conducive to the perpetuation of life on the planet and that works unless things are thrown dramatically off kilter and if we muck around with things too much venus might happen. So I think that we can assuage ourselves that the planet's not at risk, but let's not get too carried away here. We had David Wallace-Bell on the podcast saying his book,

Uninhabitable Earth, starts with the sentence, it's worse than you think. Much worse. So we're going to just take that as a given. But it's also, but the hope of fixing it is greater than the hope of fixing it. Well, that's what I want to get to.

So most of us came into awareness of this through an inconvenient truth. And maybe you watched the movie. We heard about the solutions, renewable energy, solar, wind, electric cars, turn off your light bulb. You know, just simple things that we can do as individuals. And I think that kind of missed the boat in the sense that, yes, we need all that. And yes, we need to convert to renewable energies. But there was a giant elephant that no one was thinking or talking about, which was soil. And what has been estimated is that a lot of the soil carbon, where a lot of the carbon in the universe has been sitting and not causing harm.

When the carbon goes in the ocean, it causes harm. When it goes in the soil, it actually creates a virtuous cycle of health and benefit all around the whole ecosystem. So what has been the story of soil? How big a contributor is it to climate change? How much soil have we lost and how much do we have left? So estimates are that worldwide in the last 150 years, we've lost between 35 to 75 percent of the top soil on the planet. Wow. In the Obama administration, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, right before President Obama left office, issued a report saying

that unless trends are changed, there will be no top soil left in the United States by the end of the century. Zero. Zero. Four years ago. No soil, no food. No soil, no food by the end of the century. Right.

It's like it's lights out. Right. So that was when the White House was talking about science and when there was an Office of Science and Technology Policy that was confronting truth and not fiction. Forgive the... I can't imagine what or who you're talking about. Right, right. But there was

an acknowledgement that we're facing a soil cliff which would threaten the survival of our republic. I mean, what could be more patriotic than making the soil of America great again?

This should not be a political issue in any way. So in England... So we've released carbon from the loss of topsoil 30-70% of our soil. Globally. Globally has led to

the carbon that was in the soil to be released into the environment. So between 25 to 40% of the legacy CO2 that is now threatening the existence of the human species, 25 to 40% of that came directly from the soil. And most of it came during our lifetime. So unfortunately, we own this. Yeah. We broke it. We own it.

That's the bad news. Yeah. But it's also the good news. Yeah. Because the forces that liberated the carbon that had been stably supporting life in the soil, the billions and billions of tons of carbon in the soil released into the atmosphere in this orgy of consumption, in this frenzy of destruction of the planet's surface. It happened quickly. It can

also be reversed quickly. So you hearkened back to Vice President Gore's brilliant, important movie The Inconvenient Truth. And yes, it was an incomplete recitation because it didn't examine in the movie the soil solution.

But Vice President Gore later, in one of his books, in a key chapter that was informed principally by Ratan Lau, a soil scientist at Ohio State University, he wrote about the soil solution. So Vice President Gore is very mindful and is a supporter of the soil solution. So I want to give him credit. Absolutely. I saw him recently at an event, and I went up to him and said, you talk a lot about renewables, but what do you think about the role of agriculture in soil? He said, absolutely. There is no way to get to the solution without enlisting the soil and agriculture

as an ally in the struggle. Of course we should be decarbonizing the economy, of course. But even if we did that, even if we completely did that, we'd still be screwed because we need to take the carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the ground. A trillion tons. We're going to add no more, but it may not be enough right and we're going to zero emissions tomorrow we're still screwed unless we figure out

a strategy to reduce carbon so let's talk about and there is a convenient truth you see the inconvenient truth is we've got a trillion tons up there that's vexing us and threatening us and the convenient truth is that there is a free shovel-ready technology that has been time-tested to draw CO2 from the atmosphere and put it to work for us in the soil. And that technology is called photosynthesis. So it's not like we have to invent something new and there are no barriers entry, and there's no new technology that has to be invented. It's been tested. Like these big carbon scrubbing machines.

Who knows? I don't know where that's at. Like, God only knows. And the expense there, and the trillions and trillions of dollars. And where you put that compressed CO2. If you think fracking is a problem, imagine putting all of that compressed CO2 into the fragile structure of an already broken planet. No, the soil wants its carbon back. So we got here in an interesting way. I mean, there was the beginning of the agricultural revolution 10,000, 12,000 years ago.

Agriculture has evolved over the years. And there probably isn't a single farmer who said, you know, I'm going to raid my land. I'm going to extract everything I came from until it's dead, and I'm going to move on. Nobody wanted to do that. But that was the consequence of our actions, not just in the last century or two, but throughout history. We've lost civilizations like Rome. David Montgomery wrote a book about this, how civilizations have disappeared from the earth because we've not farmed in a way that's sustainable. You talked about Mesopotamia and the land of milk and honey and how the overgrazing of goats led to the Sahara Desert.

So we're not going back to this pristine era where we're all farming in a way that was sustainable. We weren't. We just were able to do it now at a scale we've never done before. So the deep killing of the soil, the monocropping, which is putting giant 30,000-acre farms of soy or corn, tons of chemical fertilizers and nitrogen fertilizers for all fossil fuel pesticides, herbicides. That has really accelerated the damage to the soil. So I want to take a biology lesson here with you because I don't think most people understand this, and I certainly do. When you look at this carbon cycle in the environment, in the soil, it's so complex, but it's also so elegant and simple.

