The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Future is Rural: Reclaiming Food Sovereignty through Farming Clubs? with Jason Bradford

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

With grocery prices skyrocketing and supply chain disruptions becoming more frequent, the average person has more and more incentive to get involved in growing their own food – but how does one even get started? For most people, the time, money, knowledge, and land remain out of reach in order to learn even the basics of agriculture. What kind of options are available for individuals who want to reclaim their food sovereignty – and subsequently become more connected with the Earth and like-minded people?  In this episode, Nate is joined by biologist and farmer Jason Bradford, to discuss his 'Farming Club,' which offers hands-on learning for ecologically based agriculture, where members also get to take home food and build a relationship with the land. Jason explains why industrial agriculture, optimized for financial returns and machine efficiency while ignoring ecological costs, makes it almost impossible to become a successful small-scale farmer in today's economy. The Farming Club's model provides a way for people to maintain their jobs while building the knowledge, skills, and community connections needed for a lower-throughput future.  How could reinvigorating farming culture provide an avenue to real skills and purpose to the next generation, especially for young men? How could the farming club model be replicated across the country, sparking small rural movements everywhere? And how could thousands of ideas and initiatives like these act as safety nets for individuals and communities as we transition to a more simplified society? (Conversation recorded on December 4th, 2025)     About Jason Bradford: Jason co-manages a Community Supported Agriculture program with the Organic Growers Club at Oregon State University, where he practices land stewardship methods and cultivates community rooted in ecologically-based agricultural practices. Prior to his switch to agriculture, he was a research biologist studying evolution, ecology, and global change. Additionally, Jason has been affiliated with the Post Carbon Institute since 2004, first as a Fellow and then as Board President. He is currently a co-host of the Crazy Town podcast, as well as a writer for Resilience.org. Additionally, in 2019, he authored The Future is Rural: Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners  

Are we going to starve if we have human labor and organic methods? If people are skillful, no. Overproduction of horrific ecologically destructive farming is the real problem, not small farmers figuring out how to grow food ecologically. So the problem is that most of the stuff we're actually producing on these conventional farms. It's not even feeding people. It's like we had to create whole industries for almost the waste product of overproduction. In an agro-ecological system with people doing,

doing a really good job in internalizing a lot of cycling of nutrients and integrating livestock and having a diversity of crops that are adapted to your place, you're going to have a lot of food abundance. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more human

to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I re-welcome my friend Jason Bradford to the program. He was on here two years ago or so. Jason is a farmer, a community organizer, and today we discuss small-scale, ecological agriculture and community building and potential future farming schools. Jason currently co-manages a community-supported agricultural program

with the Oregon Growers Club at Oregon State University, where he practices land stewardship methods and cultivates community rooted in ecologically based agricultural practices. He's currently the board president of the Postcarbon Institute and a co-host of the Crazy Town podcast, as well as a writer for Resilience.org. Additionally, in 2019, he authored The Future is Rural, Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification. In this episode, Jason and I explore how alternative agricultural systems, especially those rooted in community and low-tech innovation, could play a key role in the coming great simplification. Jason also shares how he's piloting some of these ideas through the farming club and what that might look like for these practices to scale and replicate across the United States. along the way Jason and I also share some of our personal journeys in learning to farm and grow food.

In my opinion, projects and organizations such as Jason's give me little glimmers of hope for the more positive futures that could be possible in a lower throughput world. Before we begin, if you enjoy this podcast and would like to read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament, I invite you to join our Substack newsletter, where my team and I share written content related to The Great Simplification, You can find the link to subscribe in the show description. With that, please welcome back, my friend, Jason Bradford. J.B., welcome back to the show.

It's really good to see you, Nate. You and I have spent almost half our lives working on these issues and understanding them. Yeah. So you, my friend, are formerly trained as a biologist, but thankfully, you are also a farmer. Yeah. a land steward, and from all the stories you've been telling me off camera, you are a community builder as well. So we could talk about a lot of things today, given yours and my historical background in the topics we talk about. But I'd like to focus on you at least start us off

with giving a picture of your farm, including what you're doing, which you refer to as the farming club and what an average day working on on these projects look like. Well, it's a little hard because, you know, it's interesting about the situation is, you know, I'd be officially underemployed. I do have a part-time job as a tennis coach, but what it allows me to do is time to kind of sort through all that has to be done. And it's given me a really interesting perspective on stuff that's really not often thought of as, as, as, um, you know, you know, high status or rewarding in this world, which is sort of domestic life. And part of what I've gotten better at as I quit my formal job, big, you know, a salary job, is taking care of the home,

doing things like, oh, that needs to be fixed or a meal needs to be made. In fact, we should probably make extra so we have leftovers for the week, making sure that, I mean, it doesn't always happened, but, oh, the dishes are washed and the laundry is put away before Kristen gets home from work. Just imagine what it's like to have a nice household where you're well-fed, things are repaired, and now extend that to then. I live on some really nice farmland in the Willamette Valley. So it's a real blessing in a sense that I can also just, as I'm going out to the farm, I can take time to walk, bird, check out a cool mushroom. While I'm also looking at the crops, you know, seeing what's ripening, kind of checking in on projects,

see if something is really as broken as I think it is and what I need to do to fix it. Well, you're rich in all the ways that count is what you're really saying. Yeah. And also, you know, I've made a place here that's not just for me and my family, for a lot of other people. And so checking with them and how they're doing and learning about, you know, what's going well for them, what's not,

and readjusting sort of my expectations. So it's kind of a lot of relationship work, which, you know, as a dude that grew up in the late 20th century of America, we weren't really taught this that well. You know what I mean? and I've kind of had to grow as a person a lot and learn how important all these things are. I don't think I'm great at it yet.

In fact, I know I get tired. I can get cranky. I don't think I piss people off too much, but I don't necessarily follow through with everything on a time. And, you know, I probably, people are let down sometimes. So I like to joke that I'm kind of a mediocre farmer, but I'm trying to get better, you know. So that's it.

You know, I just approach the day with, well, what needs to happen today. And there's like lists. And sometimes it's practical. Sometimes it's about these relationships. Sometimes it's accounting, you know, getting your quick books up to date, paying taxes. And sometimes it's like, yeah, organizing people to go plant something. something, right, or harvest something. So we've known each other over 20 years.

So you know I will probably go off on tangents based on what you said. And what I'm curious about, you said, well, Lammat Valley has incredibly productive soil. Why is that? Oh, man. Okay. This is one of the things I like to do. I love to give tours of the farm.

And I'll, like, donate a tour for, like, the local nonprofit for their, like, auction or whatever, you know, and get people out and show them stuff. And I do birding tours or whatever. But, you know, one thing I talk about is like, okay, we're standing here and why is this good farmland? And you have to go to the Rocky Mountains, and you have to imagine the end of the ice age. And there was this giant ice sheet, and there was a notch in the mountains around Missoula, Montana, where icebergs would kind of build up. But that as there was a lake forming on the ice sheet during the melt, there would be a burst and glacial lake would like flood through what's now the Columbia River basin. And it would hit, it would scour that basin and bring an amazing amount of sediments.

