This is a conversation we all need to be having. There is no bloody reason why most people should not be growing some form of food, or learning how to store food for those who can. Drying canning and goods whatever. At this point, we very likely will face a food shortage, and that turnaround time that it takes if we were all to make our lawns edible food gardens. Today, but it would still be possible. Your guest makes an incredible point with 100 acres you could easily feed 100 families high-quality food and provide jobs of value education, and an industry that will regenerate every year into the future.
I appreciate the dedication to be living into the new ways (which are old ways discovered) of living in harmony with nature. I also appreciate the very clear understanding of the role of ruminants in enriching the soil, and how being an omnivore in this circle of care makes perfect sense. I was involved in a Gurdjieff community several years ago, located in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Gurdjieff was is one who was concerned that we would forget how to be human, if we could ever claim to have been human before. Many things were done “the long way“, eschewing some conveniences, but not adopting a fully Luddite approach. The center was a working farm, and there also was adjacent property on which cattle were raised. It was the view of that lineage that because women were the “bearers of life“, only men in the community were allowed to slaughter the animals. But they would awaken early, share in a “sitting“ (meditation), so that they would fully bear the solemnity of taking a life. It was in that context I learned this very beautiful meal grace, “All life is one, and everything that lives is holy: Plants, animals, and [humans]. Everything must eat to live and nourish one another. We bless the lives that have died to give us our food. Let us eat consciously together, resolving by our work to pay the debt of our existence.“
I'd love to do what Daniel is doing, but I've never been able to afford a farm and now I'm turning 63 with little desire to get a farm and try to build it up while I'm falling apart and every else around me. I just try to keep a small footprint and enjoy what we have today.
Keep seeking and share what you're thinking, you'll find a place. Those who see will find you. I built a greenhouse on the south side of my house, and it has changed my life. Winter is green in my world.
Exactly. It is a massive privelage to own land and be able to be sovereign most people don't have that option. That's not to say it isn't great what he is doing but our society makes it really hard or even impossible for others to do that without breaking rules etc.
Don't resign yourself to the idea that it's too late, if anything, I've found great inspiration a seeing 63 year old guy from work run circles around me and I'm 34. His name is Mark and he works full time as well as farms in the morning. It kicks me in the butt and got me to start building my garden and delete all of my video games
We’re two years into our permaculture farming journey. There’s so much to learn to doing it. One of the biggest surprises is what I’ve come to call the flywheel effect. Planting an orchard to grow a variety of fruit, rejuvenating the soil that had been depleted from monoculture crops, composting a quarter acre to make it hyper fertile, putting up fencing, chicken coops, making our pond a haven for fish, frogs and wildlife. It’s interesting and fascinating to watch. This podcast is so spot on. Gotta like the flywheel effect! We’ve made a lot of mistakes but we’ve learned so much.
The most important part of this conversation, at least for me, is Daniel explaining the importance of being aware and involved into our own life process pertaining to him killing his own livestock. It is truth and reality. So so important to keep it real. Life and death. Thank you Daniel and Nate
Thank you so much for this episode! I am a vegan for the animals and I cried watching this episode, but realized how true Daniel's way of life is!! Thank you both for what you are doing. I watch all of your episodes. I am very grateful that I found your channel.
Nate, this is one of your best interviews yet. Happily it is not so academic and bookish, but down to earth. My life story has been in many ways very similar to Daniel's but there are some major differences. At age 77 I have now spent 49 years living on and trying to preserve the family farm. But this "farm" is actually an abandoned then bulldozed mining village with only "mountain ground" in a gorgeous place in central Pennsylvania. I am treating it as a school now -- "Frank's School" (see the UA-cam channel of that name). The biggest impediment for me is that my family -- nuclear and extended -- are not believers so I have had to do it on my own. What's worse is that my family is reclusive, so I'm pretty much stopped except for what I can teach online. Stubbornly, though, I continue to do what I can with goats, pigs, and 37 acres, while waiting for others to see the light.
While I'm into this, I should also mention that a "technical" difference in what might be called "regenerative agriculture" that I have used along with being organic and nearly fossil free is that I have created a hand dug gravity irrigation system on its way to establishing totally terraced pasture in the style of the Incas, always, though, on PERFECT contours and thus making machinery, which craves or demands parallel "lands", out of place. See "adenerias"; "socalcos"; Laraos, Peru; Swiss bisses; etc. I have posted extensively about this technique.
@@downunderyank Thanks, Downunderyank. I'm doing and have been doing the best I can, but I personally am running out of time. Still, for about 40 of the last 50 years there seemed to be no awareness of this at all and it is encouraging that now many people are aware. Still, time is short.
I would love to compare notes with you some. I believe that I have input that could be of use -- not only about the perfect contour gardening, but also about the role of pigs and about a kind of domestic architecture designed specifically for minimalist living. Where I live, I could accept about 20 families of 4 each in a matter of months and with almost no expense. The abandoned village here once is said to have had a population of 100. A problem with urban refugees is not only their lack of skills but also the "baggage" that they would bring with them. I would prefer homeless refugees.
Really appreciate the new focus on actions to take. We have a small homestead in Missouri and have been moving towards a more self sovereign lifestyle. We also invite the community out and have one apprentice farming couple that comes for a couple hours a week to work with us. They are totally new to farming, so it is a great transfer of skills. Finding a balance between work in the wider community and personal life is difficult for sure. Hope you have a great day.
I love this interview, especially these main takeaways: 1. Regenerative actions exist on a continuum and the most important thing is to do what you can, where you are, with what you have - and that the smallest step towards regeneration is the goal. And then another step, and then another. 2. If you want to learn about something hang out with people who are already doing it. 3. If your social circle doesn’t include people who share your concerns for our predicaments and your interests in regeneration, then you need to create new social circles that do.
❤ Dear Nate, Daniel -- and fellow Great Simplification travellers ... This particular podcast is so very important, more than most of us can begin to imagine... There is so much depth here ... worlds opening up ... Writing from Cochabamba, a valley between the Bolivian Andes and Amazon, from where one can "see" the collapse of millenial-old life and social systems and the ever more aggressive and unsustainable takeover of soils, souls, and society by large-scale agroindustry and the accompanying cocaine - mafia- military - political - petro - philanthropic - industrial complex. At the same time, a few tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of bolivians are still clawing on to traditional farming and (even fewer, deep forest) lifestyles in the more remote Andean mountains, valleys, and cloudforests spilling into the bolivian amazon and the dry chaco forests and deserts ... My heart is heavy. I feel like i am holding onto glimmering fragments of sunshine and hope with the fingertips of my heart ... Each word, each conversation, each vegetable, animal, tree, meal, acre, farmer, family, conversation, tool, professional, or system that moves us one step closer to a genuinely sustainable and regenerative planetary paradigm matters. I am so sick and sad seeing all the corruption, decay, insensitivity, and insanity all around that i sometimes just want to hide and give up on it all. But that is not an option. The Great Conversation that humens -- and humans -- like you two are having openly can and will change the tide ... Love. Light. Life.
Your guest referenced the so-called friend who said that he is coming to live with him when thing go bad. Simon Michaux called these people the Vikings.
Please reach out and speak to Geoff Lawton He's the person that Bill Mollison (founder of Permaculture) passed the torch to for spreading Permaculture. He runs the Permaculture institute in Australia. He's been doing permaculture aid work for at least 30 years and maybe longer all over the planet. He's taught permaculture to thousands of people and runs the most comprehensive online permaculture platform. He's famous for his "greening the dessert" projects but has also been involved with many other projects such as the Al Baydha re-greening He has such a wealth of knowledge on these topics and would be an amazing person for you to platform - and can talk in far greater depth about proper solutions that extend further than agriculture
This is one of my favourite episodes so far. I spent a season on a farm in France, so I know a little bit, and Daniel is really summing up my feeling perfectly, even getting a bit fiery in the last sections. It is all a bit ridiculous. You need to make podcasts to tell people how to be more happy and in the end almost nobody picks up the shovel. We don't really need money in the sector, we don't need chilling in the afternoon on a sunny day, drinking organic cocoa and connecting with nature, we need to get our hands dirty FFS and start a movement on the societal level. Plain and simple. I have to acknowledge, though, that the amount of knowledge you have to amass to start a farm or start growing is not small unless you have a family background. So I am not surprised very few people from the city end up on a farm. These are true heroes, though. It can feel overwhelming and you need to have a personality for that. To be a grounded problem-solver with elementary trust in your abilities. On the other hand, as mentioned, this is all on a spectrum and everybody can do something to help return the land to a more healthy state, no need to really start a farm if this is too much. You can help returning water to the country-side or care for forests. Everybody can find something, I believe.
Totally agree. Here in south brazil, I am trying spent time in comunities vegetsbles gardens in the city where I live and it is really changing my life.
What a beautiful discussion. I’m still smiling. It gives me such hope knowing that this wonderful man, along with many others, quietly work to weave the old back into the new that is clearly broken. Here is healing and hope. Thank you!
"The difference between dirt and soil" is an appropriate metaphor for the difference between the "normal" American life and the life that Daniel Zetah lives. As a young lad I spent a couple of summers building farm silos in the Ohio/Pennsylvania area. I subsequently spent a couple of decades as a Merchant Marine Navigator traveling to many exotic places all around the world from Antarctica to Africa to Tahiti and many others. I am here to tell you that my experiences "down on the farm" are now more pleasantly memorable in my "golden years" than penguins and girls in grass skirts. It is the difference between "exotic" and "authentic". Dirt and soil.
Harvard study "Nationwide shift to grass-fed beef requires larger cattle population" concluded shifting to grass-fed beef would require 30% more cows and produce 43% more methane- increasing the United States' total methane emissions by 8%. If not grass-fed, cows are eating industrial crops too. 25 calories of plants are required to produce just 1 calorie of beef. It is far more efficient to eat plants ourselves and would result in fewer crop deaths (animals killed during plant harvest). University of Oxford study "Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers" found with a global population consuming a plant-based diet, we could reduce land use by 75%. That's an area the size of Australia, China, the EU, and the US combined. Food Climate Research Network and University of Oxford study titled "Grazed and confused" found the potential for carbon sequestration to be just 20-60% of the emissions produced by the cattle. Notice the lack of citations and actual figures in this conversation. There are numerous studies and articles debunking the entire notion of grazing livestock as a climate change mitigation strategy. "Holistic management- a critical review of Allan Savory’s grazing method", "The Myth of Regenerative Ranching", "The Savory Method Can Not Green Deserts or Reverse Climate Change".