And how exactly does regenerative agriculture create a sink in the soil for carbon? Take us through the biology of, first, what is regenerative agriculture? And two, how does carbon get from the atmosphere into the soil? And what are all the steps? So hundreds of millions of years ago, that's going to be a long story. Let's start at the very beginning. Hundreds of millions of years ago, there were 6,000 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. It was a hot, steamy planet. And then plants happened. 470 million years ago, the convergence of just the right plants and the right microorganisms,

the right fungi, the right bacteria, plants figured out a way to get a toehold on the rock. Because back then, it was just rock and that supercontinent and water. And there was no soil. It wasn't like soil's always been there in some primordial Garden of Eden. It was rock. And then plants created soil. So we just need to have in our mind that soil doesn't create plants. Plants working together with the soil food web of microorganisms,

the fungi, the protists, the archaea, the bacteria, all together, they save the worms. I'm all for worms. I mean, I even love nematodes. I mean, they're all part of it. The infinite complexity of life in a thimble full of soil, we'll never understand it, and I'm so happy to bow down in humility to the unfathomable. Isn't there more

microbes in a handful of soil than there are stars in the universe? And people always say in a thimble full of soil there are more microorganisms than there are people on the planet. In a thimble full. But if you go to the root tip, if you go to that rhizosphere,

that spot where biology meets geology, at the root tip in a healthy ecosystem, there are hundreds of times more than even the six billion organisms. The amount of life that is teaming, that is scheming, that is organizing, that is communicating, that is converting solar power and carbon dioxide and water through a plant using photosynthesis to create plant sugars, to plant, to create carbohydrates. We love carbohydrates, right?

They're a way to capture energy from the sun. Calories, all the measurement of solar power. We need, our metabolic requirements require calories. We require solar energy. Plants need them too. Plants have a metabolic need for solar energy and for and for calories so plants create sugars c6 h12 o6 using solar power to break apart carbon dioxide and water h2o co2 re-scr them. Some oxygen gets released off into the atmosphere.

Which we breathe. Thank you very much. Plant forms. So we basically live on plants' waste products. We live on the waste. We live on plant waste. We also live on the sugars that plants create using the captured solar power.

But the plants have this amazing ability to breathe in carbon dioxide. But weirdly, even though plants live in a nitrogen-rich environment, nitrogen being 78% of the atmosphere, they don't speak nitrogen. Plants need help capturing and using nitrogen so it turns out that microbes have figured out how to actually capture and make biologically available nitrogen so microbes that certain bacteria is the plants right so the plants need that biologically fixed nitrogen. In turn, the bacteria need the sugars that the plants create because they

don't have a relationship with carbon. It's like ancient traders. They trade. It's a barter system. It's an under, like we don't realize it, but as we look out into a forest or a meadow, there is this vast commodities exchange going on. Like plants say, I've got solar energy, I've got carbohydrates, I've got sugar. I need phosphorus. I need potassium. I need selenium. I need phosphorus. I need potassium.

I need selenium. I need nitrogen. Who's got it? And messages get sent out at the tips of the roots, that rhizosphere we talked about. That's where it's all happening, at the root tip. Which, by the way, when a seed is germinating, the root tip is called the radical. Spelled differently, R-A-D-I-C-L-E. But I love having radical solutions to the environmental problem. So we're looking at the rhizosphere where the messages go out, I need these commodities.

Who's got them. And the fungi say, well, I can deliver, I can deliver solubilized phosphorus that I've gotten from phosphorus solubilizing bacteria. But what I need in exchange, I need some sugar. Can you give me sugar? And the plant says, we got, we got a deal. We got a deal. Here's sugar. Give me phosphorus. Here's sugar. Give me nitrogen. Here's sugar. It's an energy-dependent ecosystem. It is.

But what's disrupted is the moment that we begin to pour synthetic fertility into that field, synthetic nitrogen, synthetic chemical-solubilized phosphorus and potassium. The plant goes, wait a minute. I don't really need to work for the soil food web anymore. I've got this farmer, this foolish farmer, who's spending money buying synthetic nutrients. I mean, they're available for free in the soil, but this knucklehead farmer, God love him, he's spending his hard-earned dollars buying synthetic fertility from these big, huge fertilizer companies,

and he's pouring synthetic fertility into the soil. I'll just use it. So thanks, but no thanks, Soil Food Web. I don't need to work for you anymore. I'll keep all my sugars. And it shuts down the underground exchange. And that diminishes the biological activity of the soil. But here's what it also diminishes. The carbohydrates are rich in carbon. The carbon-rich molecules are pouring through the root tips in that

underground exchange. They're being taken up by the microbes, by the nematodes, by the earthworms, by the fungi. And then those microorganisms are excreting and dying. and the glues and the gums that are left behind that life cycle of the soil food web are creating the sweetness of the carbon-rich tilth, the humus that is the soil. So plants are creating soil with the activity of the soil food web but if plants stop pouring their carbohydrates through their roots that creation process that soil creation process that carbon sequestration process is stopped so so when the plants don't have to buy nitrogen from the microbes anymore they get it from the farmer then they don't have to buy nitrogen from the microbes anymore, they get it

from the farmer, then they don't need to trade their carbohydrates in the form of carbon into the soil, so the carbon doesn't get in the soil, and we all have more carbon in the environment. And what's even worse, compounding the problem, not only is new soil not being created, and let me just take a step back here. You pull up a healthy plant and you look at the roots and you could say, oh, look, the roots are dirty. It's not like the roots got dirty the roots and the little tiny balls and clumps and clusters and micro aggregates of dirt that you see hanging onto the roots, that's newly created soil. Yeah. It's not like the roots got dirty.

No, the plants created the soil. Plants made dirt. Plants make the dirt. We like to call it soil. Yes. Right? The difference between dirt and soil is important. Soil is alive.

Let's use that as the defining point. But not only is the introduction of synthetic fertility stopping the formation of new soil but think about it nitrogen fertilizer speeds up plant growth but it speeds up the growth of the microorganisms too so now you've got in a cubic meter of soil trillions and trillions of microorganisms that are being fed basically a growth hormone a stimulus reproduce grow grow more quickly. Well, when you've got all that almost cancerless growth going on in the soil, they're hungry. They have to eat something. They have to get those calories so they begin to consume the flesh of the soil.