And it would hit essentially a bend where there's the hills in Portland. And the Willamette Valley would be essentially a backflow channel where these floodwaters, and there were about 40 megaflods, would fill up with sediment from the Rockies. And so that happened over about a 2000-year period towards the end of the last ice age. So we had a series of lakes, and then they would disappear, and then they reflod, and there get sediment at the bottom of these lakes.

But eastern Oregon didn't get that bounty. Parts of it did, so parts of the Columbia River Plateau have some pretty nice farmland as well. Other places were so scoured. They call them scablands. It's like the soil just got removed, and there's these really weird undulations to bedrock. So we think about the United States being a geologic province of unbelievable bounty

because we've had more oil and natural gas from this country than any other country in the earth because of where the ancient seas were and et cetera. And you're saying we have a different bounty distributed in different places. the Willamette Valley being one of them. South of where I live in Iowa, also there used to be like six feet of topsoil here. Well, the upper Midwest is some of the, you know, most valuable soil in the world.

Still to this day. Well, it used to be. I mean, it's getting less and less, right? But relatively speaking, it's still amazingly incredible. And it could recover, you know, things recover pretty quickly if you treat them right. I've been astonished by that. So what is this farming club? Like, what is it?

The simple thing is a farming club is a bunch of people, mostly people I've known for a while, but some people I kind of just got involved with with the club. And you can think of a club as an association of people that are getting together on a regular basis to do something, right, for a purpose or a cause or an activity or a thing of interest. What we do is we come together and we farm. And it happens at our place here, our farm. And, I think of it as sort of evolution of what I've gone through. Like I, so if they step back, you know, knowing what you and I have known for 25 years or whatever now, what happens if you have a piece of land like I do?

I got, I just, I kind of lucked into it honestly. But, you know, say, I happen to have this really nice piece of farmland. I think given what's going to happen with the great simplification that we are going to have to do things quite, differently, right, on this land. So I don't want to manage, I don't want to manage this land like everyone else is doing. I want to think about it in terms of what can I do to restore that soil? What can I do to help provide opportunities for people to do the kind of things I would want more of us to do in the future? And so as a landowner, steward, manager, I thought to myself, of how do I provide these opportunities?

So one is I lease to a bunch of small farmers. I think small farms are really important. They're using organic methods, these kind of things as well. And then I farmed myself. I was one of the small farmers. So I wanted to have these skills and learn how to do it. I had a really severe shoulder injury, and I got a surgery to correct it.

So I'm a lot better now. I feel a lot better. But when I got that injury, I realized I wasn't going to be able to farm on my own. And I had crops in the ground. I had contracts, you know, to grow stuff. I don't want to let all those down, but I also knew it couldn't do it by myself. So I said, you know what? Let me see if my friends want to come over.

And the deal will be, I'll teach in the farm, and they'll get great food. And they'll help me get my crops done, right? Well, that sort of opened my eyes to like, you know what, I've been talking about the need for people to become farmers. And it's a really hard thing to do. The problem is if you want to become a small farmer, you're likely going to ruin your body, ruin your finances, ruin a relationship, you know. And it's, of course, there's success stories. And I think of it like, you know, I'm a tennis fan, right? There's like a hundred tennis sports. players that make enough money to be professional tennis players in the world. There are small farmers that make it because they are akin to professional athletes in terms of how good they are. You can think of this for like musicians or artists, right? There's a lot of talented people, but only a very few actually can make a living at this business of being a small, say,

ecologically-minded farmer. Because they're competing with a model that's based on the wrong prices, the wrong long-term prices. Yeah, and this model, so this model basically drives a substitution of labor for capital equipment and requires then a scale and to deploy that large equipment that is labor efficient because labor is the highest cost of production on farms. If you have a small farm model, you make it a low cost of production when you buy a bunch of equipment that you can finance. And so as long as those fuels are around, right, and all of the markets are set up to take those commodities

and turn them through the industrial machine into, you know, manufactured foods for the masses, the small farming is not economically a highly viable thing. When denominated in dollars and profits, it's not. But maybe in other areas it is viable. Yes. And so that's what I'm doing. trying to figure out, right? So as a mediocre small farmer who's sort of like struggling and

hurting myself, I'm like, gosh, this is terrible. Why am I doing this? Okay, what if I were to say, even though I'm a mediocre small farmer, I'm a professional farmer. And relative to these people who don't know anything, I'm like, I'm like Carlos Alcaraz or Roger Federer, let's say, to them. And I can, I can train them in these farming techniques. So just, um, rattle off some of the things that you grow to eat on your land there,

like some of the crops? The farm itself has people growing all kinds of stuff. Like there's an organic nursery, there's someone raising lamb, there's someone who does, grains, a lot of herbs for flowers, produce. We do mostly produce,

and typically is what you find for small farmers. going to do vegetables and things like this. Because these are the heavy water crops, these are the things that have the highest costs, you know, relative to other foods in the market, you offset your food costs relative to your work best when you do those things. It's very hard for you to spend time growing wheat and look back at that and say that many hours I got a 50 pound bag of wheat when it's like super cheap, right? I can pay a few bucks for that. But someday that might change. That's something that might change. So I do dabble in these things.

But mostly what we do is we think we plan for like a year and we say, okay, how do we grow food? How do we keep ourselves out of the, let's say the produce aisles all year round? That's like our explicit goal. And so, for example, we had a 165 different planting units. So like things I could say this day and this location, we planted these, 165 events like that. and that might be six kinds of onions planted two times a year. It might be four different kinds of cabbages.

There was a summer cabbage. There was a fall planted cabbage that can overwinter. So I'm not saying that many species, but I'm saying you have to figure out the timing of when you plant something, when that variety is going to peak and be harvested, when maybe something you plant at the same time. But does a later maturing is coming in? Or you do what's called successional planting, like with spinach, because it just, sort of finishes, you know, and bolts. So successions of things are like cilantro.

There's three different lettuce plantings. There's varieties of lettuce that are good for early, midsummer, over winter, blah, blah, blah. If you lived where I lived, could you adapt your roadmap, what you're doing? I mean, it's today's December 4th this morning. It was negative 25 Celsius outside. The only thing you can grow is frostbite on your mustache. Yeah. You can't do winter planting here.

Right. So would you have to like totally, I mean, could you do your model here and tweak it? You tweak it. You'd have to, you'd like have a, you compress certain things, and then you'd have to focus a lot more on storage. The varieties that you would, that do better to store. Yeah. Like potato varieties and such. Yeah, and we do that too.

So, like, you know, cabbage we harvest, you know, what happens here is things will rot, right? So it'll get wet. We don't freeze as much. It will freeze, but they'll just get so wet you can't harvest them a lot. So you get a bunch of carrots finishing or parsnips or rootabagin. You get them out before the field is so saturated. You don't even want to walk out there. And you have a cellar.

And you store them in the cellar. And you have the right varieties will last for months in a cellar. So it's pretty amazing. What's your painting is really in many ways a microcosm of the bifurcation that's in our society enabled by these armies of cheap fossil workers and available credit and a sixth continent global supply chain because time is what, especially since we're addicted to dopamine and stimulation, people want immediate feedback, immediate things,

and things are so cheap that, oh, I might be interested in growing a garden, but it's just so cheap to go to the pigly-wiggly or safe way. and fill up my basket, but those times are changing now. So this tradeoff between money and all the other things that we value in our life is becoming felt, I think, by more people. So let me ask you this. Current agricultural production, at least in the United States,

is dominated by large commercial firms. So in your opinion, what is the benefit of small scale farms in terms of food production, ecological health, maybe community coherence, maybe personal satisfaction. Yeah. So there's, that bookshelf is full of some of the books written about this. So that's sort of the problem. Like that's such a big question, right?