I agree with you wholeheartedly and have the same critique. However I do think those studies are not taking to account all of the processes involved. Even the ways nutrition are measured and co2 sequestration is measured can be challenged. They work on top of assumptions that many farmers lived experiences of improving soil will dispute. I don't raise this because I think that we should use holistic management.... I raise this because unless the studies can accurately take into consideration the nuances and more details of soil health, then the bridge between farmers and science won't ever be crossed due to lack of trust
Scientists aren't farmers and science as a whole is very farm from understanding all of the details of the soil food web. Even recent studies have been surprised by how much co2 is sequestered by fungi and the studies linked definitely don't measure that as they only check for chemical content of soil, not content embodied by the life in the soil
What remains undiscussed is whether grass-fed pasture meat is even scalable, as a shift to grass-fed meat would require a larger cattle population, and more pasture land. Where is all this extra land? Don't such farms require large amounts of pasture for the cattle to roam, not small landholdings? I wish supporters of regenerative farming would be honest about the cost, because not everyone will be able to afford to eat beef or pork on a daily basis if all of it were grass-fed on expansive pasture, where the cows or pigs rotate from one area to another. It seems that (but he seems too polite to say so) Mr. Hagens intuits that daily meat consumption, if you choose to eat meat, is not sustainable (particularly beef and pork). It's odd that Mr. Zetah brings up the ethics of animal killing, but not whether most people would, or should, be able to expect to afford the products of "humane" regenerative animal husbandry and slaughter, which, if it can't feed most people (which i suspect it cannot, because of topographic and geographic constraints), is unsustainable by definition, at least unsustainable to Americans, most of whom expect to eat meat daily.
@@aureliaglenn2220 totally agree. There's just no way for beef, pork and other large animals be a scalable source of protein for the planet in a sustainable way. However I do think there's a place for these animals in our lives, but I'm really not convinced they should be killed.... Beans are a fantastic source of nutrition that scales amazingly. Not only do beans contribute to soil health with nitrogen fixing but they can be grown vertically as many are climbers and you obviously don't need to grow other crops to feed them, nor do you need to clear forest for them. Many people can grow beans in nooks and crannies around human habitat
@@aureliaglenn2220 Why is the debate always cast as being between consuming as much meat as the industrialized world does now vs. going pure vegan? In ancient civilizations, most people ate a plant based diet most of the time, but engaged in ritual animal sacrifices. Those sacrifices were essentially great big communial BBQs, like a neighborhood Fourth of July celebration, or a big Thanksgiving potluck. Let meat be a scarce, expensive luxury. Ration it so the rich don't eat it all.
finally finished this episode and couldn't believe when I heard you both were impacted by Daniel Quinn's book!! This is what I tell people when they ask how my current path started: I once read a book about a telepathic gorilla who befriends a six year old girl and they have chats about human culture. During one of their discussions, the gorilla talks about the Takers and the Leavers, those early humans who uncovered technology and explored it and started a new type of evolution, and those who remained in their natural flow and foraged and hunted and lived in small groups etc. It got me thinking about technology in general, about all the compound applied knowledge from its beginning to now. I found myself in my kitchen and looked around, and I just felt profoundly disconnected from all these things in my life. The artifacts, tools, materials, food, energy, data. How it's all produced, the complex markets and supply chains that make everything available to me, and I just felt that I, nor anyone I knew, had any meaningful degree of control over any of it. I thought that should change. And that I should do something. I guess because I was standing in the kitchen I decided to focus on food first. But let's think about, for a start, the basic, reasonable needs for a living. Food, water, shelter, artifacts, energy, information, whatever society wants to say are the most important basic needs. In those areas, we focus on making distributed versions of the technologies that provide us with these modern basic needs, such that it is embedded in the smallest units of society; the dwelling. The means of production of the basic necessities in convenient, sustainable forms, that are then stewarded and maintained by families and communities. What Fuller might have called "livingry". Imagine a populace that could have their basic needs met, to have basic safety and security? The stress of survival replaced with space for creativity, problem solving, exploration. The potential could be astronomical! In either direction; I guess... lol, to keep honest consideration of risk, I try to imagine a beautifully advanced utopia while keeping in mind perhaps we go pear-shaped 🙃 Great episode you two!
Play this game. Find one item in your home that got there without benefit of fossil fuels. Your homegrown veggies don't even count, if you used garden tools from the hardware store, or bought seed. The only item I could name in my house was some feathers I picked up on a walk. Also, in your list of necessities for a basic living, don't forget clothes. You don't want to be outdoors in midwinter, naked, or even weeding your garden in summer heat without clothing for protection.
This is a great podcast! At 55:10 Nate you start asking questions about cows in a CFAO as opposed to a natural grazing system, especially as it relates to CO2 and methane. What jumped to the forefront of my thought is this: healthy living soils have methogenic bacteria that consume methane. It's a symbiotic system. These bacterium only exist in healthy soils. Cows on grass not only produce less excess methane, but most of what they do produce is consumed by bacteria.
Sitting just in the space of learning about our predicament(s) will only take you to dark places. In order to avoid despair you need to take it to the place of doing something to create alternative ways of living and being that are more in harmony with our evolutionary experience and nature in which our lives are nested. Permaculture offers an excellent framework for this when you really dive down into it because it gives you a different lens for interacting with the world.
Why does it take you to a dark place? We are all going to die. Even if our civilization were healthy and sustainable, every single person alive today will grow old and die. On a geologic time scale, the human species will be gone - extinct, or evolved into new forms of life. I don't get people's anxiety over this topic.
i'm 70 and live in the mountains of north georgia. i myself eat an organic whole food plant based diet and would love to become much more involved in a permaculture lifestyle on my property. i find the biggest deterrent is the lack of local people that seem to have any interest. social support is indeed a very important part of the endeavor! it still amazes me how distant my lifestyle is to the average person, even something as simple as composting seems to be beyond the mental grasp of most that come to visit. i'm still in excellent health but not so inclined to a life of hard labor so my progress is slow. i'm incredibly fortunate to have a superb piece of land with spring fed stream and pond and an abundance of native trees and wildlife. i'm hoping that more podcasts such as this one will awaken an interest in others and we will start to see a growing desire for a more sustainable and self sufficient life.
I've got one foot in the old world and one in the new - I work a 9-5, I have all the trappings of a middle class life, but I've chosen to live in the country on 5 acres, and in the evenings and on the weekends, I'm slowly turning it into a farm. Every year, I grow a little more of my own food. The job is just to pay off the mortgage.
"The Great Humbling", "voluntary energy austerity", you are both gifted communicators and good people. Thank you. You give me learning and tools to practice with. Thank you! thank you!
I live in a small house on a quarter-acre lot in a mid-size Southern city. I often think about whether it would be better for me to buy a farm out in the country, or join some kind of eco-community, or to stay put and take care of the small piece of the Earth that I already have. My neighborhood has many large lots and people love their gardens in the South. If everyone here used the space they already have to grow food, it might not cover 100% of peoples' needs but it could be a large percentage.
If you’ve got community and the capacity to meet many of your needs, stay put, build skills, teach others. Self sufficiency is a myth and we need community more than ever!
Please also consider dedicating some land to native plants. Look up Homegrown National Park for inspiration. Our pollinators and birds need all the help they can get, and they provide humans with "natural services" in return.
Great podcast. I thoroughly agree that what we most need are visions of a regenerative, good life to guide us. Many permaculture folks do live in suburbia but try to adapt in situ, growing some of what we eat, reducing energy and consumption where we are, and buying as locally as we, can, not to mention the re-skilling that goes with that. Permaculture co founder David Holmgren calls this “retrofitting the suburbs “ or Retrosuburbia.
Star trek did a whole movie about this. A highly technical race of people on a beautiful earth like planet who gave up the technology and lived off the land doing manual labour because of the psychological peace it brought them. Oh and I seem to remember they banished the psycopaths! Wish I could remember what the movie was called. But pretty much what we should be doing!
One of the more inspiring episodes (though I loved your interview with Joslin Faith Kehdy). I'm going to repeat Daniel's words to my 21 yr old: If you're planning on doing what your parents are doing you've got it wrong!
I’ve raised meat chickens for our 4-person family for 7-8 years now, including a season doing it small scale commercial, and have included my kids in it from the beginning. As I was doing it with my parents and grandparents when I was quite young.
Just processed my first batch of roosters last month. I was incredibly lucky that an elder dropped by and offered to help. I would have made a disaster of it had he not been there. Made me realize how important to share knowledge to others
Being able to choose between wants and needs is an objective in most school curricula. I've been working with standards for quite some time. The problem is how to get that accross, especially in these times, in this material world and the influence of social media. It's really difficult. Most teachers probably don't even try anymore...
Excellent interview! good point about there being very few people who share these values. I'd love to live in a world filled with sovereign individuals. The biggest issue is land use policy that actively prevents people from having land. Also, you can't really own land anyway due to property taxes that keep you renting, this keeps you plugged into the system and prevents you from following this lifestyle. anyways, i do what I can. After a couple of years, I've noticed I can grow hundreds of pounds of food on just 600 sq ft of growing space! i can't wait until the fruit trees start producing.
Thank you for this interview!! Great conversation. Dr. Bush’s Farmer’s Foootprint is working with commercial AG to convert to natural systems because the profit is there. Want to change values? Change the VALUE proposition. And perhaps teach those folks who go back to the cities/suburbs what they can do where they are! Guerilla gardening, replace your grass with groceries, how to grow food in a condo, roof top gardens, even how to find a farmer’s market… there are lots of ideas available. But finding people you can align to which will foster your growth in the direction you want to go.
fantastic episode! i feel like i might be the target demographic. aware of the polycrisis, carrying some anxiety, burnt out and not able to work my crappy office jerb any longer, but swimming in a sea of consumption where you have to capitalism as hard as possible to survive or even exit capitalism. this was a particularly energizing and re-energizing eposide. thank you!
One of my favourite episodes. I'm really getting into the regen ag in my tidy garden and my veggies love it. I'm also vegan by choice so for me the shooting of the animals would be very unpleasant. I would be concerned if the cows were impregnated artificially rather than naturally. But I'm also into common sense and the Earthling Ed's of this world that say we don't need ruminants I find hard to agree with. It goes against a vegan mantra to include animals in farming and therefore slaughter, but I understand the need for something to be eating, digging and scratching the soil. As for grass fed beef being carbon neutral, I'm not so sure. George Monbiot has a lot to say on this and from memory it's mostly around land use for system returns.
Great conversation. Thanks! One comment is that vegans avoid meat not only for ethical and environmental reasons, but also for health related ones. Eating like “royalty”, as Daniel says, has been scientifically linked to diseases of affluence like coronary disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.