They begin to break down. So there's all this carbon in the soil already that's been built up over years and years and years for thousands of years. And then the bacteria get hungry because they're being fertilized with the nitrogen and then they eat all that carbon in the soil, which then gets released when they

expire because the bacteria have to burp or fart. The belching and farting and breathing, the exhalation, the respiration. So we're about how far is this? We're about how far is this? Exactly. And so think about it.

We've got a trillion tons of legacy CO2 in the atmosphere, and up to 40% of that came directly from the soil. And the soil wants that carbon back because that's what good soil is made of and and it's it produces fertility and healthy soil produces nutrition produces flavor it's a it's a win-win if we can put that carbon back in the soil and the technology is there to do it. And it's not just a carbon issue for humans. It's the nutrient issue because as we've destroyed the soil and we've taken out the microbial life of the soil, the plants can't extract the minerals and nutrients from the soil, which means we see much less mineral content in our current vegetables. So even if you're eating broccoli today, it's different than broccoli eight years ago, it's much less nutrient dense.

And I've heard figures mineral by mineral that range quite a bit, but around 40% diminution of nutrient content. I mean, sometimes for certain macro nutrients, it can be 60, 80% diminution, but what we're growing is, uh, is a lot of food that is empty and nutrient value. The other thing is calories, but not nutrients. Well, the other thing you also probably know is that plants are getting much higher levels of carbohydrates because plants eat carbon dioxide.

So since there's so much carbon dioxide, it's making your plants into junk food, which is all another problem. All right, let me recap here. What we haven't done, there's one critical thing I haven't explained, which is the whole reason why we're here, which is what's called regenerative agriculture. Before you do that, I want them explain, which is the whole reason why we're here, which is what's called regenerative agriculture.

Before you do that, I want to recap because you just downloaded a lot of stuff, and I want to make sure people really understand it and correct me if I'm wrong. So the whole idea here is that we know that plant mass draws down carbon out of the environment like the rainforest, and your farming plants do the same thing, and they draw the carbon into the soil through a process of photosynthesis, where they suck out carbon dioxide, they combine it with water, and through photosynthesis, it creates energy for the plants to do their thing. And then we actually get to eat the plants, which gives us energy too, which is all a great cycle, and we get to breathe the oxygen.

So it's this beautiful ecosystem interdependence then what happens is the the disruption of our soil and turning soil to dirt disrupts that whole cycle right so then we don't put carbon back into the soil it gets released the atmosphere which is why you say anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of our current greenhouse gases are from the loss of soil and that leads to poor quality nutrition for us it leads to the destruction of the microbial life in the soil it leads to this horrible cycle where we're in now where we're seeing dirt instead of soil and we're using more and more chemicals more pesticides more herbicides more fertilizers and we're we're at a point where we can't continue this anymore. And then we have this horrible situation. But the good news is that there's a solution, which is regenerative agriculture.

Did I get that right? You got it perfectly right. And it's really not complicated. We went from 6,000 parts per million of CO2 using plants. It got brought down to 260, 270 parts per million. Plants know how to do this. Plants and the soil food web all working together create the perfect conditions for life on the planet. So if we're at 415 parts per million no problem if we can go from

6,000 to 260 yeah we can go from 415 back to 350 or 300 or 270 I mean the mother nature can do this if we get out of our way and if we optimize the photosynthetic activity and that concept of the photosynthetic activity and that concept of optimizing photosynthetic activity to sequester carbon is called regenerative agriculture and that's a radical thing you just said because we're all talking about how do we mitigate climate change how do we like stop increasing carbon emissions how do we go not from where we are now 1.1 degree to 1.5 but but not to 2? You're talking about a whole different idea, which is take us back to, you know, no degrees.

Correct. And we and the regenerative movement respect the need to decarbonize the economy. We certainly need to transition to clean energy. We don't want to contribute more CO2 and other greenhouse gases to further compound the climate. We don't have fuel to the fire. We don't want to do that. But if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions tomorrow, it doesn't change anything for us. So we've

got to bring the CO2 back down and the technology is there for regenerative agriculture. If we don't do this, just to make it really clear, because of the worldwide destruction of soil, UN scientists in a report that was released May 2019 said, we have 60 harvests of food left. Venice lights out. This is worldwide. That's even worse than climate change. Sounds like a soil crisis is a bigger crisis than climate change. Because if we lose soil, who cares if it's hot or cold? We can't eat. We can't eat. And there'll be a breakdown of the hydrologic water processes. With no soil, there's no retention of rainwater. There's no effective rain. There's no recharging of the streams and ponds and rivers and lakes.

So everything breaks down without soil but the good news is that if we farm in a way that is consistent with nature if we farm regeneratively then we can bring the carbon back and bring it back very quickly so the science is behind this absolutely there's enough science behind this. Absolutely. There's enough science. Should there be more? Could there be more? Of course. Is there time to make the science perfect? No. Not at all. So let's acknowledge that we should continue researching this.