And I guess, okay, how do I do this succinctly? That giant equipment that runs over those, you know, let's start with that, like the soil, or whatever, that giant equipment, those machines, sort of demand a certain way of doing things. And they change the mindset, I think, of the people. People become part of that machine. Like, what tools you have really becomes part of your psyche. Cyborg farmers.

Right. And so they see the soil. They see the farms as production systems. And what production system people want to do is they want to simplify and they want to homogenize. And so you get attitudes like, you know, level the field. So there goes the topography that the river systems over time created, depositing different kinds of soil at different depths. Take down any borders that used to be there.

So farms used to be smaller and there were these natural borders with fence lines for livestock and hedgerows. Remove those so that we now take a field that was 40 acres and now we connect it to another field next door that's 100. Now we have 140, more efficient. You start simplifying the landscape. And then because you care so much about, you know, this time component, you're going to find whatever equipment you can use to speed things up. And that may be practices like, you know, I don't need to cover crop. That's a really time and expensive thing to do relative to buying those inputs I can spray on.

Right. And so you just get this ecological degradation because the machines are dictating a way of being that is not in sync with any kind of ecological reality. Well, the ecological degradation has zero weighting in the optimization of the prices and the costs because we treat it in our economic system as zero, basically. And I literally believe that most farmers lose, I mean, there's exceptions, of course, right? There's going to be some 20% of farmers who are big time conventional farmers and are really ecological minded and are trying to do the right thing and are caught up in this pickle. But a lot of people, I think, because they get, you know, people are going to justify what they're doing. What they want to be, they want to have the self-concept of I'm a good person and I'm doing,

I'm doing a righteous thing in my life. And so there's a lot of denial that happens of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, problem until it's kind of too late, you know, is a bummer. You don't need many people for this, this kind of farming, right? So community, right? What happens to the rural communities? What happens? I can hear stories of like, oh, this is an old schoolhouse, right? Some of them still exist, and they were all over the place. In my neighborhood here, there was a hundred, a woman who died 103, and I go talk to her, Frances. And she, died earlier this year. And she would tell you the greatest stories about what this was like

growing up in this neighborhood. All the family that was around, it was like an extended family. She had her aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and mom and dad and her brothers and sisters and they would all just run to each other's homes. Like there was a trail through the field where they would all connect to each other. And she had a tree here that she talked about. We built a fort in that. And when I moved here, there was remnants of that fort. And there were little grain storage silos here. So everybody would store their own stuff on the farm in equipment. Was it totally different than now? There were windmills. There were wooden structures and they would wind or wind pumps, you know, they would mechanically pump water.

And that's in her lifetime. And the difference between that and what kind of life it would have been, like in community and what it is now is just absolutely astonishing. And so it's just, it's kind of a depressing thing to think about is that these rural areas are not as interesting and fun and vivacious as they used to be. And sort of a part of what I'm trying to do, right, at this little microscale is bring people out, bring a lot of small farmers out here. I open my farm out to the neighbors. They can take walks on it.

So the proximate goal is to grow more food for the people, but the ultimate goal might be community for the people spending time with the last. land and each other on a human scale time sort of situation. And you need that time to get a relationship with each other and with the land and the place. And so, you know, there's like movements of like land back in these sort of things, which are really interesting. And, you know, there'd be the very far political left wanting to get people onto farms and all that. And I think that's great. But also, I think you've got to do it in a way that's responsible because people,

don't have the relationship yet to the place. I forgot the first time you were on this show. I think it was in the first year, so it might have been three years ago. And I think I asked you then, but maybe you could repeat your answer or whatever new answer you have. How does what you're doing or what small farms are capable of doing pan out with respect to food production itself relative to the conventional big ag, big tech methods? That's a good question. People often worry about that stuff. I don't worry about it from a theoretical perspective. Like, people are really capable if they have some guidance. And I think this is the key what's happening with the farming club is you don't just take people who don't know what they're doing and throw them out there and say farm. Okay. That's disaster. It's like I think of it as, you know, I'm coaching people on how to be farmers themselves. and they have to then create expertise, have roles and responsibilities

where they're paying attention to details that matter. And there's a lot of details that matter. So you're talking about a cultural problem. If you were to imagine people nowadays going out to farms and trying to make it, no, they'd be flail. They just have no clue. If you have the time to develop a food culture

where people know how to interact with the land, with their simpler tools, with the animals, with the plants and each other in ways that are effective and efficient, relatively speaking, then people are great at growing food. We got here, we got to this point because we figured out this stuff. We figured out how to provide for ourselves. And I don't think, I'm not worried about that theoretically. I worry about it for other reasons. So you can grow as much or more food on your land as an equal plot of,

conventional fossil fuel land. There's a real interesting difference in kind. So what we would do would be so different than what they would do. It's hard to make a comparison. It's almost like the question doesn't quite, I mean, I think I know what it's getting at, is the question is, are we going to starve if we have human labor and organic methods? If people are skillful, no. Right.

Well, and also the question also has many, different sub-variables in it because do you want to make the most money per acre is a question. Do you want to grow the most calories per acre is another question. Do you want to grow the biggest variety to make you healthy and happy with your diet is another question. Right. Do you want to become healthier and grow community in the process? Right.

But just in terms of food, presumably you're substituting fossil workers with the time of more human workers, and you use less off-the-farm inputs than a conventional egg? A lot less? Yeah, I'd say a lot less. Now, you can do, so, you know, there's some other writers that have done a good job of looking at this. Chris Smaid has a new book on that, I think. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, there's people that have delved into the details of this. Chris is really good. And the basic answer is for certain crops, in certain situations, you're going to have a drop in yield.

And mostly this has to do with things that have been bred really well to accept synthetic nitrogen. And then yields go crazy. That's a limited set of crops where that is super important. Wheat's one of them, honestly. But otherwise, right, in an agroecological system, with people doing a really good job and internalizing a lot of cycling of nutrients and integrating livestock

and having a diversity of crops that are adapted to your place, you're going to have a lot of food abundance. And it's real food. So the problem is that most of the stuff we're actually producing on these conventional farms. This is sort of the part of the question that's sort of hard to get addressed.

It's not even feeding people. It's like we had to create whole industries for almost the waste product of overproduction. It's kind of madness, like the ethanol industry and these sort of things or the excess of chickens

and hogs and torture conditions. Just because we're overproducing. So I worry, I think overproduction of horrific, ecologically destructive farming is the real problem, not small farmers figuring out how to grow food ecologically.

We will not starve if we have enough skilled small farmers. and their social, I mean, and social complexity, breaking down isn't too awful, and climate disruptions aren't too bad. So a lot of ifs, but, you know,

I'm trying to work on models that may help us navigate. So you have described your land there in the Wyoming value as a hub for projects such as dry farming, habitat restoration, permaculture design, and various other small farm businesses. How is this all possible on just one track of land?