They completely ignore the ethics in this discussion. Enslaving and KILLING them is still unethical, because it's completely unnecessary. Yes, this is better than factory farming, but still making another sentient species live only for your benefit. It's USE therefore abuse There is such a thing as veganic farming that addresses all the issues they say require enslaving cows to solve. It's just not true. No one in veganism thinks monoculture is a good idea either
I agree as far as modern processed ‘food’ and industrial scale animal production goes. But our grandparents grew up on farms eating a LOT of meat, often fried in lard, and I think they will be the longest lived generation to have ever existed. We are evolved to consume animal protein, I don’t care what anyone says.
@noahbrown4388 thinking we are "evolved to consume animal protein" is a logical fallacy. We haven't evolved to do anything. Evolution doesn't have a goal or purpose. It just is. Thinking otherwise is a religious belief. Also, the whole meaning of the word evolution is CHANGE OVER TIME, so whatever we did in the past isn't necessarily where we SHOULD be going
@noahbrown If you are interested in long lived people, take a look at the work of Dan Buettner, in particular his book "The Blue Zones" to learn about lifestyles that are correlated to health and longevity. Definitely, not a lot of meat and lard in those diets.
Great discussion. I made the leap to an off grid, low consumption life over 5 years ago. My costs went down along with my ecological footprint. I was able to pretty much retire (from making money) because my expenses have dropped so much. I have one fifth the ecological footprint I had and about one fifth the costs. I only need to work a few days a month for money now, I have a much lower stress life with a lot more freedom, and I am more financially secure than when I was a part of the rat race. The notion that people will have to be forced to switch to a low consumption, off grid, self sovereign life is not correct. If people only knew how much better their life would be by becoming more self sufficient, they would be leaving the cities in droves to start homesteads, regenerative no-till farms, intentional communities and eco-villages. The main problem is that these kinds of lifestyles are illegal or blocked in most places. Thanks for the work you are both doing. There is a large and growing interest in low cost, self sufficient lives. Its important to let people know that not only is this possible, its preferable.
This guest, Iain McGilchrist, yourself is the teaching. Noding is the future. Too many onliners worry about their numbers etc. They must teach out, activate nodes(people) the whole planet and the world polinates.
Thank you so much for this episode, Nate! Daniel, I intend to contact you for consultation. My husband & I are in our mid 60s, retired, and this interview has inspired me to begin a feasibility study of buying land on which to practice regenerative agriculture. Realistically, that is unlikely to happen for a few years, as shopping for and purchasing land will take time. Since we can't count on our strength sustaining us through our 70s and 80s, we will need one or more partners with whom to do the work. Not only would this relieve the cognitive dissonance of living on "securities" investments, it will be more secure as peak oil leads to decreasing economic stability across the US and around the world. I'm in the process of rewilding our suburban yard. I'm a handspinner. I used to be a backpacker. Why didn't I ever think of this?
Extensive animal farming, described in the podcast (as opposed to intensive or feed lot farming) requires more land to produce a given amount of food. Here are some of the points George Monbiot makes: 38% of the planet’s habitable land is used for food production. Of that 38%, 26% is used for animal farming, primarily cattle and sheep, 6% is used for food for farm animals and only 6% is used to directly feed humans. A switch from corn fed beef to pasture fed would require a 270% increase in land dedicated to this type of farming. (Note: cities occupy 1% of land). Every acre of land we use for animal farming is an acre that cannot be occupied by wildlife ecosystems (a pasture may support some wildlife, but is a large net loss for most species occupying woodlands or forest ecosystems). Extensive farming is the greatest threat to wildlife ecosystems because it is the greatest user of land.
... assuming the rate of meat consumption remains constant. Make it more scarce. Raise the price. People should eat more lentils and beans for their health, anyway.
I saw this guy who works with African farmers on a yt doc, I don't remember his name, who said we could substantially improve ag productivity there by radically increasing ruminant populations and herding. I think he said the herd walking, eating, and pooping all over would improve soil a lot. I think I'm hearing that again here.
53:54 I've been harping on this point for decades now. It's a relief to hear some other farmers articulating it. Once you've seen what tractors/herbacides do to the land you'll understand how eating (pastured) meat is more humane than mono-crop dependant veganism.
Monocrop isn't required for veganism. There are Veganic permaculture small scale farms as well as even biocyclic certifications. Elaine Ingram has shown how crops can be established that replenish soil on large scale without need for pasture
THANK YOU for mentioning the bit about the meat industry. Cattle are amazing creatures, and they are extremely healthy for humans to eat, but only if they are treated like cows (not prisoners/slaves). Humans are omnivores (although some of us eat only plants), and most of us are healthiest when we eat that way.
I live in a mega city. I cannot be a farmer. I don't buy stuff I don't need. Am I sovereign? We cannot and should not all be farmers. Being sovereign is not enough. Electoralism and voting is not enough. System change is very important. Mass action, activism is also very important. Choice is clear: we unite, we strike massively against growthist capitalism, we shut the s*** down, do a great reset, and a great simplification. Or we perish. Oh, and btw, Degrowth Collective does this.
While you are shutting things down, who will feed you? I will, of course, but I am now in southern France. I suspect there are sympathetic farmers near you.
@@wvhaugen Who said anything about shutting down farms? I said shut the s*** down and by that I mean: fast fashion, SUVs, private jets, yachts, production of unnecessary goods, advertising, planned obsolesce etc etc
I love this concept. The question I have is what percent of the population could realistically leave the city and farm before the farming space becomes too crowded.
That question is not able to be answered with any certainty at all but I’d argue that pre ww1, over 45% of Americans lived and worked on farms, rural America was bustling with thousands of small towns with local economies and tight knit communities meeting munch of their own needs. We’re now at .67% living or working on farms and the average farm size went from 150 or so to over 1000 today. This didn’t happen because we ran out of space, our cultural values shifted from local and quality to cheap and convenient and every kid with any intellect was told to move to the city or they’d be a loser. if our culture can allocate 93m acres in the US alone for corn production which is 99.99% genetically identical yellow dent #2 that is inedible without heavy processing and makes any being that consumes it sick, I think we could put millions of people back on the land and it’d be good for everyone involved.
@@downunderyank I agree with you Daniel, that it would be a great benefit for all to have millions of people back on the land. It just can't be a solution for everyone. Similar to Nate sourcing his meat from the wild. If everyone chose to do so I would be very surprised if the deer and moose populations could endure the pressure on them.
That question is a really good one, and one that Nate is especially well equipped to find answers to. Nate, I hope you take up that challenge. I'd also like to know more about foreign farmland ownership. A quick search shows it's about 3%, but rising. Land should be owned by the folks who live there. There's also the problem of suburbia and urban sprawl. Before the industrial revolution, cities were limited in size by the farmland close enough to supply them. They were either situated at the best ports, or in the midst of the best farmland. That great farmland has been paved over for suburbia, losing who knows how many tons of topsoil. If urban dwellers would move to much smaller cities, and suburbs would self destruct in favor of farming, could we avoid overpopulation in rural places?
Gabe Brown switched his 2000acre ranch in Montana to a regenerative agriculture, no till organic farm and he makes way more profit than his neighbors who all farm using chemiculture techniques. Once established regenerative farming is more profitable because the expensive inputs are so much less than a chemiculture farm.
Nate and Daniel. Thank you for a great conversation. I spent my early life to my early 20s on an industrial family farm (corn, soybeans etc), but couldn't see farming that way economically or environmentally. In the end, it didn't work out for my parents economically. I've always thought of going back and starting something small and sustainable. I was very interested to hear Daniel talk about the contrast between his farm and the local community, because ultimately in small communities one has to get along with your neighbors.
This was amazing. Thank you both for this talk. I have dropped out of the rat race. My partner and I are looking for an existing farm to buy and start biodynamic, no-till farming on. I hear from a lot of young people who don't have nest eggs like me, what can they do? I tell them there are lots of regenerative farmers who could use the help now, go stay with them and learn and help. Do you have any advice on how to get more people who are currently in the system with existing student loans and all the baggage life has handed them how to get out?
That’s the priceless question isn’t it? As long as there isn’t a debtor’s prison, we need young folks smart enough to recognize no amount of money you make making the world worse will ever be worth it and brave enough to jump. We’re actively looking for folks to co-create and co-steward this land with going forward and I know we’re not alone. The skills one needs to live a sovereign life and those you need to restore your local ecology have a lot of overlap. If you commit your life to learning them and making your life better and the world better, you will have far more security and purpose going forward than if you stay temporarily safe in the bosom of the matrix.
Buy something and provide room and board. If you can't afford to pay them so they can pay bills, buy land near a town that has jobs. They don't have to earn a lot if you house and feed them. Then, they can find part-time work to cover loan payments, phone bills, etc. I am building off-grid. I work remotely part-time to pay my phone bill, car insurance, and other monthly expenses until my farm is earning money. I only work 10 to 15 hours per week. So, there are ways. The desire to live this way motivates me to solve personal economic issues. Since I moved here, my bills went from almost $1000/month to $220/month now. It took some effort. I started out living in a tent while I built my cabin. I never felt like i was suffering because I was creating this life. I am debt-free and happy. Most people where I live started in a camper or tent and built everything themselves. I was 50 when I started. Many out here started in their 50s with little money.
You have done it again :). Much much gratitude for bring on this guest. Right up my alley and we're I not already 3 hours late, I could respond positively to sooo many things. Maybe good I am late for now, I'll watch again late so as not to let the excited emotional babble take over. Namaste'
I'm basically in the same situation as this guy, just opposite side of the country. He expresses a lot of my thoughts, opinions and feelings. Good episode.
I listened to the episode and it was great, but I'm conflicted on whether it's wise to stay in the system or leave it for me. I'm a young, radically different high school teacher working on educating kids on ecology, energy and system science as it relates to The Great Humbling. I've managed to squeeze in some gardening for students, but since we're in the city we have no regenerative farm in our vicinity, and even if we did our school system is too rigid to let the farm be a regular place for education. Thoughts on whether I should stay in the system?
I live in a very densely populated city on the coast of Brazil--I am 72 and my outlet is working as a volunteer gardener in the public gardens and squares!!! I have learned a lot while taking care of a wide variety of tropical plants and trees!!! Start out small and doors will open!!!
We are locked in the system..there is no offgrid..you take the grid with you wherever you go .. an acre lot of land is lots of maintenance and expensive to get up and running..today the most important thing is to cherish each moment, hug our loved ones lots and lots..one day at a time..keep it simple..learn to breathe and listen to your breath.