But while we're researching it, let's get to work. This is shovel-ready. It's ready right now. How do we know this? This is a good idea. People are actually right now. How do we know this? This is interesting idea. People are actually doing this. Worldwide. There are many fine organizations that are promoting this. The Savory Group with the holistic livestock management has millions of acres in farms and ranches around the world. The carbon underground. We're working with

governments. We're working with tens of millions of farmers lining up with hundreds of millions of acres in the queue to be converted to regenerative agriculture. This is happening worldwide. This is hope. I wake up hopeful every morning. There's spring in my step. I know we're in an existential crisis, but this is a great time to be alive because there is a solution that works. And here's how people can understand it. Forests know how to produce massive quantities of nutrients. My farm in Costa Rica is on the edge of a quarter of a million acres

of rainforest. And you look out over it, no one's tilling it, no one's fertilizing it, and yet it's green and lush. And does it need Monsanto to keep the weeds down? It does not. It is a balanced, abundant, rich, nourishing, beautiful ecosystem. If you look at the prairies of the world, such as they exist, and there aren't many left,

but prairies knew how to produce food. So the prairies are the rainforest of the temperate zone. Basically, soil is where we can actually have a better chance of getting carbon down than even rainforests, right? Well, there are billions of hectares of grasslands, and they're meant to be grasslands. They're not supposed to be forests. There's been this push and pull, the competition between forests and grasslands around the planet. We don't need to convert prairies to forests. We don't want to convert forests to grasslands. They each have their dignity. And let's work with those ecosystems as they are. Prairies are enormous carbon sequestration systems.

A healthy prairie. So the idea of using agriculture in a way that mimics natural processes, producing our food like a forest produces food, like a prairie produces food, by minimizing soil disturbance, so by minimizing or preferably eliminating tilling, we don't want to be passing that blade through the flesh of Mother Earth, which exposes the organic matter to decomposition forces. And then the carbon gets released. We don't want to do that. So we want to have the least disturbance possible in the soil, minimizing or ideally

eliminating synthetic nutrients. We don't need to. You don't need to fertilize your prairie or forest. You know, the argument is that, oh, well, you know, that all sounds nice for hippies and they can have organic regenerative farms. But to really feed the world, we must have these inputs. We can't grow food at scale. We can't get the yields.

We can't get the productivity. We can't grow enough food. What do you say to that? So I have a… Let's call it the green revolution. It is. Turned out to be the brown revolution. Turned out to be.

It's right. So I'll give you a couple of simple examples. There's a scientist I know, Dr. Alan Williams, and he's one of the forces behind adaptive multipathic racing. And he's a livestock geneticist. Which, by the way, what is that? What is adaptive multipathic racing? I'll circle back.

Okay, okay. And he's probably a fifth or sixth generation farmer from the southeast, and he buys some abused, destroyed land in the Mississippi Delta. I mean, it was a cotton plantation, and then it was grazed irresponsibly, and this is dead, this is dirt now. This isn't soil. And the organic matter is a fraction of what it was in its natural history. And five years later, five years after using adaptive multi-pad grazing, he's finding that the soil organic matter levels have gone from 0.5% to 4% to 5%.

He's found that every year he's sequestering up to 40 tons of organic and inorganic carbon per hectare per year. This is dead soil five years ago. It now is a showcase of biological activity and abundance. And productivity. And productivity. And the stocking capacity, the rate of productivity of his cattle ranch is 3x that of his neighbors, and his input costs are lower. Wait a minute.

So you're saying that regenerative ag can have threefold increases in productivity of cattle and meat? And cost less. And cost less? And produce a higher quality of nutrients in the output. So better meat and less costs and carbon sequestration and no chemical inputs. Sounds like a fantasy. It's called the convenient truth. That's why I wake up.

I know we're in a real mess. So this is a huge myth. The whole myth of we need industrial agriculture to feed the world. You can have your nice little organic farm, a regenerative farm, but it's nice, but it's not really going to do the trick. You're saying not only is regenerative agriculture equal to, but it's better than in solving all the problems we're trying to solve for health, climate, inputs, costs, all of it. Mark, if we have no soil left in 60 years, if the Obama administration scientists are right that there'll be no topsoil left at the end of the century, if the scientists in advising in the House of Commons in England are right when they say that the top soil of England has gone from three meters to bedrock and farming will be economically impossible in one generation

in England. So 10 feet to rock. Right. That's what's happened. So we know how the movie of industrial agriculture ends. It ends with bedrock. We're back to that soil-free environment 470 million years ago. The movie ends in calamity. The movie ends, as the UN reporters stated last month, with 60 harvests of food and then lights out. So when people say we need industrial agriculture to feed the planet, yeah, well, how's that working out? How's that working out for you?

How's that working out for you? Well, it's good to say, but it's not good. Exactly. So we could have this frenzy of chemically supported production, which is incinerating and vaporizing the soil to the tune of 25 to 75 billion tons of soil every year being gasified and the carbon being put up into the environment, compounding our climate crisis. That's where we are right now. So no thank you to that.

Okay, so let's talk about regenerative agriculture a little more deeply. Because right now there's this raging debate, which I get buffeted about by. On the one hand, there's an enormous movement and enormous money behind it that says that in order to save the planet and reverse climate change, that we need to become vegan or plant-based. Because it's the cows and in fact the farming of cows that are causing a significant part of the carbon emissions and if we stop eating those cows then we'd all be better but there's another group saying no in fact we

need animals as part of our regenerative cycle otherwise how do we create the soil we've talked about regenerative agriculture with plants, but we haven't talked about the animals. And even if you eat meat or don't, you're a vegan mostly, right? And you have been most of your life. But you are focused on actually incorporating animals into the cycle. And you have a dairy farm in Costa Rica. I'm a walking consumer. So how do you navigate this? Because the arguments are really vocal, and they're backed by, quote, science on both sides. And when you start to dig into the vegan argument that we should get rid of all cows,

and regenerative farming actually is bad or worse than conventional factory farm animals, you've got scientists writing papers like grazed and confused, meaning that people who think that grazing is the solution are all confused because the data only show that it works, right? And often their data is cherry-picked so that they're looking at only a one or two-year cycle to see if it works. And it takes longer than that to actually change from dirt to soil. So, you know, how do you, and they're also funded by large leading groups and they're supported

paradoxically by big food, big chemical companies, big ag, you know, it's strange when you see, you know, Syngenta and ChemChina and DuPont and Bayer, Monsanto and Pepsi and, you know, Nestle all supporting this, it's bizarre because they're talking about increasing plant production, which in the developing world they're saying needs all these inputs. And so we should increase the fertilizer. We should increase the inputs. And you're saying there's this whole backstory to it. So can you help navigate through that?