Well, it's big enough. So, I mean, farms vary a lot in size, right? And so there's some people that have just 10 acres or to say you'll have 1,000 acres. I haven't had like over 100 acres. And to give people an idea of what that is, and it's about, you know, 40 to 50 hectares or whatever for non-English-speaking metric people. which are great. But that's the size of like a hundred soccer fields or football fields. Oh, that's a lot. Yeah. So the farm is about, if I were to like, I'm sitting at one end of it right now in my house.

And if I were to walk east, it would be a mile to the other end, you know, one and a half kilometers. So it's long and narrow. But I have a mile of riverfront that snakes through the southern and eastern section of it. So a lot of the restoration work is in this riparian zone. I have a 4,500 foot linear border with a neighbor that is, I'm trying to get a nice hedgerow. I'm trying to remove invasive species,

plant more natives in there. make it healthier, make it more diverse. There's remnants of it in patchy, and it's an incredibly important habitat. I'm planting shelter belts. I'm planting what's called the silvo pasture. What's a shelter belt? This is actually really important functional aspect of a farm. When there's high winds, let's say, you can have a lot of damage,

and you can have a lot of stress, say, or animals or crops. And so one of the problems that happens with farms that get over-industrialized is they remove a lot of vegetation that would have blocked the fetch. It would have shortened the fetch of the wind. What's the fetch? It's like the distance the wind has to travel and maintain its sort of corridor. And so when you break up that, you slow the wind down, you create eddies. And so I see these animals out here. And we get these hot summer winds, let's say, that come from the east and we're going to have a heat wave.

And there's no shade, right? The trees are, there's trees are being taken down everywhere. So, again, with the big equipment, homogenize open up. They hate to turn these things around. They want to drive in long straight lines. With little equipment and smaller field blocks, you now say, oh, I would like the ecological function of a shelter. I'm going to bisect the farm with trees, that kind of thing. So, and that's what these hedgerows are doing as well, as well as the riparian forest.

They're making the landscape more ecologically, you know, diverse. I just say, I'm very excited about this. Well, I'm in third place for the bird species of yards in Oregon. Third place in, like, the number you've seen. Yes. I think 121 species this year of birds. And do you think that's correlated with your efforts to create hedgerows and habitat and such? Well, this is a great question.

I'm trying to get involved some scientists here to study that. And I think I know how. We have this system in eBird, which has what are called hotspots. And so there's these local parks, right, that are near the farm, really close by. You can do a species, you know, intense, an effort, a species curve by effort of observation and see how my curve at the farm corresponds to curves of local like, you know, parks, right, natural areas. And then do it on a farm that hasn't been sort of helped along. I think there's a lot more food here. I honestly do.

Well, there's no pesticides, so there's more bugs, for one, right? There's more bugs because of no pesticide use. we put these trees in, you know, we have these more organic soils, and these soils are full of life. They're full of bugs, right? There's a biodiversity that happens if you were to shovel up the earth and look at it. And the difference between farms that are managed, like I'm managing this, or we're managing it as sort of a team here, right? And the next door field that isn't managed like this is absolutely tremendous. It's sort of this invisible life. And you see all these animals, you even watch birds and are just like looking around.

You can't tell what they're looking at, but there's food everywhere. Especially after a rain, I have 15 ducks now, which is about 10 too many, and they'll go out like constantly looking at the ground. They don't even want me to feed them on those days. They're like out on a treasure hunt. Yes. So these methods you're using Jason sound incredibly productive and beneficial for the land. and the bird habitat, as you just said. So why aren't commercial farming operations adopting some of these practices?

Well, I say a few of them are trying. Like you're going to get, you know, there's organizations like the Xerces Society, this is a private, and there's NRCS, which is the USDA, you know, programs that try to encourage farmers to do this. And there's habitat set asides, you know, like crept, all these like acronyms, crep and equip and all these practices you can do. And so the government and foundations and private entities will help pay farmers to do some of this work. And when I was doing more large-scale commercial farming, like I was vigorously going after grants and installing stuff as best we could.

But, you know, honestly, it's hard to find an ROI for these things. Like if you have somebody who's the CFO and is asking you, why are you doing this, you can mumble through an answer about, the ecological relationships, and there's this group out of UC Berkeley that's like doing agro-ecological studies and like the tomato pests were less intense, closest to their ecological shrub planting and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, but can you like, can you satisfy them? Maybe not. That's the problem.

It's very hard to get to speak their language. it may be that it's impossibly because their time horizon isn't appropriate for the relationships you're trying to build over five, 10, 20 years. Discount rate, blah, blah, blah, you know all this stuff. So if we were somehow able to radically change our food systems in the ways that you're proposing or describing, what would life look like for an individual involved in a farming club or an effort the way that you're doing it. How many of those people would there actually be

relative to the current proportion of people who are farming? Great question. How many would there be in proportion? That's a really interesting one. 3% of our population is, well, 3% of our population in the U.S. is energy and food employed.

Yeah, I think 1%'s food, yeah. 1%'s food. Relative to something like 75% to 80% of the population of the country of India is in, involved in food. Right. So I sort of think we would, we would evolve solely a peasant culture. And that's a bifurcation that would be a good one to have, this peasant culture. And there's a tension between like the, the rural peasants and sort of any kind of urban culture. And that's an

important tension that we have to sort of manage. I don't know if you watch the episode with Jean-Marc Jean-Covici, but he said there's three ways to deal with energy scarcity. One is efficiency, which is technology. The other is sobriete, which is kind of, you know, resilience and actively choosing to live differently. And the third is poverty. So what you're kind of talking about is the food equivalent of that is we might all become peasants as the futile techno future arises, but not in a way we would like. but you're trying to describe peasants in a positive way. Like we're actively choosing to live more that way.

Yes, I think so. I see that. And so I joke around with my farming club that, you know, I say, you know, dearest neo-peasants of Corvallis, you know. And we come up with rituals, you know. It's a little tongue and sheep, but I think it's also something that's important. I think that here's what's interesting, okay? And this is something Chris Smeage talks about in his book, actually,

which I totally agree with because I had this, it gets to technology too, like cargo cults and these sort of things. Anyway, they're all wrapped together. You know, if you are a liberal urban person today, you might be like, oh, indigenous, indignity, indigenous wisdom. Okay. And you're going to, you're going to nod at that. You're going to read Robin Wall Kimmerer and you're going to like, you know, think about how do I, how to become indigenous? Well, guess who the indigenous people were? And maybe if you're a white person like me and your ancestral past.

And guess who a lot of the indigenous people are in places like the Andes of South America? These are peasants. You would look at them and you would say they're peasants. The Irish peasants, the Polish peasants, right? The German peasants, the Italian peasants. These were the indigenous people who had cultures that were food sovereign. and knew their local ecology. Now, granted, you can also read stories about deforestation,

Gilgamesh, whatever. You can read stories of systems of agriculture collapsing. Now, a lot of that was because you had power shifting too much to centralized urban states. And they then demanded there's an extraction that happens from the countryside. You get a Rome of a million people, the violence against the land and the people that worked the land was horrendous so that Rome could blossom. And so I see a lot of these, I go to these big places, I see these monuments, and I just realize, like, they messed up North Africa for that. They had, they destroyed the peasant culture in central Italy and created these essentially like gentrified ascent. states of now indentured servant workers.