I grow soybeans, corn and many other things for consumption in my garden and I don’t use any animal inputs nor do I till the soil. The soil here in southern Ohio is not nearly as good as southern MN. I grow cover crops like vetch, clover and rye and I have a compost commode which produces hot compost. Animal agriculture has at least one inherent disadvantage in that it is calorically inefficient. It takes more calories to feed plants to the animals and then consume the animals as opposed to eating plants directly. If we just ate plants, far less land would be required to grow food and the rest could revert to nature which would sequester lots of carbon and would be far more bio diverse than a cow pasture. The downside is everyone would be a nutrient deprived vegan like me: ua-cam.com/video/SiBE2lzj1GA/v-deo.html
THANK YOU FOR SHARING THIS! I don't understand why this point is continuously ignored (although someone's source of income can easily dictate what truth they are willing to face). But don't sell yourself short, I'm sure your health is fine or that veganism is not the cause (maybe you're joking? Add some quotations around "deprived" if so )
The comments on cows only are accurate when talking about free range grass fed cows. Only 4% of US cattle are “grass-finished”. The food fed to the rest is from tilled land. So per calorie Beef kills many, more dead bunnies than eating monoculture plants.
I always wonder what would happen if everyone moved from the city to the country. Wouldn’t that destroy an awful lot if habitat? Where would all the animals go if there were people spread out everywhere?
I can tell you’ve never stood in a cornfield and used your senses. There is nothing alive, not even an ant. 93million acres in corn slime each year that is going to make cheap, poor quality at best and toxic at worst “food” for people not currently living on land. Urban folks already use up a ton of land with their choices, they just don’t own it.
I’m barely into this discussion and want to express how delighted I am with this new addition! Thank you! Let me suggest, Nate, that you interview Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen together. And is Wendell Berry still with us and giving interviews? How about a brief one with Joel Salatin? I knew several farmers decades ago in both the Virginia /TN and the New England areas who plowed with horses, did not use artificial fertilizers, and were quietly and contentedly finding a way. The trick is that youth, inheriting (or the ability to afford enough of the right land in the right biome and community / state), and mentoring are all essential. These are all precious limited ‘resources’. Unfortunately this circles us back to the grim realities of overpopulation / entrenched consumer lifestyle again, so please allow me also suggest Nandita Bajaj for a future interview.
1 kg of dry matter vegetation takes on average 1.65 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere to grow through photosynthesis. For every kg of dry matter eaten, ruminants like cattle and sheep emit about 22 grams of methane CH4. Using the IPCC climate forcing calculations which give CH4 28 times the warming potential of CO2, that's 22 x 28 = 616 grams (0.616 kg) of CO2 equivalent emitted for every kg of dry matter vegetation eaten. It doesn't matter what they eat, where they eat it (CAFO or pasture) or how long they live and eat before slaughter. They eat vegetation that took nearly 3 times more CO2 from the atmosphere to grow than their CO2 equivalent biogenic methane emissions. Biogenic methane from any livestock is irrelevant, and is a red herring. CAFO and other feeding systems where feed is brought to stock unfortunately need more fossil fuel inputs to harvest the feed and take it to where it is eaten. Livestock grazed on land more suitable for grazing or in a complementary system on a farm where crops are rotated with pasture and ruminants are part of the rotation (as was traditionally the case on croplands) reduces fossil fuel in comparison with CAFO. In cold climates, a system where ruminants are housed in winter or any system where their effluent is collected (for example at the milking shed), we also have a golden opportunity to produce methane in biodigesters (biogas) and use it for energy production. This is where efforts regarding biogenic methane in agriculture should be focused.
I started building a homestead on my family’s exurban property. There is less than a few inches of topsoil. Using the geoff lawton chicken manure/ woodchip compost method i have nearly and acre with 1 ft top soil. I wish i could make a living doing it…
I work on building the tools of sovereignty as well, by inventing automated aeroponic farming appliances to advance sustainable food production at the point of consumption. Food grown outside of the conventional system and its negative externalities, in full control of homes and communities who then decide what is grown, reconnecting them with food at its source. Just part of a grand scheme to build and implement sovereignty, to make every home a nation.
All agriculture is extractive. We need to be clear about this. Soil nutrients with the exception of Nitrogen are heritage resources like fossil fuel and either become depleted or must be extracted elsewhere. There is a reason why the most persistent cultures on earth didn’t practice agriculture. But this also leads into the idea of sovereignty, as agricultural practice requires the private ownership of land, which requires law, government, police, violence, and the rest…all completely at odds with meaningful sovereignty. It’s worth pursuing the thinking this realization forces in some detail, and for those who can stomach I pursue the topic in some detail on my own channel. My own personal choices are certainly guided thusly. As far as I can see the only functional path forward is the re-engineer what can only be called a neo-indigenous relationship to living, as much as possible bringing the best of human knowledge forward but embracing the essential posture necessary to have a constructive dynamic with life. This may seem heady, but on a personal level it is wholly actionable.
I’m working on a truly non extractive farming system. With many animals and without annual crops hit might be possible - changing our diet and eliminating waste are good first steps
@@SeegerInstitute So has every other farmer in human history. For many poor farmers to do so is just a matter of survival. But, you will forced to extract to pay the property taxes. It might be possible to live within personal habitat but of course that’s no longer agriculture, and there’s no point in owning the land.
This is great! Please continue having regenerative agriculturalists on the show. 🙏 Some potential guests: Mark Shepard, Wes Jackson and.....me (jus' kidding) .........(but not kidding)
Well that could have been me talking so obviously I will congratulate the two of you on yet another excellent podcast. (Spent the time fitting the kitchen in the new tiny house for my daughter.)
Super interesting interview. I do wonder, however, if the type of regenerative and self-sufficient farming Daniel practices will become increasingly difficult to the point of not being viable because of increasingly unpredictable weather, fires, invasive species, floods and droughts.
Great conversation but why not just use native wild ruminants such as Bison, Elk, Deer and Pronghorn and not eat them? In the UK we have so much land dedicated to grass fed cows and sheep and have decimated our wildlife in the countryside! Theres more foxes in the towns then the countryside! 🤔
We partner with British white cows on the farm because they’re docile around the many visitors and students we host, are easy to handle and are efficient on grass. Bison would be an excellent choice here in Minnesota too if we had better fences and less visitors. I don’t live in the UK but ever place, ecology and situation is different. The key is using what wants to be in your ecology for their ecosystem services that you can also sustain yourself on. If you can find a way to do that in the medium/long term without eating the ruminants, let me know.
Some great stuff covered in here, fabulous overall. The discussion on carbon emissions missed what's absolutely baseline to this discussion however, and that is we must sever our ties to the industrial tit. The Amish understood this, the rest of us seemingly do not. Not to glorify the Amish (and Old Order Mennonites) but rather they are the only extant example on display in developed nations now. You are not sustainable if your energy source is oil and gas and you never will be. The Amish farm economy is propelled by a machine that just appears when you place it in company with other machines of its type - no global chain of resource sourcing, no chain of manufacture, little to no off-farm dependence - and what fuels that machine grows in every field and ditch and renews itself with no inputs from us either. The machine is called the horse. There was never a more elegant system nor one with more potential for sustainability than the horse culture. We had it, we made the mistake of abandoning it, we need to bring it back. This is ground-zero stuff. I don't understand why we so perversely resist this part of the discussion. It's not that we're blind to it. It's that we won't have it. The part about the working horse and how essential it was and will be again - IF we get it in time. Let's incorporate this part of the discussion, too. Whether or not we are there ourselves in our practices yet or ready to make some beginnings in that direction. That's not the point. The point is that this is baseline - a sustainable source of work. There was talk about human labor, the Amish, yet the system, the solution that brought us so elegantly to the eve of our crisis never got any mention. Next time let's hope.
Tipping away listening to ye chat. Daniel reminded me of David the good whose YT channel same name. Keep up with these chats there are people listening and doing actions quietly too. Have a great day lads
Good afternoon Nate and Daniel Thankyou for this. SOIL so needs to be more sexy, for Sure. Local Government has little to no power certainly in Scotland, all very concerning, confusing even. After eighteen months of disconnection and reconnection, wee bit of a spiritual awakening and much more, both Professionally and individually. Always find these shared conversations reassuring to say the very least. Sensemaking brain gym. Most Grateful for your shared work. 💜
Living the American eco privileged dream, I would love this yet I'm one who has to produce the bullets, the tractor the gas etc to feed the family, if only equality could have the whole population live like this, oh we can't, not enough land for 8billion to live this dream. Loved this episode and then went back to reality.
I’m sorry you seem so bitter and jaded. I never said what we were doing was THE answer, it’s merely a multigenerational stepping stone to a different way of living. I don’t like having to work as a mechanic and welder to pay our taxes and insurance and for few bullets and fuel we use but I do it knowing it’s part of the path back to a culture and society that can live more closely tied with Creation.
I wish most of the recent government incentives allocated for so-called renewable energy had been directed toward regenerative agriculture. It is the truly “green“ solution--from the ecosystem, it preserves, to the quality food it yields, to the carbon it sequesters.. A digital account and/or a special debit card could’ve been created for every legal resident targeted solely to the purchase of the products of regenerative agriculture. Kind of like the FSA system used for medical stuff. That, combined with education about consumption, the “growth“ paradigm, and family planning could go a long way toward healing the ecosystem and mitigate the “overshoot“ that is well underway.
Great, but just to be devil's advocate - he's standing on the shoulders of giants. This lifestyle was obviously the only way forward 30-40-50 years ago. Heck, I've been doing it for 25+ years, after reading 'The Oil Drum' and listening to Chris Martensen's Crash Course.......but anyway, maybe there's a whole new generation who need to hear this...
Hello Mr. Hagen, I am wondering if you are a religious person. The reason I ask is: I'm not religious, but like your guest, I raise and harvest my own meat. And although I am not religious, I, like you, feel almost a religious moment when processing the animals. After I pull the trigger, and confirm the kill, I thank the animals, and give them some parting words. It is a very complex "transaction", so to speak, with a weight that borders on the transcendent.
I was highly interested in this interview. I have overtime formulated an answer to the would be they will show up when shtf. I do get that from time to time as well. My answer to them is in the attempt to get people to think its best to actually produce an oasis of their own. Here: You will have to get your timing right. If you are too early you will catch a bullet. After I run out of bullets is the perfect time to show up. If you wait too long there will be nothing left because none of you will know how to operate the system. That's why you don't have a growing area for yourself, you don't know how.
I cant find it. But they reference a book at something that they both seem very excited by. Can someone comment that book so I don't have to re watch thru lol
I think you can be relatively healthy eating some meat, but what I have been explained, our bodies are built as herbivores (for example dr Milton Mills) and therefore I think it would be optimal to eat a plant only diet (whole foods and ideally organic)
Everyone’s body is different but i feel so much better eating meat from our farm 6 days a week than when I was a vegetarian for over 6 years. What I’d like for folks to take away from this interview is how we grow our food is more important than what the food is. A perennial based diet is the best diet for us and all the other critters we share this world with and the best way I can do that in minnesota is to eat a lot of meat, nuts, fruits and perennial plants. Other bioregions with different climate and ecologies will have different ways to do that. We all need to become more connected with our local ecologies so we can do better at restoring their capacity to support us and all life.