Because I think people are confused about whether we should all eat meat from a genitive farm to save the planet or we should never eat meat at all from any place i certainly honor the the spiritual and the religious uh perspective that says that the eating of other life forms is inappropriate. I will in no way denigrate that. And so if people come to veganism from that point of view, it is interesting because I do think that plants have consciousness. And I don't know how you draw a line between... Microbes have feelings too.

Microbes have feelings. They may not have eyes. They may not have little furry faces, but they're conscious. And plants respond to the environment. Plants have memories. So I don't have the knowledge to be able to say that consciousness stops at a certain kingdom of life. And so, again, there's some data on it, which is fascinating, like secret life of plants. can differentiate between stimuli that threaten and therefore need to be responded to and stimuli that are just general background noise.

We think of it in a very mammalian expression of intelligence, and there are plants that do that better than some animals do that. So again, I'm not a llama or a guru. I'm not a mystic. I can't tell you where consciousness starts and stops in creation. But if someone has made that decision, fine. But they shouldn't be deluded into thinking that it's necessarily good for the environment. Or that they're not telling you anything because you're destroying habitat.

I mean, agriculture is the most destructive thing. You're destroying habitat of moles and mice and rabbits and insects and birds. And they're all dying because you're eating your broccoli, right? Right. In fact, I don't think most of the engineers realize this, but I was at the Brooklyn Range, which is not too far from here. It has one of the biggest rooftop farms in the world. And it's this beautiful organic farm on top of this roof overlooking the Manhattan skyline. And I was taking a tour, and I said, oh, this is fascinating.

So how do you take care of the soil up here? Because you bring all this soil up. And how do you grow these plants? Oh, we use bone meal and oyster shells. So your broccoli is a carnivore. Exactly. I don't know of any healthy ecosystem ever

in the natural history of the planet that evolved absent animal interaction. If you cordon off an ecosystem and keep all mammals out, it would likely die. I mean, I think that that's probably a major cause of desertification around the world, where ecosystems are deprived of animal inputs.

Ecosystems don't like... I mean, manure and urine. Urine and also... And then the disturbing of the soil. Ecosystems don't like... I mean, manure and urine. Urine and also... And then the disturbing of the soil. Exactly. They're chewing down on the plants just to the right level so that they can regenerate and grow and stimulate further root growth.

It's all a cycle. The Great Plains became great through that ballet, that choreography between the tens of millions of ruminants. Yeah, there were 60 million bison and 10 million elk. Oh, wow, exactly. And yeah, they were all running around. They weren't causing climate change. And they were all belching and farting and emitting methane.

And you mentioned Nicolette Hahn-Nyman and her wonderful book, Defending Beef. And it's brilliant that I recommend that people read it. It's not the cow, it's the how. It's not the cow. It's the how. It's not the cow. It's the how. Don't blame the ruminant. Blame the malpractice of the management system that is misusing the ruminant.

I happen to love cows, and I raise cows, and I have the dairy. Ironically, I'm vegan, so I don't consume them. But I sure need them on our farm. Without their involvement, our ecosystem would struggle, would really be diminished. So I look at fact and not at the religion of the argument. And to me, around the world, people who manage their livestock in a way that is consistent with certain key principles, if they use their livestock as a proxy for the wildlife that ain't there anymore. So we used to have 60 or 70 million bison and they're gone. But do we have something that could be managed in a way that emulates, that mimics the activity of those wildlife?

Yes, we do. We have cows. And chickens are more complex. But there are people doing regenerative chicken production right now and and and and I'm happy to share those resources with you and point your audience in the direction of that. Like Gabe Brown and Joel Salatin from Podface Farm they are grass farmers and they use animals to help grow the grass. Exactly and Gabe is a great example because Gabe was struggling.

His farm was failing. And it was the introduction of the right type of regenerative agriculture and the right use of livestock that just stimulated, that catalyzed, that catalyzed, formation of massive amounts of topsoil. When people say, oh, you know, it takes a century to grow a centimeter of topsoil, wrong. There are farmers in desert areas of Africa, and Dr. Tim LaSalle and folks that he's worked with in Africa, they're laying on an inch or more of fresh topsoil every year in Africa. Amazing.

In desert areas of Africa. And when you think of an inch of topsoil over millions and billions of hectares. That's how we can bring the carbon back. And going back to the simple math, a trillion tons of legacy CO2 that we've got to bring back down to Earth. There are 5 billion hectares of grasslands and forests on the planet. There are 5 billion hectares that we have as a potential carbon sink.

If we can optimize agriculture, optimize the technology that's time-tested photosynthesis, 5 billion hectares, a trillion tons. So how do we do that math? How long would it take? Well, let me give you a couple of really simple examples. In Costa Rica, where I have a cacao plantation. Chocolate, you're my best friend. Theobroma cacao, food of the gods. There's been peer-reviewed published science showing that a well-managed regenerative cacao plantation can sequester, can draw back to earth and build new soil to the tune of 41 tons of carbon per hectare per year. Unbelievable. Okay. Well, what if you have a billion hectares doing that? So do the math.

A lot of billions of tons. It's billions of tons. And, again, do I know for an absolute fact that we can, using regenerative agriculture, reverse climate change in five years or 10 years or 20 years? No, we haven't done it. But there's enough scientific support around the world that gives us confidence that this is a strategy that has to be used right now. And we need governments and we need major corporations representing hundreds of billions of dollars of food commerce. We need them lined up, signed up, enrolled, and regenerating right now.