It's power and maybe dark triad all the way back. Yes. And it's the two models that cleverness and short-term power out-compete wisdom and longer-term resilience over and over in our history. And now it's coming to a head. Totally. So what I suggest, if you don't want to be one of these powerful people and good luck, you know, being one of the oligarch, you know, being one of the oligarch,

or whatever, get these skills and embrace this other way of living that actually, you know, most people kind of liked it, like people resisted de-peasanthood. It was an awful thing for these cultures to lose it. So what you're kind of suggesting is that in these tumultuous times, especially with AI and the other things coming our way, that personal agency, one direct route to it may be starting with food sovereignty. Yeah, I think that's probably one of the best ones, honestly. So getting some connection to a place where you can start to have food sovereignty.

So how might a person with currently no access to land but who wants to be involved with projects like you're describing go about finding an opportunity, finding land, and people to connect with to learn these skills and get some to much of their food in this way? Yeah, it's tough. I think, you know, for a lot of people, it may require relocating. It may require a voluntary simplicity approach where you don't need much. And so you can kind of manage to get a buy without money. They may require living in conditions and locations that you're not as comfortable in. So it's like, I guess, understanding that you may have, you know, there's definitely a change that has to happen. But how to do it. I think there's so many paths.

I mean, one path might be if you're a young person to get some degree related to food and agriculture and get a job somewhere with a farmer who's experience. Do people that go to college for agro food sort of degrees, is the thing that they're taught in and trained in commensurate with the future you're describing? or is it all based on big tractors and large-scale things? It's all over the place. I would say, for example, like, UC Santa Cruz is kind of famous for being this agroecology center. It's not even one of the land-grant schools.

I went to UC Davis, which was the land-grant school, and it was much more of, like, the commercial side, right? And there was this little tiny organic program because there were hippies that went through there in the 70s. And so you get these little offshoots, and there's like, you know, you have. There's giant fields. Davis has, you know, thousands of fields that they're doing trials on. And then there's like the organic garden area. And there's, they've got these alternative structures that they built these domes. And so Santa Cruz kind of just did that. They didn't, they didn't bother with the big ag. So your land grant ag schools or maybe even better, your non-land grant ag schools who just for some reason there was the right combination of people that showed up. And it's some liberal. Art School. What was the guy in Vermont that was we met? Kenneth Mulder. Geez, genius, exactly.

That school's not there anymore for God's sakes, but he was farming with oxen, right? Yeah, with oxen. At this little school. Yeah, and he wrote half of my PhD thesis to boot. So you have to find

these little like, you know, places like Oregon State University, plenty to do here in big commercial egg also tons of opportunities. There's organic programs, there's permaculture, horticulture itself, just learning horticulture, which is a standard ag degree. I see our future is more of like a livestock and horticulture, like, you know, small herds of livestock and horticulture rather than the big field agriculture with the equipment. What is horticulture? Well, horticulture is more of this sort of handwork, you know, things with the simpler tools. It's learning how

to propagate plants and plant them and tend them in sort of smaller scales. And so it's a set of techniques that gardeners will often use, but also small farmers, because they're not going to be using these big mechanized equipment as much. So for small scale farmers and landowners, maybe even with a house and three quarters of an acre, especially in the United States, what do you recommend they do with their operation if they're interested in replicating what you're doing with the farming club. Okay. So this is thing. So I have different hats, right? I have the, I have the hat of the guy that actually has a farm. And, and then that led me to think about what should I do, right? And so part of what, if I just had a homestead, a smaller, I would just trick it out with, you know,

permaculture kind of designs thing for, and gardens everywhere and trees. And it would be just this beautiful little place you'd show up. It'd be like paradise. So can you make your goal? If that's, I'm here. I'm going to be staying here. I'm going to make my place an absolute paradise that I can eat out of and have it be just like a retreat center for anyone who shows up as well. Dumb question there. What about people that do have three quarters of an acre, but most of it is a green grass lawn? Would you suggest that? Oh, rip it up? Yeah, make it a paradise. You know, like in other words, completely redesign things around. around this idea that you're going to need to be more food sovereign in your locale, right?

And is there any comparative advantage guns and butter sort of economic example from people living in the suburbs that they each have a little bit of land and they do kind of what you're doing? They learn and share crops. You do the root of Vegas. I'll do the potatoes. And then we share the outcome is have you, what are your thoughts on that? No idea. That's an interesting question. I mean, I think it's going to happen more informally than formally. Maybe you're going to get to know people. See, a lot of this stuff, I think it's hard to plan this stuff, honestly. I think a lot of this is just going to evolve. Every year might be a little different as new people come in and new opportunities and your life changes. But yeah, it's more like, you know, what happens around here is I had a gardener neighbor and it'd be like, I've got a bunch of extra this and he'd be like, eager. can you please get these cucumbers off my plate? And I'd take a bottle of wine over him.

And he's like, I don't need wine. Like, I know, but I'm trading you. And I'd grab the cucumbers. So I think a lot of it's going to be like that more, you know. So let me ask you this. The current model is not sustainable for many reasons that you wrote a white paper on it. What was the name of that again? Oh, yeah, the future is rural?

The future is rural. But we're running into this K-shaped economy that the top 20% are doing great. Stock markets at all-time highs, but the bottom 40% are not, and the middle is starting to be pulled back down. Yes. So when there's economic tough times, there's going to be two dynamics going on. One is people are going to try to squeeze more profit out of land that they have, and that's going to mean kind of double. doubling down on the giant tractors and the mechanized things so that they can make a profit. But simultaneously, there's going to be a lot of people that either don't have jobs or don't have

food security. But they do have time and they want to learn and contribute so they would want to do some of these things. Totally. So both that's going to be pulling our society in two different directions. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, this is sort of the other side. There's one idea as this suburban, like retro-suburbia, like a David Holmgram sort of thing. And the other is what I'm trying to do here is say, I've got a pretty good-sized piece of land.

And so there's so many farmers that are lonely, right? Lonely men that have giant acres. And if you have any connection to a community, right, it's like, do your kids go to the same school as people that live in that town? You know, are they on the same basketball team? Find connections, both of you, both sides, find connections. Then they get people connected from the town or whatever to that piece of land. It's your land, your big family acres, you have 500 acres, and work together with the club to figure out how to grow food.

It's such a no-brainer, I think, in communities around the world because this gets back to the expanding the definition from narrow boundary to wide boundary capital. Because if we use narrow boundary capital, that landowner, that lonely farmer is going to measure his or her output in dollars. This is how much money I made for my land. If you use wide boundary capital, yeah, I need some dollars to pay the bills and put my kids in school and whatever. But I also want community relationships. I want safety because everyone knows each other. I want diversity of food crops instead of just one.

Yes. I want hedgerows. I want lots of birds here. I want to think of my asset and widen the definition of how I get a return on it. And think how well you'll eat as a farmer, for God's sakes. Most farmers don't eat anything they grow in America. It's really upsetting. Is that true?

Yeah. I mean, what are you going? Corn, soy, alfalfa, what's for dinner tonight? Corn and soybeans, honey? Like, they don't eat them. Most of these go to feed or ethanol, too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, just, it's incredible.