So many narratives in the comments about how it isn’t possible for billions to live like this. How expensive it is etc. most of these comments are from people who are unwilling to downsize their current lifestyle in any way or any understanding of what a human needs to live. You don’t even need to own your own land, many farmers need unlimited help and can provide food, places to stay/ camp, water etc. creativity and bravery are what we need, not fear and complacency.
This is a conversation we all need to be having. There is no bloody reason why most people should not be growing some form of food, or learning how to store food for those who can. Drying canning and goods whatever. At this point, we very likely will face a food shortage, and that turnaround time that it takes if we were all to make our lawns edible food gardens. Today, but it would still be possible. Your guest makes an incredible point with 100 acres you could easily feed 100 families high-quality food and provide jobs of value education, and an industry that will regenerate every year into the future.
I appreciate the dedication to be living into the new ways (which are old ways discovered) of living in harmony with nature. I also appreciate the very clear understanding of the role of ruminants in enriching the soil, and how being an omnivore in this circle of care makes perfect sense.
I was involved in a Gurdjieff community several years ago, located in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Gurdjieff was is one who was concerned that we would forget how to be human, if we could ever claim to have been human before. Many things were done “the long way“, eschewing some conveniences, but not adopting a fully Luddite approach. The center was a working farm, and there also was adjacent property on which cattle were raised.
It was the view of that lineage that because women were the “bearers of life“, only men in the community were allowed to slaughter the animals. But they would awaken early, share in a “sitting“ (meditation), so that they would fully bear the solemnity of taking a life.
It was in that context I learned this very beautiful meal grace,
“All life is one, and everything that lives is holy:
Plants, animals, and [humans].
Everything must eat to live and nourish one another.
We bless the lives that have died to give us our food.
Let us eat consciously together,
resolving by our work to pay the debt of our existence.“
Deep gratitude for this video Nate. SOLUTIONS ON THE RISE. Thank you Daniel for all your words of wisdom and care.
I'd love to do what Daniel is doing, but I've never been able to afford a farm and now I'm turning 63 with little desire to get a farm and try to build it up while I'm falling apart and every else around me. I just try to keep a small footprint and enjoy what we have today.
Bless you. Hugs.
Start small. Get a bucket and grow zucchinis using your kitchen waste as a compost. It’s never too late or too small
Keep seeking and share what you're thinking, you'll find a place. Those who see will find you. I built a greenhouse on the south side of my house, and it has changed my life. Winter is green in my world.
Exactly. It is a massive privelage to own land and be able to be sovereign most people don't have that option. That's not to say it isn't great what he is doing but our society makes it really hard or even impossible for others to do that without breaking rules etc.
Don't resign yourself to the idea that it's too late, if anything, I've found great inspiration a seeing 63 year old guy from work run circles around me and I'm 34. His name is Mark and he works full time as well as farms in the morning. It kicks me in the butt and got me to start building my garden and delete all of my video games
We’re two years into our permaculture farming journey. There’s so much to learn to doing it. One of the biggest surprises is what I’ve come to call the flywheel effect. Planting an orchard to grow a variety of fruit, rejuvenating the soil that had been depleted from monoculture crops, composting a quarter acre to make it hyper fertile, putting up fencing, chicken coops, making our pond a haven for fish, frogs and wildlife. It’s interesting and fascinating to watch. This podcast is so spot on. Gotta like the flywheel effect!
We’ve made a lot of mistakes but we’ve learned so much.
The most important part of this conversation, at least for me, is Daniel explaining the importance of being aware and involved into our own life process pertaining to him killing his own livestock. It is truth and reality. So so important to keep it real. Life and death. Thank you Daniel and Nate
Thank you so much for this episode! I am a vegan for the animals and I cried watching this episode, but realized how true Daniel's way of life is!! Thank you both for what you are doing. I watch all of your episodes. I am very grateful that I found your channel.
Nate, this is one of your best interviews yet. Happily it is not so academic and bookish, but down to earth. My life story has been in many ways very similar to Daniel's but there are some major differences. At age 77 I have now spent 49 years living on and trying to preserve the family farm. But this "farm" is actually an abandoned then bulldozed mining village with only "mountain ground" in a gorgeous place in central Pennsylvania. I am treating it as a school now -- "Frank's School" (see the UA-cam channel of that name). The biggest impediment for me is that my family -- nuclear and extended -- are not believers so I have had to do it on my own. What's worse is that my family is reclusive, so I'm pretty much stopped except for what I can teach online. Stubbornly, though, I continue to do what I can with goats, pigs, and 37 acres, while waiting for others to see the light.
While I'm into this, I should also mention that a "technical" difference in what might be called "regenerative agriculture" that I have used along with being organic and nearly fossil free is that I have created a hand dug gravity irrigation system on its way to establishing totally terraced pasture in the style of the Incas, always, though, on PERFECT contours and thus making machinery, which craves or demands parallel "lands", out of place. See "adenerias"; "socalcos"; Laraos, Peru; Swiss bisses; etc. I have posted extensively about this technique.
Well as a fellow land steward, I applaud your dedication and perseverance. You’re leaving a far better legacy than most!
@@downunderyank Thanks, Downunderyank. I'm doing and have been doing the best I can, but I personally am running out of time. Still, for about 40 of the last 50 years there seemed to be no awareness of this at all and it is encouraging that now many people are aware. Still, time is short.
I would love to compare notes with you some. I believe that I have input that could be of use -- not only about the perfect contour gardening, but also about the role of pigs and about a kind of domestic architecture designed specifically for minimalist living. Where I live, I could accept about 20 families of 4 each in a matter of months and with almost no expense. The abandoned village here once is said to have had a population of 100. A problem with urban refugees is not only their lack of skills but also the "baggage" that they would bring with them. I would prefer homeless refugees.
Frank you are an inspiration! I
Really appreciate the new focus on actions to take. We have a small homestead in Missouri and have been moving towards a more self sovereign lifestyle. We also invite the community out and have one apprentice farming couple that comes for a couple hours a week to work with us. They are totally new to farming, so it is a great transfer of skills.
Finding a balance between work in the wider community and personal life is difficult for sure.
Hope you have a great day.
I love this interview, especially these main takeaways:
1. Regenerative actions exist on a continuum and the most important thing is to do what you can, where you are, with what you have - and that the smallest step towards regeneration is the goal. And then another step, and then another.
2. If you want to learn about something hang out with people who are already doing it.
3. If your social circle doesn’t include people who share your concerns for our predicaments and your interests in regeneration, then you need to create new social circles that do.
Yes!!! This is the way❤
❤ Dear Nate, Daniel -- and fellow Great Simplification travellers ...
This particular podcast is so very important, more than most of us can begin to imagine... There is so much depth here ... worlds opening up ...
Writing from Cochabamba, a valley between the Bolivian Andes and Amazon, from where one can "see" the collapse of millenial-old life and social systems and the ever more aggressive and unsustainable takeover of soils, souls, and society by large-scale agroindustry and the accompanying cocaine - mafia- military - political - petro - philanthropic - industrial complex.
At the same time, a few tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of bolivians are still clawing on to traditional farming and (even fewer, deep forest) lifestyles in the more remote Andean mountains, valleys, and cloudforests spilling into the bolivian amazon and the dry chaco forests and deserts ...
My heart is heavy. I feel like i am holding onto glimmering fragments of sunshine and hope with the fingertips of my heart ...
Each word, each conversation, each vegetable, animal, tree, meal, acre, farmer, family, conversation, tool, professional, or system that moves us one step closer to a genuinely sustainable and regenerative planetary paradigm matters.
I am so sick and sad seeing all the corruption, decay, insensitivity, and insanity all around that i sometimes just want to hide and give up on it all. But that is not an option.
The Great Conversation that humens -- and humans -- like you two are having openly can and will change the tide ...
Love. Light. Life.
Your guest referenced the so-called friend who said that he is coming to live with him when thing go bad. Simon Michaux called these people the Vikings.
I hear you my friend!
Please reach out and speak to Geoff Lawton
He's the person that Bill Mollison (founder of Permaculture) passed the torch to for spreading Permaculture.
He runs the Permaculture institute in Australia.
He's been doing permaculture aid work for at least 30 years and maybe longer all over the planet.
He's taught permaculture to thousands of people and runs the most comprehensive online permaculture platform.
He's famous for his "greening the dessert" projects but has also been involved with many other projects such as the Al Baydha re-greening
He has such a wealth of knowledge on these topics and would be an amazing person for you to platform - and can talk in far greater depth about proper solutions that extend further than agriculture
Yeah, I second that! Geoff is a legend.
Yes, he is my teacher and I will vouch for many of the experiments I conducted as from the seeds of ideas he planted in my mind.
Geoff Lawton is my inspiration.
This is one of my favourite episodes so far. I spent a season on a farm in France, so I know a little bit, and Daniel is really summing up my feeling perfectly, even getting a bit fiery in the last sections. It is all a bit ridiculous. You need to make podcasts to tell people how to be more happy and in the end almost nobody picks up the shovel. We don't really need money in the sector, we don't need chilling in the afternoon on a sunny day, drinking organic cocoa and connecting with nature, we need to get our hands dirty FFS and start a movement on the societal level. Plain and simple.
I have to acknowledge, though, that the amount of knowledge you have to amass to start a farm or start growing is not small unless you have a family background. So I am not surprised very few people from the city end up on a farm. These are true heroes, though. It can feel overwhelming and you need to have a personality for that. To be a grounded problem-solver with elementary trust in your abilities. On the other hand, as mentioned, this is all on a spectrum and everybody can do something to help return the land to a more healthy state, no need to really start a farm if this is too much. You can help returning water to the country-side or care for forests. Everybody can find something, I believe.
Totally agree. Here in south brazil, I am trying spent time in comunities vegetsbles gardens in the city where I live and it is really changing my life.
I'm loving this! Thank you for great discussions. Hi from Finland.
Nate you're nailing it so HARD! No words can contain the value this podcast transfers. Thank you! Keep it up! Daniel is a soil warrior.
What a beautiful discussion. I’m still smiling. It gives me such hope knowing that this wonderful man, along with many others, quietly work to weave the old back into the new that is clearly broken. Here is healing and hope. Thank you!
"The difference between dirt and soil" is an appropriate metaphor for the difference between the "normal" American life and the life that Daniel Zetah lives. As a young lad I spent a couple of summers building farm silos in the Ohio/Pennsylvania area. I subsequently spent a couple of decades as a Merchant Marine Navigator traveling to many exotic places all around the world from Antarctica to Africa to Tahiti and many others. I am here to tell you that my experiences "down on the farm" are now more pleasantly memorable in my "golden years" than penguins and girls in grass skirts. It is the difference between "exotic" and "authentic". Dirt and soil.