And that's how we stand a chance of drawing that trillion-ton legacy, which is suffocating us and heating us up to the point of extinction and bringing it back down to Earth quickly. So this solves, in many ways, our health health crisis because we can't grow these giant corn and soy monocrops that are destroying the earth that made into junk food and biofuels and animal feed right which don't help any of us right it helps reverse climate change it actually produces more food better food it provides better environments for the animals, better environments for humans. Seems like a win-win-win.

But there's a few companies that control the agricultural and food systems. I mean, there's nine companies in the food world that control almost all the brands, even ones you don't even imagine, even the, healthy brands that are all bought off by big food. So Kraft, for example, just bought Primal Kitchen, which is a paleo brand of, of sauces and food. And then you've got, you know, three chemical companies that control most of the chemical inputs. You've got a few nitrogen fertilizer companies that control

most of the nitrogen fertilizer. You've got a few grain companies and trading companies that control most of the commerce. So you basically got maybe 20 CEOs out there that control the companies, that control everything around what's happening. And they are all thinking about what's happening in the next quarter, not the next century. Some. And there's a shift happening, but how do we make the economic argument that this is in their best interest? Well, at the talk that I gave last night that I'm thankful that you attended, in the audience was a CEO of one of those companies. Yeah.

A big one. A big one. One of the one of those companies. Yeah. A big one. A big one. One of the big nine food companies. And he came up to me after the talk and said, I want your deck and I want you to present this to my company. So I think that there are some major food company CEOs that get it, that get that their supply chains on which their profitability quarter by quarter relies, that those supply chains are imperiled by the worldwide

destruction of soil. If you're a food company and you're told that there will be no soil on the planet, that's a risk that you better manage. Yeah. I was really struck that the vice chairman of Pepsi, I've got to know, I mentioned on the planet, that's a risk that you better manage. Yeah. No, I was really struck that the vice chairman of Pepsi, I've got to know, I mentioned on the show a few times, very great guy. But we differ on a few important points. He did say he was invited by the United States Department of Agriculture to give a keynote presentation at one of their big meetings. And I'm like, why would they invite you?

He said, well, they wanted me to talk about some of our initiatives around trying to create regenerative agriculture, because we understand the issues in our supply chain and we are trying to solve them, but we actually can't solve it alone. We have to do it as a collective, meaning all of the food companies and all the ag companies. And we can't convene because it's, it would be, you know, illegal under the

antitrust law so we need other bodies to start taking maybe the carbon underground can bring them all together and have like a you know world summit of food and ag and chem and fertilizer companies and have an honest conversation because these people all have children they all have grandchildren no one's trying to destroy the planet i think a lot of this is unintended consequences of things we just never knew. People are imprisoned in the paradigm of production that they have been told is the only way to do things. And we need to change in the thinking.

Because again, we know how the movie of industrial agriculture ends. We're witnessing it. And once companies are awakened to the existential threat to their profitability, to me, if I were the CEO of a major food company, I would be imposing a key performance indicator on everyone responsible for the ecosystems that are producing the foods that I am selling, I would require those managers every quarter and every year to report on how much carbon the company is responsible for resequestering, how they are recharging the ecosystem.

I mean, imagine a person responsible for the supply chain of a multi-billion dollar corporation acting in a way of burning down the production facilities, of poisoning the production facilities, of guaranteeing that the company would be out of business in 10 years or in 20 years. I gave a presentation a few years ago to a major clothing company, and I asked. It grows cotton. I won't be naming the company, but my partner in the carbon underground, Larry Koppold, and I asked in this meeting,

are you in your risk management taking into consideration the likelihood that in 20 years there will be no world supply of cotton if agricultural practices don't change? And to the credit of that company, their management said, we are aware of that risk. Companies are smart. The CEOs of major international corporations, they're not stupid. They are appreciating the risk to their supply chain. And it's within the interest of every major food and textile company on the planet to manage the environment in a way that recharges the productive capacity of the land that is giving that company the ability to make a profit and to give shareholders their return. Every shareholder, every investor should be demanding of corporations that their supply chains convert to regenerative agriculture.

And there ought to be a divestiture movement. Just as there is a divestiture movement asking that major universities and pension plans and trusts divest from fossil fuel companies, people should be divesting from companies that are refusing to get on board with regenerative agriculture. Industrial agriculture is killing the planet. Regenerative agriculture is the hope for the future. Shareholders, investors, hedge funds, private equity groups, they should be organizing a campaign to get their investment targets on board with regeneration. Tom, when are you announcing your candidacy for presidency of the United States for 2020? That's what I want to know.

You know what's interesting? There are at least two candidates now in the Democratic field that are explicitly identifying regenerative agriculture as part of their environmental strategy. Yes. This is percolating up. Actually, one of them is a good friend of mine, and I have been speaking this in his ear for years. And as a result, he wrote a book called The Real Food Revolution.

Tim Ryan was on cnn and his last line on the cnn town hall was it's about the soil we have to fix the soil and he was one of the folks to whom i was referring and i am a big fan yeah he's a good guy he's a he's a really solid human being and he gets these issues uh i mean it's it's a crapshoot who's going to win or lose and uh almost doesn't but he's putting but he's putting this out in the that's what i mean it's like right the fact that it's in the conversation is what matters and that's what i care about yeah exactly yeah it's so incredible so we're talking about changing the behavior of big corporations we're talking

about changing government policies we're talking about a global movement at a high level to rethink finance and investment and divestiture. That all seems great and big and grand, but the average person listening is like, well, what the heck can I do? You know, like, is it relevant to me or do I just have to wait and hope everybody figures out or just lights out? Can the individual take actions in their life that helps us solve this problem? You know, what are the theories of change? What are the levers of change?