This is, again, you know, so you have, like, you know, you got the farmer that's running all this equipment and spread thin, and they're just in big trucks and dragging a combines around, whatever. You often maybe have a wife. She's a teacher or a nurse or a secretary in town. And the household is, like, vacant. And now, who's making dinner? Where are you getting that food? You live in these rural areas. It's pretty rough.

Now imagine you're growing some of the best food you've ever eaten in your life because, and it's on your farm. And you're figuring out how to help these people. You're a mentor of some kind. So this is what I'm doing and I'm pretty involved because I'm not super distracted with other things, right? This is one of the things I really want to do. So you can imagine levels of it. So you are, after all the things you and I have talked about and done, you are trying to meet the future halfway. by educating and looking two or three steps ahead of what you think is going to be necessary, not only in society,

but in the Willamette Valley with the people around you. Yes. And this is a way to take back some agency from the superorganism ahead of the really dire straits and build social capital and knowledge and skills. Yes. And what better skill? I mean, there's a lot of skills that are needed,

but one, central one is we have to eat every day. So yeah. It's pretty fun, too. I should say that people are pretty happy when they're out here. How could this scale? How could farming clubs or the, something that rhymes with that scale in our country, the United States at this time? Well, I don't think the idea is kind of novel, I think. I mean, there's gardening clubs and there's community gardens, but nothing at the kind of the scale and goals I'm talking about. And I ran across this guy who is a professor and he decided he was going to try to figure this out. Like his question was how hard is it to grow my own food? It turns out he's gotten pretty good at it. And he spends,

he spends 96 hours a year growing his own food. Everything doesn't go out. What? And he's, he's figured it out. He's published his paper. I spend 96 hours just weeding my potatoes and I still had a half of a good crop. Yeah. So anyway, the idea being, and so then I was thinking about this is like, okay, how much time do we expect club members to come farm? And it's about 90 hours a year, we say. And where are they going to get?

Really? Yeah. And what are they going to get out of it? They're going to get out almost all their produce needs and a few other things. And they're not great farmers yet. They're just okay, right? So there's a learning curve. They're going to get all the produce they need for 12 months?

Pretty much. I mean, obviously, sometimes, like we ran low on carrots, I bought carrots, or there wasn't, there was a gap in lettuce and I got lettuce. I'm not getting an avocado. But just about all of my produce besides the bananas, the avocado, the citrus, and every once in a while there's a gap. Yeah, you know, there's plenty of food. So I was doing some math. I was looking at USDA stats, and I was looking at this, and it's like, right now it's something like the average household is spending $8,000 a year on food, and now I'm maybe, maybe it's up to $10,000 a year, right? This is kind of old data. And the average, this is median. I'm saying median average, by the way. And the median after tax wages about $20 an hour. And so you look at that and you go, oh, that's 400 hours of labor time for a household that you're going to convert into going to a grocery store to get food.

So they would need to ask off their boss 15% of their time so they could put in 90 hours a year to get, right? I mean. Or, or you think about, yeah, if people are underemployed or part-time, like you as a member of a household, if you have one member of a household who is underemployed, they can, they could grow food for everybody else, honestly. But what, so what's the bottleneck here? It's the land availability.

I think it's just the idea in your head that, because think about your reluctance of this. Everyone thinks the machines have done everything so. efficiently that there's no way we could do this ourselves. When if you go to like peasant cultures and you study how much like time studies, they're pretty busy. Sure, yeah, they're busy, but they know exactly what they're doing. They're efficient. And then I can't tell you how many times you see them part partying or laying back and relaxing and enjoying life as well, right? Music, dancing. It gets dark. You can't do much anymore. And what do you do? Right? You do other things. So without all the lights, without the streaming service, there's their seasonality, there's

downtime. And then there's crazy periods of time where you're all hands on deck and you wear yourself out. Sure. Okay. It's like football season when you were in high school. Whatever. You get over it. And so, you know, people have this idea that are in modernity and fully industrial world

that there's no way we have the time to do that. Like, what are you talking about? No. And these machines are efficient. No, they're not. They've taken the labor out of it, but they've added all this other scrap to it, the processing, the transportation, the packaging. We only spend $0.8.0.0.00 of a dollar on the raw food. What?

92 cents is all the other junk. Like what? Packaging, the energy and processing, the finance and management of all that, the grocery store and the retail outlet, the trucking, the packaging, everything. 92 cents goes to everything but that raw ingredient. So imagine this. You suddenly are eating raw, pretty much close to raw ingredients from something you grew. I only got it, I got to make, I got this 92% that I'm just going to get rid of that I'm

competing against now. Well, not only that, but the 8% that's actually food now that you have is much healthier for you. Exactly. Because it doesn't have. Yeah. Yeah. And so then what does that do to your energy level and your health and well-being?

Your ability to sleep. You have social relationships. You've gotten outside. You've gotten exercise. You've had a good meal. So with people watching this show or just generally in our country that are sensing what's ahead, some sort of not as stable as the past. Could we have some sort of a pilot where a philanthropist,

it wouldn't have to be a zillionaire, just someone in Topeka, Kansas or Famigee, Minnesota, that has gained some savings in the bank and is a respected local person. Get attractive land, say 100 acres, and use it as an anchor in their community. They somehow gift it to the community with different protocols so that young people and other people

can do some of these methods that you're talking about, and we have those all over the nation. Yeah, it'd be cheaper than the AI build out we're doing. Let me tell you that. Well, it would be hugely cheaper, but... And it wouldn't cause a bubble, a financial collapse from a bubble,

and it wouldn't cause job loss or extinction. So you can either put your money into financial bubble, massive job loss and social unrest, or human extinction. Maybe you're not the right guy, but sometimes there is no right guy and you just have to do it. Could you write a manual for how to get something like that started? I literally just submitted a grant to Western Sare for $35,000 so that I could write a manual. And here's one of the ways I'm thinking about it.

And I'm thinking about it like this. At the highest end, okay, I work for a tennis club that is a member-owned nonprofit, a 501 C-C-C-C. all the assets of the club are owned by the dues-paying members. And if you think back, you know, a long time ago, early 20th century, prior to essentially the reforms that happened after the Great Depression, when government really started providing social services, what you had was you've had these clubs that provide a lot of social services, insurance, health care, and, you know, even few. General services. They were the places you would go to have music and stuff and have friends and play games and dances. Social clubs.

Social clubs. In the 1920s. Exactly. Now, imagine, this was before we had Social Security and Medicare and all these sort of things, which kind of removed the need for them. The state was doing it now. Now, so imagine you have a 501C7 owned farm, and members paid dues, like they paid dues to a country club right now to play golf. It'd be the same scale as a golf course club. And instead of

golfing, you have professional staff who are paid wealth as professionals to help people become farmers and grow their food. I get paid as a tennis coach, okay? I get paid as a tennis coach. And people are willing to pay me to teach their kids how to play tennis. I'm just imagining, And retired people are willing to pay me to help them with their serve. Okay. I've done a lot of good for people, community service. Yeah. But I think to myself, if I could take my coaching skills and transition them to having, like, a serious organization that is managing all this because, you know, it would be incredible.