Harvard study "Nationwide shift to grass-fed beef requires larger cattle population" concluded shifting to grass-fed beef would require 30% more cows and produce 43% more methane- increasing the United States' total methane emissions by 8%. If not grass-fed, cows are eating industrial crops too. 25 calories of plants are required to produce just 1 calorie of beef. It is far more efficient to eat plants ourselves and would result in fewer crop deaths (animals killed during plant harvest).
University of Oxford study "Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers" found with a global population consuming a plant-based diet, we could reduce land use by 75%. That's an area the size of Australia, China, the EU, and the US combined.
Food Climate Research Network and University of Oxford study titled "Grazed and confused" found the potential for carbon sequestration to be just 20-60% of the emissions produced by the cattle.
Notice the lack of citations and actual figures in this conversation. There are numerous studies and articles debunking the entire notion of grazing livestock as a climate change mitigation strategy. "Holistic management- a critical review of Allan Savory’s grazing method", "The Myth of Regenerative Ranching", "The Savory Method Can Not Green Deserts or Reverse Climate Change".
I agree with you wholeheartedly and have the same critique. However I do think those studies are not taking to account all of the processes involved. Even the ways nutrition are measured and co2 sequestration is measured can be challenged. They work on top of assumptions that many farmers lived experiences of improving soil will dispute. I don't raise this because I think that we should use holistic management.... I raise this because unless the studies can accurately take into consideration the nuances and more details of soil health, then the bridge between farmers and science won't ever be crossed due to lack of trust
Scientists aren't farmers and science as a whole is very farm from understanding all of the details of the soil food web. Even recent studies have been surprised by how much co2 is sequestered by fungi and the studies linked definitely don't measure that as they only check for chemical content of soil, not content embodied by the life in the soil
What remains undiscussed is whether grass-fed pasture meat is even scalable, as a shift to grass-fed meat would require a larger cattle population, and more pasture land. Where is all this extra land? Don't such farms require large amounts of pasture for the cattle to roam, not small landholdings? I wish supporters of regenerative farming would be honest about the cost, because not everyone will be able to afford to eat beef or pork on a daily basis if all of it were grass-fed on expansive pasture, where the cows or pigs rotate from one area to another. It seems that (but he seems too polite to say so) Mr. Hagens intuits that daily meat consumption, if you choose to eat meat, is not sustainable (particularly beef and pork). It's odd that Mr. Zetah brings up the ethics of animal killing, but not whether most people would, or should, be able to expect to afford the products of "humane" regenerative animal husbandry and slaughter, which, if it can't feed most people (which i suspect it cannot, because of topographic and geographic constraints), is unsustainable by definition, at least unsustainable to Americans, most of whom expect to eat meat daily.
@@aureliaglenn2220 totally agree. There's just no way for beef, pork and other large animals be a scalable source of protein for the planet in a sustainable way. However I do think there's a place for these animals in our lives, but I'm really not convinced they should be killed.... Beans are a fantastic source of nutrition that scales amazingly. Not only do beans contribute to soil health with nitrogen fixing but they can be grown vertically as many are climbers and you obviously don't need to grow other crops to feed them, nor do you need to clear forest for them. Many people can grow beans in nooks and crannies around human habitat
@@aureliaglenn2220 Why is the debate always cast as being between consuming as much meat as the industrialized world does now vs. going pure vegan? In ancient civilizations, most people ate a plant based diet most of the time, but engaged in ritual animal sacrifices. Those sacrifices were essentially great big communial BBQs, like a neighborhood Fourth of July celebration, or a big Thanksgiving potluck. Let meat be a scarce, expensive luxury. Ration it so the rich don't eat it all.
Fantastic guest.
finally finished this episode and couldn't believe when I heard you both were impacted by Daniel Quinn's book!! This is what I tell people when they ask how my current path started:
I once read a book about a telepathic gorilla who befriends a six year old girl and they have chats about human culture. During one of their discussions, the gorilla talks about the Takers and the Leavers, those early humans who uncovered technology and explored it and started a new type of evolution, and those who remained in their natural flow and foraged and hunted and lived in small groups etc.
It got me thinking about technology in general, about all the compound applied knowledge from its beginning to now. I found myself in my kitchen and looked around, and I just felt profoundly disconnected from all these things in my life. The artifacts, tools, materials, food, energy, data. How it's all produced, the complex markets and supply chains that make everything available to me, and I just felt that I, nor anyone I knew, had any meaningful degree of control over any of it. I thought that should change. And that I should do something.
I guess because I was standing in the kitchen I decided to focus on food first. But let's think about, for a start, the basic, reasonable needs for a living. Food, water, shelter, artifacts, energy, information, whatever society wants to say are the most important basic needs. In those areas, we focus on making distributed versions of the technologies that provide us with these modern basic needs, such that it is embedded in the smallest units of society; the dwelling. The means of production of the basic necessities in convenient, sustainable forms, that are then stewarded and maintained by families and communities. What Fuller might have called "livingry".
Imagine a populace that could have their basic needs met, to have basic safety and security? The stress of survival replaced with space for creativity, problem solving, exploration. The potential could be astronomical! In either direction; I guess... lol, to keep honest consideration of risk, I try to imagine a beautifully advanced utopia while keeping in mind perhaps we go pear-shaped 🙃
Great episode you two!
Play this game. Find one item in your home that got there without benefit of fossil fuels. Your homegrown veggies don't even count, if you used garden tools from the hardware store, or bought seed. The only item I could name in my house was some feathers I picked up on a walk. Also, in your list of necessities for a basic living, don't forget clothes. You don't want to be outdoors in midwinter, naked, or even weeding your garden in summer heat without clothing for protection.
This is a great podcast!
At 55:10 Nate you start asking questions about cows in a CFAO as opposed to a natural grazing system, especially as it relates to CO2 and methane.
What jumped to the forefront of my thought is this: healthy living soils have methogenic bacteria that consume methane. It's a symbiotic system. These bacterium only exist in healthy soils. Cows on grass not only produce less excess methane, but most of what they do produce is consumed by bacteria.
Very rich conversation. Excelent. Thanks a lot!
Sitting just in the space of learning about our predicament(s) will only take you to dark places. In order to avoid despair you need to take it to the place of doing something to create alternative ways of living and being that are more in harmony with our evolutionary experience and nature in which our lives are nested. Permaculture offers an excellent framework for this when you really dive down into it because it gives you a different lens for interacting with the world.
I concur
Why does it take you to a dark place? We are all going to die. Even if our civilization were healthy and sustainable, every single person alive today will grow old and die. On a geologic time scale, the human species will be gone - extinct, or evolved into new forms of life. I don't get people's anxiety over this topic.
i'm 70 and live in the mountains of north georgia. i myself eat an organic whole food plant based diet and would love to become much more involved in a permaculture lifestyle on my property. i find the biggest deterrent is the lack of local people that seem to have any interest. social support is indeed a very important part of the endeavor! it still amazes me how distant my lifestyle is to the average person, even something as simple as composting seems to be beyond the mental grasp of most that come to visit. i'm still in excellent health but not so inclined to a life of hard labor so my progress is slow. i'm incredibly fortunate to have a superb piece of land with spring fed stream and pond and an abundance of native trees and wildlife. i'm hoping that more podcasts such as this one will awaken an interest in others and we will start to see a growing desire for a more sustainable and self sufficient life.
One of the very best episodes you've done, for realism, practicality, and helping to formulate a collective response to the challenge we face.
I've got one foot in the old world and one in the new - I work a 9-5, I have all the trappings of a middle class life, but I've chosen to live in the country on 5 acres, and in the evenings and on the weekends, I'm slowly turning it into a farm. Every year, I grow a little more of my own food. The job is just to pay off the mortgage.
"The Great Humbling", "voluntary energy austerity", you are both gifted communicators and good people. Thank you. You give me learning and tools to practice with. Thank you! thank you!
I live in a small house on a quarter-acre lot in a mid-size Southern city. I often think about whether it would be better for me to buy a farm out in the country, or join some kind of eco-community, or to stay put and take care of the small piece of the Earth that I already have. My neighborhood has many large lots and people love their gardens in the South. If everyone here used the space they already have to grow food, it might not cover 100% of peoples' needs but it could be a large percentage.
If you’ve got community and the capacity to meet many of your needs, stay put, build skills, teach others. Self sufficiency is a myth and we need community more than ever!
Please also consider dedicating some land to native plants. Look up Homegrown National Park for inspiration. Our pollinators and birds need all the help they can get, and they provide humans with "natural services" in return.
Great podcast. I thoroughly agree that what we most need are visions of a regenerative, good life to guide us. Many permaculture folks do live in suburbia but try to adapt in situ, growing some of what we eat, reducing energy and consumption where we are, and buying as locally as we, can, not to mention the re-skilling that goes with that. Permaculture co founder David Holmgren calls this “retrofitting the suburbs “ or Retrosuburbia.
Star trek did a whole movie about this.
A highly technical race of people on a beautiful earth like planet who gave up the technology and lived off the land doing manual labour because of the psychological peace it brought them.
Oh and I seem to remember they banished the psycopaths!
Wish I could remember what the movie was called.
But pretty much what we should be doing!
One of the more inspiring episodes (though I loved your interview with Joslin Faith Kehdy). I'm going to repeat Daniel's words to my 21 yr old: If you're planning on doing what your parents are doing you've got it wrong!
Thank❤🌹🙏 you, Nate and Daniel Zetah! Regenerative agriculture is the only way to go - tech-fixes will only exacerbate our predicament... 😢
I’ve raised meat chickens for our 4-person family for 7-8 years now, including a season doing it small scale commercial, and have included my kids in it from the beginning. As I was doing it with my parents and grandparents when I was quite young.
Just processed my first batch of roosters last month. I was incredibly lucky that an elder dropped by and offered to help. I would have made a disaster of it had he not been there. Made me realize how important to share knowledge to others
Another winner, Nate! Thx. So glad to know about these folks -- just the kind of people I've been wanting to connect with.
Wow, that was truly excellent. Thank you both.
Being able to choose between wants and needs is an objective in most school curricula. I've been working with standards for quite some time. The problem is how to get that accross, especially in these times, in this material world and the influence of social media. It's really difficult. Most teachers probably don't even try anymore...
Excellent interview! good point about there being very few people who share these values. I'd love to live in a world filled with sovereign individuals.