And that's what we all talk about. And what is it that led to the success of the non-GMO movement? And was it corporations getting enlightened? Was it the media picking up on the issue? Was it scientists? Was it consumer groups? It's a concatenation, a combination of all of those forces. So I don't think consumers should feel disenfranchised and powerless because they can start asking in their farmer's markets and they can start asking in their phone calls to the brands that they love. They can start in the conversation. The conversation of regeneration 10 years ago, no one was talking about this at the

natural products expos and the food gatherings in North America. Now whole days are being devoted to the concept of regeneration. So consciousness is stirring. There is an awakening to this on an individual level. Yeah, people should be looking at their front lawns and their back lawns and they should be looking at the fact that the number one agricultural system in north america is grass being grown it's where we're dumping more chemicals and more pesticides so yeah people have an individual ability so turn your lawn into a garden there there should be an agroecological permaculture awakening yeah it's ron finley probably heard him the uh gangsta gardener from south central la took that little

strip between the sidewalk and the road in front of his house and turned into a garden and he got cited by the city they had a subpoena out of his arrest until he was growing sunflowers and he started a whole movement of urban gardening and it's awesome yeah in spaces where nobody was gardening and growing food and there's a whole urban agriculture movement so i think all these bits matter and even uh insofar as they help you produce better food enhance your community you know reduce some of the carbon footprint of our ag system you know they'll certainly help draw down carbon but we need this at scale on five billion hectares we we need it at scale and i have told people if you have the opportunity to be in a presidential debate forum or if you're

hearing a candidate ask the candidate what are you going to do about the fact that there are 60 harvests of food left and then there's no more food? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, just a simple thing. You believe that we have a climate crisis. Well, what's your strategy? What's your bridge from 415 parts per million to 350 parts per million? Let's start asking our political leaders simple questions. This is not a partisan issue. Whether you're

Republican or a Democrat or whatever you are, we're facing a climate crisis. What's your strategy? And how are we going to rebuild the productive capacity of the United States, of wherever you are in the world? We in the Carbon Underground are working with major corporations because to us that is a locus of power. If there is a corporation that represents, controls $100 billion of food commerce, I want to work with them. Larry and I will come meet with your board. The Carbon Underground is ready to help you reconfigure

and regenerate your supply chain. And we're doing this around the world. And it's a net financial win in the end. It is. Well, it separates your supply chain from imminent impossibility. I mean, supply chains are collapsing. I'm giving a talk. But you're also talking about like this method of farming isn't just something we have to do because the climate is going to hell. It's actually a better way of farming because it causes more yields, more productivity, three times the amount of animals you can grow on the food, on the land. I mean, it's sort of- And it will be more beautiful.

Yeah. So if there's nothing other than the biophilia of loving a rich, abundant, biodiverse environment, for all of these reasons, farmers will make more money, ranchers will make more money, the ecosystem will endure, Our children and grandchildren will be able to inherit from us a planet that is biologically recharged. It is a win-win. And therefore, rather than talking about the end of times and we're facing inevitable calamity. I mean, and that's all true, maybe. But there's still hope. There's still an opportunity.

And this is what the regenerative agricultural revolution represents. And when the carbon underground goes to local, state, and federal governments, different nations around the planet, which we are, we are in conversations with national leadership around the world of how they can enroll the tens of millions of farmers in their nation in the regenerative revolution. This is how we get the footprint that we need. folks listening, in your backyard, be regenerative. In your wallet, in your shopping cart, shop regeneratively. In your political conversations, be asking about the regeneration of soil and the strategies for bringing carbon back down and reversing climate change. But recognize that there are also major corporations and governmental leaders who are on board, who get that it is in their corporate and governmental interest to have a recharged and well-fed and well-nourished and beautiful

populace and ecosystem. And this revolution is happening. It is inevitable. And we need people to get on board. Well, that's so hopeful. I mean, people are interested. They can go to the Food Policy Action Network where every single one of your congressmen and senators is rated on how they vote on food issues and agriculture issues.

And you can reach out to them through their websites. And you can comment. You can ask them these questions. You can advocate for ideas that you want. And let me tell you, they listen. It matters. Yes, they get funded by big food and big ag and by big corporations. But you vote for them at the end of the day, and they're going to start paying attention

when you start asking these questions. And you look at all the movements that have happened that have changed laws. I mean, things happen not starting in Congress, but ending in Congress with abolition or civil rights or women's rights or gay rights. The, you know, the dreamer act, I mean, that just passed in Congress, you know, that, that all started from people raising up their voices and speaking together and changing and challenging the status quo. And that's what we have to do. And it's not easy. It's not one solution. But what you're saying to me is really striking. One is that most people have no clue

that the soil is the answer to climate change. Correct. It's probably the most important answer. Right. It's the cheapest answer. It's the most effective answer. It's the answer that provides multiple beneficial side effects for everybody.

And it's something that is very little understood, very little appreciated, and certainly not being implemented at scale. And it's ready right now. And we don't have to wait. Correct. And there's no barriers to entry. And if you've got a land mass and a shovel

and some seeds, get to work. And the one gap, though, I would challenge you on is that right now we're seeing most of our farmers are like late 50s, early 60s, and they're aging out of farming and young farmers are not entering into the space because of access to land issues. There's been the financialization of land where the land is worth more for its property value than for its agricultural value. And these issues of the youth being obstructed because of various land policies and other issues from actually going in or the cost of starting a farm are prohibitive so even the people want to do it we have to solve for that the government

needs to implement policies to help train and and actually convert these farms there needs to be a much bigger initiative around helping the transition because it's not an easy transition to go from a factory farmed industrial agricultural model to a regenerative model. It takes a number of years until it switches over, it's profitable and it starts to reap the benefits. So I think that's an important point

people need to remember. You've mentioned that I've been active in Greenpeace over the years, and I'm proud to be a part of that organization. And environmentalists in the big environmental organizations need to start really appreciating and celebrating the role of farmers in the climate movement. Rather than lamenting the destructive forces that industrial agriculture now represent, we can be encouraging the policies and the practices where farmers become the front lines of the climate resistance, of the climate revolution. Farmers are our allies.