And so, yes, you could franchise this. Like instead of, you know, having like the moose club with their funny hats, but instead of being moose club, they're farming, whatever, right? The old Elks Club or whatever. You could get them all over the nation as a franchise. The challenge, of course, is our cultural narrative of technology and colonizing other planets and it's energy and systems blind. So most people are not yet getting the signal, the memo,

that things are going to change except maybe AI. I think people are worried about AI taking their jobs and therefore there's going to be more food insecurity. Yeah. So we have to build these models.

Yeah. And the networks and the mycelium and the islands of coherence before the whole society gets the memo. And even today, the underemployed, low-wage people

would be far better off working to grow their own food, financially speaking, not to mention all the other benefits, than they are now going to the store. I believe this. And what's the bottleneck there? How can those people move in that direction? Well, I think about if I drive around here and I just sort of, I'm driving down the country and I look left, oh, that's Brooks's place and oh, you know, those are the, that's the warden farm. And I'd imagine these guys going, come on out. I'm just thinking, no. We need, we need to apply AI to be a matchmaker with those people that have land and

social goodwill to, and then those people that are needing and wanting to learn and to have food and community. Yeah. I mean, seriously, I wouldn't know how to go about that, but it seems like it could be a thing. I think, I think, I mean, that's what I'm, that's what I told the people that wrote the grant to. Yeah, awesome. Well, good luck with that.

So, J.B., before this recording off camera, you mentioned wanting to explore what simplification really means. Yeah. Not just theoretically, but as embodied knowledge. And how is working your land and living in community with the people you mentioned and interacting with the actual ecosystem around you shaped or changed your worldview in ways that that academic theory never could have. I think of it as like you kind of become what you do, right?

And there's a difference, you know, this is why also when I was a biologist, I was, you know, I'm spending my time. Most of the time you're spent, I'm spending in like a big city at a university, a research institution, and you're reading papers and you're, you know, and I'm like, every year I said, I have to get out of here and actually go into the field and look at the stuff that I'm supposedly becoming an expert at. And so it's almost, this is why I think AI is kind of absurd in some ways, is because it has no body.

It has nothing. It has no senses. We're an animal that has senses that moves through the world and feels the pressure of air and the ground on our feet and what it smells like after it rains. and what the different soundscapes are depending upon what season it is and which bird species are coming through or what time of day it is. And so, you know, what's changed with me is I was in my head so much analyzing, spreadsheets, writing, communicating, sitting in meeting rooms, for God's sakes.

I quit all that. And I've been on this property. and it's very hard to explain to somebody who hasn't just gotten outside and been outside a lot what the difference is and the feeling of it. And so I think that when we imagine the great simplification, a world that's different, if we're just trapped in our head and our rumination,

we can't imagine how we would even get through something like that until we go out and we actually practice some of the things that we believe from reasonably believe will be helpful. And so I just can't emphasize enough. There's probably tons of your listeners who are doing things. But I think the great simplification is going to lead to a forced reconnection of people with local ecologies. And what scares me is like People when they come out here and they've never been out on a farm and they don't, how dumbfounded they are. And it's a sense of awe often and it's wonder and I enjoy it. But I can't tell you how many times like I have a give a good tour and the people like, I've never experienced.

This is incredible. I had no idea. And I'm just like, wow. Because they're used to go into the pigly wiggly and just filling up their basket and doing a credit card and then going home and eating. And they missed all the steps. No idea what farms are like. No idea. And this is the other thing because farms can be awful, for God's sakes. They can be absolutely awful, industrial wastelands. So what also I want people to see is that farms don't have to be that way. Farms can be places, it's a weird kind of beauty in a sense that, you know, we're sort of engineering it, right? But it's still there. Like, I'm still out there walking through my cabbage, you know, and checking for, for mom. or whatever, caterpillars. And there's still golden crown sparrow,

and there's juncos, and there's song sparrow, there's tohies, and there's white crown sparrow, and there's the kestrel's flying around. And, you know, there's still an incredible amount of life. And so we have to find a way of sort of figuring out because we're just one kind of absurd, insane species. It got too big for its britches. and we need humility and we need we need we need awe of beauty and so we need to like embody that in our lives more than I think it's so important it's hard to like intellectualize this anymore I agree I mean I'm not as good a farmer as you but I have farmed yeah to grow at one point well more than potatoes chicken eggs yeah chicken eggs uh kale

Brussels sprouts, hazelnuts, tomatoes, tomatios. Yeah, your hazel nuts. I forgot about the hazel nuts. How are they doing? Not great. The squirrels, a few years, got all of them. I have 270 plants, trees, and they're 12 feet tall. Last year, we had a bounty crop, but they were a little bitter.

This year, we didn't have such a good crop. I don't know. It's an experiment, but... Are you going to manage them by coppicing, do you think? I've been coppicing quite a bit. Okay, good. Probably 25%. Nice.

I think that's smart for like home scale stuff especially. Isn't it amazing that you can cut certain sort of trees like hazelnuts? Yeah. And I think chestnuts and some other things. Most of these trees. Completely to the ground. Yes. And they'll come back up because the energies and the roots.

And some of these hazelnut chestnuts are a thousand years old or something. Yes. No, I think, and this is a detail. Like, these are the details that are fascinating. that I think about all the time. Like, people don't know what coppice thing is or how it works or what time of year you should do it or why you would do it. We've got this ash borer here that's coming in, the emerald ash borer. It might be as devastated you.

Oh, yeah, it went through here too. It's just so terrible. I have 100 trees that are dead from that. It's one of the dominant trees in my forest, and I'm just terrified. And I know they're all probably going to die. But I have a plan. I'm going to try where the ash borer likes to have diameter of a certain amount, because it needs enough Cambian in there.

And if you get a narrower or enough diameter, it doesn't like those trees as much. So imagine you have these ash trees that are of modest size. Coppicing doesn't work when the trees are gigantic. Wait, you can coppice ash trees? Yes, they, beautiful. In fact, that's how they were standardly managed in Europe to get the nice poles, ashes or handles and stuff.

So coppice them, they re-sprout, And then a bunch of these little tiny shoots may not be as interesting to the ash borer. And I have talked to some people around the country that I've managed estates and these sort of things. And they said, yes, the ones I've coppice are still alive. All my other trees are dead. So how can we get more people to be interested and care about things like that instead of Candy Crush and Facebook and TikTok? Well, I don't know. I use it as an example.

I know you. You keep saying Candy Crush for 15 years. I'm like, really, Nate? Have I really? Update it. Update it. Update it to what? I don't know.

I don't do that stuff. Some TikTok AI videos, I guess, are getting... I'm sending videos of like a giant antlered bucks running in a field to my 85-year-old dad. And he texts me back. He's like, that's AI. Like my dad knows. Cynical now. Before I know.

Yeah. Oh, my God, AI. So, like, does it, it feels like the default path is... In a few decades, we're going to be watering plants with Brondo. I mean, like, seriously, we're losing this cultural knowledge of the type that you are suggesting here today. What do we do? I'm scared, too, like, it's bifurcation. I'm so worried about social media addiction and porn addiction and all the stuff where it's like, you know, the AI chat bot stuff.