The biggest issue is land use policy that actively prevents people from having land. Also, you can't really own land anyway due to property taxes that keep you renting, this keeps you plugged into the system and prevents you from following this lifestyle.
anyways, i do what I can. After a couple of years, I've noticed I can grow hundreds of pounds of food on just 600 sq ft of growing space! i can't wait until the fruit trees start producing.
Thank you for this interview!! Great conversation. Dr. Bush’s Farmer’s Foootprint is working with commercial AG to convert to natural systems because the profit is there. Want to change values? Change the VALUE proposition. And perhaps teach those folks who go back to the cities/suburbs what they can do where they are! Guerilla gardening, replace your grass with groceries, how to grow food in a condo, roof top gardens, even how to find a farmer’s market… there are lots of ideas available. But finding people you can align to which will foster your growth in the direction you want to go.
fantastic episode! i feel like i might be the target demographic. aware of the polycrisis, carrying some anxiety, burnt out and not able to work my crappy office jerb any longer, but swimming in a sea of consumption where you have to capitalism as hard as possible to survive or even exit capitalism. this was a particularly energizing and re-energizing eposide. thank you!
One of my favourite episodes. I'm really getting into the regen ag in my tidy garden and my veggies love it. I'm also vegan by choice so for me the shooting of the animals would be very unpleasant. I would be concerned if the cows were impregnated artificially rather than naturally. But I'm also into common sense and the Earthling Ed's of this world that say we don't need ruminants I find hard to agree with. It goes against a vegan mantra to include animals in farming and therefore slaughter, but I understand the need for something to be eating, digging and scratching the soil. As for grass fed beef being carbon neutral, I'm not so sure. George Monbiot has a lot to say on this and from memory it's mostly around land use for system returns.
Thank you, Daniel and Nate. This resonates with me so much!
I love Minnesota, and will never leave it.
Great conversation. Thanks!
One comment is that vegans avoid meat not only for ethical and environmental reasons, but also for health related ones. Eating like “royalty”, as Daniel says, has been scientifically linked to diseases of affluence like coronary disease, diabetes, cancer, etc.
They completely ignore the ethics in this discussion.
Enslaving and KILLING them is still unethical, because it's completely unnecessary.
Yes, this is better than factory farming, but still making another sentient species live only for your benefit.
It's USE therefore abuse
There is such a thing as veganic farming that addresses all the issues they say require enslaving cows to solve.
It's just not true.
No one in veganism thinks monoculture is a good idea either
I agree as far as modern processed ‘food’ and industrial scale animal production goes. But our grandparents grew up on farms eating a LOT of meat, often fried in lard, and I think they will be the longest lived generation to have ever existed. We are evolved to consume animal protein, I don’t care what anyone says.
@noahbrown4388 thinking we are "evolved to consume animal protein" is a logical fallacy.
We haven't evolved to do anything.
Evolution doesn't have a goal or purpose. It just is.
Thinking otherwise is a religious belief.
Also, the whole meaning of the word evolution is CHANGE OVER TIME, so whatever we did in the past isn't necessarily where we SHOULD be going
@noahbrown If you are interested in long lived people, take a look at the work of Dan Buettner, in particular his book "The Blue Zones" to learn about lifestyles that are correlated to health and longevity. Definitely, not a lot of meat and lard in those diets.
Great discussion. I made the leap to an off grid, low consumption life over 5 years ago. My costs went down along with my ecological footprint. I was able to pretty much retire (from making money) because my expenses have dropped so much. I have one fifth the ecological footprint I had and about one fifth the costs. I only need to work a few days a month for money now, I have a much lower stress life with a lot more freedom, and I am more financially secure than when I was a part of the rat race.
The notion that people will have to be forced to switch to a low consumption, off grid, self sovereign life is not correct. If people only knew how much better their life would be by becoming more self sufficient, they would be leaving the cities in droves to start homesteads, regenerative no-till farms, intentional communities and eco-villages. The main problem is that these kinds of lifestyles are illegal or blocked in most places.
Thanks for the work you are both doing. There is a large and growing interest in low cost, self sufficient lives. Its important to let people know that not only is this possible, its preferable.
This guest, Iain McGilchrist, yourself is the teaching. Noding is the future. Too many onliners worry about their numbers etc. They must teach out, activate nodes(people) the whole planet and the world polinates.
Thank you so much for this episode, Nate! Daniel, I intend to contact you for consultation. My husband & I are in our mid 60s, retired, and this interview has inspired me to begin a feasibility study of buying land on which to practice regenerative agriculture. Realistically, that is unlikely to happen for a few years, as shopping for and purchasing land will take time. Since we can't count on our strength sustaining us through our 70s and 80s, we will need one or more partners with whom to do the work. Not only would this relieve the cognitive dissonance of living on "securities" investments, it will be more secure as peak oil leads to decreasing economic stability across the US and around the world. I'm in the process of rewilding our suburban yard. I'm a handspinner. I used to be a backpacker. Why didn't I ever think of this?
Extensive animal farming, described in the podcast (as opposed to intensive or feed lot farming) requires more land to produce a given amount of food. Here are some of the points George Monbiot makes:
38% of the planet’s habitable land is used for food production. Of that 38%, 26% is used for animal farming, primarily cattle and sheep, 6% is used for food for farm animals and only 6% is used to directly feed humans. A switch from corn fed beef to pasture fed would require a 270% increase in land dedicated to this type of farming. (Note: cities occupy 1% of land).
Every acre of land we use for animal farming is an acre that cannot be occupied by wildlife ecosystems (a pasture may support some wildlife, but is a large net loss for most species occupying woodlands or forest ecosystems). Extensive farming is the greatest threat to wildlife ecosystems because it is the greatest user of land.
... assuming the rate of meat consumption remains constant. Make it more scarce. Raise the price. People should eat more lentils and beans for their health, anyway.
I saw this guy who works with African farmers on a yt doc, I don't remember his name, who said we could substantially improve ag productivity there by radically increasing ruminant populations and herding. I think he said the herd walking, eating, and pooping all over would improve soil a lot. I think I'm hearing that again here.
53:54 I've been harping on this point for decades now. It's a relief to hear some other farmers articulating it. Once you've seen what tractors/herbacides do to the land you'll understand how eating (pastured) meat is more humane than mono-crop dependant veganism.
Monocrop isn't required for veganism. There are Veganic permaculture small scale farms as well as even biocyclic certifications. Elaine Ingram has shown how crops can be established that replenish soil on large scale without need for pasture
@@tomatao. Totally
@@MashTrombo yep. All true
THANK YOU for mentioning the bit about the meat industry. Cattle are amazing creatures, and they are extremely healthy for humans to eat, but only if they are treated like cows (not prisoners/slaves). Humans are omnivores (although some of us eat only plants), and most of us are healthiest when we eat that way.
I live in a mega city. I cannot be a farmer. I don't buy stuff I don't need. Am I sovereign? We cannot and should not all be farmers. Being sovereign is not enough. Electoralism and voting is not enough. System change is very important. Mass action, activism is also very important. Choice is clear: we unite, we strike massively against growthist capitalism, we shut the s*** down, do a great reset, and a great simplification. Or we perish. Oh, and btw, Degrowth Collective does this.
While you are shutting things down, who will feed you? I will, of course, but I am now in southern France. I suspect there are sympathetic farmers near you.
@@wvhaugen Who said anything about shutting down farms? I said shut the s*** down and by that I mean: fast fashion, SUVs, private jets, yachts, production of unnecessary goods, advertising, planned obsolesce etc etc
I love this concept. The question I have is what percent of the population could realistically leave the city and farm before the farming space becomes too crowded.
That question is not able to be answered with any certainty at all but I’d argue that pre ww1, over 45% of Americans lived and worked on farms, rural America was bustling with thousands of small towns with local economies and tight knit communities meeting munch of their own needs. We’re now at .67% living or working on farms and the average farm size went from 150 or so to over 1000 today. This didn’t happen because we ran out of space, our cultural values shifted from local and quality to cheap and convenient and every kid with any intellect was told to move to the city or they’d be a loser.
if our culture can allocate 93m acres in the US alone for corn production which is 99.99% genetically identical yellow dent #2 that is inedible without heavy processing and makes any being that consumes it sick, I think we could put millions of people back on the land and it’d be good for everyone involved.
@@downunderyank I agree with you Daniel, that it would be a great benefit for all to have millions of people back on the land. It just can't be a solution for everyone. Similar to Nate sourcing his meat from the wild. If everyone chose to do so I would be very surprised if the deer and moose populations could endure the pressure on them.
That question is a really good one, and one that Nate is especially well equipped to find answers to. Nate, I hope you take up that challenge. I'd also like to know more about foreign farmland ownership. A quick search shows it's about 3%, but rising. Land should be owned by the folks who live there. There's also the problem of suburbia and urban sprawl. Before the industrial revolution, cities were limited in size by the farmland close enough to supply them. They were either situated at the best ports, or in the midst of the best farmland. That great farmland has been paved over for suburbia, losing who knows how many tons of topsoil. If urban dwellers would move to much smaller cities, and suburbs would self destruct in favor of farming, could we avoid overpopulation in rural places?
Gabe Brown switched his 2000acre ranch in Montana to a regenerative agriculture, no till organic farm and he makes way more profit than his neighbors who all farm using chemiculture techniques. Once established regenerative farming is more profitable because the expensive inputs are so much less than a chemiculture farm.
Keep in mind the massive amounts of marketing that Gabe Brown does. And he sells his meat to the elites who can afford it.
Nate and Daniel. Thank you for a great conversation. I spent my early life to my early 20s on an industrial family farm (corn, soybeans etc), but couldn't see farming that way economically or environmentally. In the end, it didn't work out for my parents economically. I've always thought of going back and starting something small and sustainable. I was very interested to hear Daniel talk about the contrast between his farm and the local community, because ultimately in small communities one has to get along with your neighbors.
Great talk...this guy Daniel is awesome
Perhaps you two should read George Monbiot’s powerful new book, Regenesis on the massive harms from animal agriculture, including range grown animals.
truly excellent...thank you!!!
This was amazing. Thank you both for this talk. I have dropped out of the rat race. My partner and I are looking for an existing farm to buy and start biodynamic, no-till farming on. I hear from a lot of young people who don't have nest eggs like me, what can they do? I tell them there are lots of regenerative farmers who could use the help now, go stay with them and learn and help.
Do you have any advice on how to get more people who are currently in the system with existing student loans and all the baggage life has handed them how to get out?
That’s the priceless question isn’t it? As long as there isn’t a debtor’s prison, we need young folks smart enough to recognize no amount of money you make making the world worse will ever be worth it and brave enough to jump. We’re actively looking for folks to co-create and co-steward this land with going forward and I know we’re not alone. The skills one needs to live a sovereign life and those you need to restore your local ecology have a lot of overlap. If you commit your life to learning them and making your life better and the world better, you will have far more security and purpose going forward than if you stay temporarily safe in the bosom of the matrix.