Absolutely. And you have millions of people that tune in to your podcast. This is a platform that is highly influential. And I would ask everyone who was listening in, please get the word out to all the farmers, to all the policymakers. We in the environmental movement recognize, are starting to recognize, Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, and I just wrote an article on the story of soil and how soil is an indispensable part of the climate solution. We are reaching out to farmers now. Please, we recognize you. This is not an urban-rural divide.

This is not an East Coast, Midwest. Forget all of those. It's like in the musical Oklahoma, can the farmers and the cowboys just be friends? We need to all be friends here. We have to all pull together here. And I can't wait to have meetings where Republican conservative farmers and progressive liberal Democrat industrialists are getting together, shaking hands, and celebrating the rebuilding of their ecosystems and their soil. The soil is our common ground. It should not be something that is politicized and and the farmers are an indispensable part in this country of the climate response i think you're right i

think it's it's easy to vilify farmers because oh they're doing industrial it's actually not their fault it's not their fault they're being dictated to by the fertilizer companies the pesticides and by the and by the regulatory regime of the crop insurance programs. And there was a systematic effort starting in the 1920s to eliminate the small farmer. Earl Butz, Nixon's ag secretary, said, go big or go home. There's a wonderful book called Foodopoly, which explains the legislative political history of suppressing, of eliminating the small farmers and the rural communities. So what we need to do is we need to recharge and regenerate the rural environment. And the political leaders who get that, who

understand that rather than viewing the rural areas as a flyover zone between the coasts, these rural areas, the Great Plains can be made great again through regenerative agriculture. We need to start doing this. And this is a wonderful political, environmental, social opportunity to recharge and regenerate. But let's not be too limited to just the United States because there are more than 2 billion smallholder farmers around the world. Smallholder meaning that their plots of land are typically five acres are smaller. There are more than 2 billion of them, the majority of those being women who are feeding their families and feeding their communities. This could be a wonderful expression

of the divine feminine manifesting on the planet where the women of the world taking care of their families and their communities through regenerative farming, through the more than 500 million small farms around the world. So yes, in the United States, we tend to think big, but there's also power in the big numbers of all the smallholder farms. So the smallholder peasant uh farming collab collaboratives and cooperatives we need to enlist them in this as well and they've been also pressured through the green revolution to change their farming practices to use absolutely big ag seeds and big ag chemicals so it's it's it's it's an important thing and they're being driven out of their lands and they cannot afford it.

And then they're suffering the climate effects of droughts and floods. And they're becoming climate refugees themselves or they're committing suicides at incredible rates because they can't maintain the debt or the productivity of their farm. So it's really a crisis situation. But the good news and the hopefulness that I feel after this conversation is pretty big, you know, because it's easy to get discouraged. It's easy to listen to the news about climate change, the doom and the gloom and the disaster and the projections and go, we're screwed. Like, we just let's, I told my wife after I interviewed David Wallace-Wells for the

podcast on climate change, I said, let's just spend all our money, just party till the end of time, and that's it. But what you're saying is, no, we shouldn't. We actually need to think about this differently and that we can use this beautiful thing called soil to change the world. This is a wonderful moment to be alive. Everything is on the line. To check out and party, that diminishes us.. That would be fun for a while. But to honestly face the existential threat and to use the power of Mother Nature and to work in an alliance with her in a regenerative fashion, what an opportunity. What a celebration. I wake up hopeful every morning, and I want people to join us in this regenerative

revolution. It's sort of like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz where she had the power to go home all the time all she'd do was click her ruby red slippers three times and boom you're there so. And there's no place like smile. You're like the ruby red slippers so. Exactly. Thanks for doing your work with the Carbon Underground and for those people who want to do something and are motivated you've created a program called the Doctometer. So briefly share with us what that program is. So people do ask the question, what can I do?

And the problem is so big. And how can I contribute to the regenerative revolution? And the good news is that the Carbon Underground, working with Savory, with regenerators around the world, we've identified tens of millions of acres that are queued up right now for regeneration. And we've done the baseline carbon measurements on those acres. And what we need now is to economically support to conduce the transition to regeneration. So for $5, you adopt a meter. You get a meter of soil. You get a meter of soil. And if we can aggregate enough people adopting their meter and funneling that support directly to the groups that are working to regenerate those

tens of millions of acres that are all queued up and ready to go around the world. That is a very direct way for people to participate in the regenerative revolution. So while we're waiting for governments to implement this and corporations to change, we actually can act right now. Adopt aa-meter. So you go to thecarbonunderground.org, thecarbonunderground.org to our adopt-a-meter page, and people can sign up right now for being a part of the regenerative revolution.

All right. Hope is not lost. So thank you so much for being on The Doctor's Pharmacy, Tom. This has been a great conversation, enlightening, and I hope inspiring for people to realize that there is a solution to climate change and we have to just take advantage of it. So if you've been listening to this podcast and you like what you heard, feel free to leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love to have you share it with your friends and family on social media and subscribe to this podcast wherever you find your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. So two quick things. Number one, thanks so much for listening to this week's podcast. It really means a lot to me. If you love the podcast, I'd really appreciate you sharing with your friends and family. Second, I want to tell you about a brand new newsletter I started called Mark's Picks. Every week, I'm going to send out a list of a few things that I've been using to take my own health to the next level. This could be books, podcasts, research that I found, supplement recommendations, recipes, or even gadgets. I use a few of those. And if you'd like to get access to this free weekly list, all you have to do is visit drhyman.com forward slash pics. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics. I'll only email you once a

week, I promise, and I'll never send you anything else besides my own recommendations. So just go to drhyman.com forward slash PICS, that's P-I-C-K-S, to sign up free today. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey,

seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.