I take the next level. And who, what kind of relationships are people going to be having with? They're going to have relationships with machines. No, you need to have relations with other people in your community that you can do stuff together that is meaningful and purposeful and build skills. And you feel part of a place and have a role in it that is valued. Oh my gosh, do we need that? We need that for everybody, especially like, you know, young men.

who I worry about, who are lonely and isolated, they're like, they're like the, you know, who, who tends to shoot other people? Yeah, it's a powder keg. Yeah. Gosh, darn it, can we get, can we get young men especially, we have women, of course, but out doing stuff that's healthy, give them skills that are about providing, for gosh sakes, providing. They don't need to make money.

Don't ask them to make, if we can stop asking them to make money to get a girl or whatever, worthy and we can say, hey, guess what you can do? You know how to coppice well, lay a hedgerow, manage, manage sheep. For gosh sakes, skills, having a way to give people skills and connection that is valued, I think is so important. I agree with you. Let me ask you this. What do you think some of the biggest gaps are between what we think we know about sustainability versus what you've seen play out on the ground at your farm. Boy, that's an interesting question. I mean, I don't know what the average person thinks.

I see like, you know, I read headlines or whatever. I read the news. Maybe it's representative. It's the media represented. But the media is ridiculous. The media thinks, you know, the media kind of has this belief in technology and sort of green energy transitions. He has a belief in things like green chemistry, right, that we can like make plastic. that aren't going to be as harmful.

It's like, how do we take every single thing we see in this ridiculous built environment that we have and find a way to swap it out at scale, at cost, and we're going to figure this out. And, oh, you have doubts that we're going to make it in time. That's why we have to double down on AI, because AI is going to be so smart. It'll tell us how to both make money on this investment we made and save ourselves. Oh, but it might kill us. So I don't know.

Nothing makes sense. But I think most people have some view that smart people out there, whether they're academics or business types or some remnant functioning governance, is going to steer this ship. But I think it's completely bogus. I don't think it's ever going to come from that level. So given the challenges ahead that you and I, and many of the listeners here are imagining or seeing or experiencing already. What role do you see for projects like yours, the farming school, whether that be safe havens or prototypes or educational sites or something else?

Yeah. I mean, the best thing would be that it's a early prototype of a way to get people reconnected to the land and learn important skills. that will help us as sort of we, I guess, deindustrialize and lose financial ability to pay for basic needs, which is happening more and more, obviously, that part at least right now. And that if it scales, right? If it scales, then these become these sort of safe havens, right? I expect some, I'd expect periods of kind of chaos, I'd be honest with you. I don't see a easy, smooth path.

So, you know, if you get these safe havens that become then models, maybe as there's islands of coherence and stability, maybe that then those safe havens become the local replicates for how things were done. I think also housing is super important, right? Like, right now we've depopulated the country. side, and you've got these vast farms without any place to live. So part of this has to be like not just growing food, but every, all these other material needs. You know, as I'm just thinking about it and listening to you, I agree with you, we're not going to have the incentives and the

superorganism isn't going to voluntarily shrink and become sustainable. But I also don't think we're going to create these safe havens organically. And I almost see something like, something very much like farming clubs as being the intermediate step towards the safe havens. Yeah. Because it builds knowledge, it builds social capital, and it produces something that everyone's going to need. Yeah. And actually, our friend of Cher Miller

was, wrote a letter. He's in the club. And he wrote a letter. And in that letter, he talks about, how this is in support of the grant, right? Okay. In the letter, he talks about his family, sort of living in the nearby town, city, and that they think about this stuff, right? They think about the food system. They think about how unsustainable it is. They wish they could embody these practices. And until it would just be just because they knew me and I'm their friend and had this wacky idea and happened to get my shoulder hurt and so I needed my friend's help, he was like, this is this gracious path now I have where I can, I'm going to keep my job in this crazy

modern world because I don't have a, to get away from this would be like jumping off a cliff. But what I'm having is I'm seeing a staircase now. Like I'm having some steps I can take that are practical steps and it's not scary and it's, it's not like giving up on everything. So that's the thing when you say like, you know, some people have these like young, you're 20 years old, they graduate from college, they have a dream, I'm going to start a farm or whatever. It's like, great, you're young. You can make mistakes and you're probably going to land on your feet after doing some backflips. You're a middle-aged guy with a mortgage and kids. How do you do anything like this? Oh, the club. You can show up. It's reasonable. You've got help. Your family's getting health. You're getting healthy. You're or your kids are learning. I think it's a really good idea. Keep forge ahead on that, my friend,

because I do actually think there's just a tendril of giant hope and possibility in this idea. So this is a repeat time for you joining me here. So I'm not going to ask you the usual closing questions, but I will ask if anything about your work or your worldview or perspective on society in the future has changed since you were last on the show, which might have been two years ago or even three years ago, I'm not sure.

Well, I've been rather shocked and odd by how fast things are moving, both in social, political systems and environmental systems. You know, there's these things about systems get pushed to a point, point and then they flip system states. Okay, that's phase shift. Phase shift, right? Tipping points, phase shift, basins of stability. Then there's islands.

Anyway, it feels like we're in one of these phase shift kind of moments, right? And so none of it's how, I don't know how much of it is exactly how I thought it would unfold. I guess the madness of the AI is quite shocking to me. this large language model, which at first I'm like, eh, kind of help people write a little bit. It doesn't seem to know what it's talking about. You know, it's making all these mistakes. And in a few years, it's like Elon Musk is talking about creating these gods that take over the energy supply of the galaxy, right? To, you know, it's like Ray Kurzweil type bizarness.

And everyone just so on going along with that, it seems like without a lot of, a pushback and they're getting addicted to it already. I'm kind of shocked at how hard it is for people to, like, break free from this machine, this superorganism. Like, there's so much pressure going on right now with people being like swept off the streets and disappeared kind of to the billions, hundreds of billions, $3 trillion dollars are trying to invest in building data centers. it's just overwhelming, right?

All this is just so overwhelming. And so how do you stay sane in this situation? Go out and count birds and get your hands in the soil. Well, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm kind of trying to get to is that I don't think there's any way to make sense of all that or to do much of anything about it. Obviously, you've written a direct harm. Or maybe to stop it until it stops on its own. wait. A lot of these things, if you're most normal people, these things are going to, are going to, you know, vote, cite your opinion, everything like that. But you can, you know, people don't seem to be able to get out of the situations in these multipolar dynamic kind of stuff you like to talk about. And my hope is that it all actually kind of falls apart sooner than later. Like there's this duality of like, I would like the farming clubs to scale across the nation. And we're going to.

have a million of these chapters, and we'll have trained 100 million people to be small farmers. And, okay, how long is that going to take? Do we have time? Is the AMMA going to shut down, you know, and we're going to start freezing in Europe, and we're going to have just the wackiest weather everywhere, and the glacier is going to, you know, is going to slip off of Antarctica and we have rapid sea level rise? I mean, I feel like we're at these tipping point moments in almost all these systems simultaneously, is what I'm saying.

Yeah. So if there's a time that you need to move and do something big, for God's sakes, you know, if you haven't yet, I'm sure a lot of your listeners have. But if you haven't yet, it's pretty darn late, but do it, do, do, go, go, go. Great to see you, my friend. Keep up the good work. And maybe I'll make it out there in person next year. That would be awesome.

I hope to see you. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit the Great Simplification for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann, Julia Maxwell, Gabriella Sleman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.