Buy something and provide room and board. If you can't afford to pay them so they can pay bills, buy land near a town that has jobs. They don't have to earn a lot if you house and feed them. Then, they can find part-time work to cover loan payments, phone bills, etc. I am building off-grid. I work remotely part-time to pay my phone bill, car insurance, and other monthly expenses until my farm is earning money. I only work 10 to 15 hours per week. So, there are ways. The desire to live this way motivates me to solve personal economic issues. Since I moved here, my bills went from almost $1000/month to $220/month now. It took some effort. I started out living in a tent while I built my cabin. I never felt like i was suffering because I was creating this life. I am debt-free and happy. Most people where I live started in a camper or tent and built everything themselves. I was 50 when I started. Many out here started in their 50s with little money.
Greetings from the Huon Valley Tasmania.
Great to hear your permaculture journey started here Daniel, just like ours.
Sure miss the heart shaped mass filled with black sheep. Say g’day to everyone for me🙂
I live in Tasmania and have been to Lorinna many times, my sister lived there for years. Pretty sure I have met this Lance guy lol
You have done it again :).
Much much gratitude for bring on this guest. Right up my alley and we're I not already 3 hours late, I could respond positively to sooo many things. Maybe good I am late for now, I'll watch again late so as not to let the excited emotional babble take over.
Namaste'
I'm basically in the same situation as this guy, just opposite side of the country. He expresses a lot of my thoughts, opinions and feelings. Good episode.
I listened to the episode and it was great, but I'm conflicted on whether it's wise to stay in the system or leave it for me. I'm a young, radically different high school teacher working on educating kids on ecology, energy and system science as it relates to The Great Humbling. I've managed to squeeze in some gardening for students, but since we're in the city we have no regenerative farm in our vicinity, and even if we did our school system is too rigid to let the farm be a regular place for education. Thoughts on whether I should stay in the system?
Personally I think good educators probably should stay "in" and educate...maybe??? But only if it something you can feel good about doing.
I live in a very densely populated city on the coast of Brazil--I am 72 and my outlet is working as a volunteer gardener in the public gardens and squares!!! I have learned a lot while taking care of a wide variety of tropical plants and trees!!! Start out small and doors will open!!!
We are locked in the system..there is no offgrid..you take the grid with you wherever you go .. an acre lot of land is lots of maintenance and expensive to get up and running..today the most important thing is to cherish each moment, hug our loved ones lots and lots..one day at a time..keep it simple..learn to breathe and listen to your breath.
You can't escape the system.
I'd go listen to professor Guy McPherson discuss how experience doing this and why it was actually counter productive
@@MattAngiono Can you point to a specific video, podcast, or webpage? Counter-productive?!
I grow soybeans, corn and many other things for consumption in my garden and I don’t use any animal inputs nor do I till the soil. The soil here in southern Ohio is not nearly as good as southern MN. I grow cover crops like vetch, clover and rye and I have a compost commode which produces hot compost. Animal agriculture has at least one inherent disadvantage in that it is calorically inefficient. It takes more calories to feed plants to the animals and then consume the animals as opposed to eating plants directly. If we just ate plants, far less land would be required to grow food and the rest could revert to nature which would sequester lots of carbon and would be far more bio diverse than a cow pasture. The downside is everyone would be a nutrient deprived vegan like me: ua-cam.com/video/SiBE2lzj1GA/v-deo.html
THANK YOU FOR SHARING THIS!
I don't understand why this point is continuously ignored (although someone's source of income can easily dictate what truth they are willing to face).
But don't sell yourself short, I'm sure your health is fine or that veganism is not the cause (maybe you're joking? Add some quotations around "deprived" if so )
I clicked the link.... got it lol!
The comments on cows only are accurate when talking about free range grass fed cows. Only 4% of US cattle are “grass-finished”. The food fed to the rest is from tilled land. So per calorie Beef kills many, more dead bunnies than eating monoculture plants.
This dude is A1. Good job Hagens.
I always wonder what would happen if everyone moved from the city to the country. Wouldn’t that destroy an awful lot if habitat? Where would all the animals go if there were people spread out everywhere?
I can tell you’ve never stood in a cornfield and used your senses. There is nothing alive, not even an ant. 93million acres in corn slime each year that is going to make cheap, poor quality at best and toxic at worst “food” for people not currently living on land. Urban folks already use up a ton of land with their choices, they just don’t own it.
That’s the main problem. Overpopulation :/
I’m barely into this discussion and want to express how delighted I am with this new addition! Thank you!
Let me suggest, Nate, that you interview Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen together. And is Wendell Berry still with us and giving interviews? How about a brief one with Joel Salatin? I knew several farmers decades ago in both the Virginia /TN and the New England areas who plowed with horses, did not use artificial fertilizers, and were quietly and contentedly finding a way. The trick is that youth, inheriting (or the ability to afford enough of the right land in the right biome and community / state), and mentoring are all essential. These are all precious limited ‘resources’.
Unfortunately this circles us back to the grim realities of overpopulation / entrenched consumer lifestyle again, so please allow me also suggest Nandita Bajaj for a future interview.
This was awesome. Thank you Nate.
1 kg of dry matter vegetation takes on average 1.65 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere to grow through photosynthesis.
For every kg of dry matter eaten, ruminants like cattle and sheep emit about 22 grams of methane CH4.
Using the IPCC climate forcing calculations which give CH4 28 times the warming potential of CO2, that's 22 x 28 = 616 grams (0.616 kg) of CO2 equivalent emitted for every kg of dry matter vegetation eaten.
It doesn't matter what they eat, where they eat it (CAFO or pasture) or how long they live and eat before slaughter. They eat vegetation that took nearly 3 times more CO2 from the atmosphere to grow than their CO2 equivalent biogenic methane emissions.
Biogenic methane from any livestock is irrelevant, and is a red herring.
CAFO and other feeding systems where feed is brought to stock unfortunately need more fossil fuel inputs to harvest the feed and take it to where it is eaten. Livestock grazed on land more suitable for grazing or in a complementary system on a farm where crops are rotated with pasture and ruminants are part of the rotation (as was traditionally the case on croplands) reduces fossil fuel in comparison with CAFO.
In cold climates, a system where ruminants are housed in winter or any system where their effluent is collected (for example at the milking shed), we also have a golden opportunity to produce methane in biodigesters (biogas) and use it for energy production. This is where efforts regarding biogenic methane in agriculture should be focused.
I started building a homestead on my family’s exurban property. There is less than a few inches of topsoil. Using the geoff lawton chicken manure/ woodchip compost method i have nearly and acre with 1 ft top soil. I wish i could make a living doing it…
An Awesome Podcast guys Thanks! 😇🕊🌏💖
I work on building the tools of sovereignty as well, by inventing automated aeroponic farming appliances to advance sustainable food production at the point of consumption. Food grown outside of the conventional system and its negative externalities, in full control of homes and communities who then decide what is grown, reconnecting them with food at its source. Just part of a grand scheme to build and implement sovereignty, to make every home a nation.
All agriculture is extractive. We need to be clear about this. Soil nutrients with the exception of Nitrogen are heritage resources like fossil fuel and either become depleted or must be extracted elsewhere. There is a reason why the most persistent cultures on earth didn’t practice agriculture. But this also leads into the idea of sovereignty, as agricultural practice requires the private ownership of land, which requires law, government, police, violence, and the rest…all completely at odds with meaningful sovereignty.
It’s worth pursuing the thinking this realization forces in some detail, and for those who can stomach I pursue the topic in some detail on my own channel. My own personal choices are certainly guided thusly. As far as I can see the only functional path forward is the re-engineer what can only be called a neo-indigenous relationship to living, as much as possible bringing the best of human knowledge forward but embracing the essential posture necessary to have a constructive dynamic with life. This may seem heady, but on a personal level it is wholly actionable.
I’m working on a truly non extractive farming system. With many animals and without annual crops hit might be possible - changing our diet and eliminating waste are good first steps
@@SeegerInstitute So has every other farmer in human history. For many poor farmers to do so is just a matter of survival. But, you will forced to extract to pay the property taxes. It might be possible to live within personal habitat but of course that’s no longer agriculture, and there’s no point in owning the land.
m.ua-cam.com/video/uUmIdq0D6-A/v-deo.html&pp=ygUKZ2FiZSBicm93bg%3D%3D
This is great! Please continue having regenerative agriculturalists on the show. 🙏 Some potential guests: Mark Shepard, Wes Jackson and.....me (jus' kidding) .........(but not kidding)
Mark Shepard, Richard Perkins, Elaine Ingham
@@tomatao. None of these are deep in permaculture, Shepard being the best of the three, they mostly just use the word to get attention.
@@RickLarsonPermacultureDesigner what do you mean "deep in permaculture"?
Well that could have been me talking so obviously I will congratulate the two of you on yet another excellent podcast. (Spent the time fitting the kitchen in the new tiny house for my daughter.)
1:24:50 Another thing that's nice to hear a fellow permaculturalist articulate!
Loved this so much.
Super interesting interview. I do wonder, however, if the type of regenerative and self-sufficient farming Daniel practices will become increasingly difficult to the point of not being viable because of increasingly unpredictable weather, fires, invasive species, floods and droughts.
Great conversation but why not just use native wild ruminants such as Bison, Elk, Deer and Pronghorn and not eat them? In the UK we have so much land dedicated to grass fed cows and sheep and have decimated our wildlife in the countryside! Theres more foxes in the towns then the countryside! 🤔
We partner with British white cows on the farm because they’re docile around the many visitors and students we host, are easy to handle and are efficient on grass. Bison would be an excellent choice here in Minnesota too if we had better fences and less visitors. I don’t live in the UK but ever place, ecology and situation is different. The key is using what wants to be in your ecology for their ecosystem services that you can also sustain yourself on. If you can find a way to do that in the medium/long term without eating the ruminants, let me know.
Very interesting story, but the fact is that are 8 billion people. I don’t think there is enough land for all these people to live like this.
Some great stuff covered in here, fabulous overall. The discussion on carbon emissions missed what's absolutely baseline to this discussion however, and that is we must sever our ties to the industrial tit. The Amish understood this, the rest of us seemingly do not. Not to glorify the Amish (and Old Order Mennonites) but rather they are the only extant example on display in developed nations now. You are not sustainable if your energy source is oil and gas and you never will be. The Amish farm economy is propelled by a machine that just appears when you place it in company with other machines of its type - no global chain of resource sourcing, no chain of manufacture, little to no off-farm dependence - and what fuels that machine grows in every field and ditch and renews itself with no inputs from us either. The machine is called the horse. There was never a more elegant system nor one with more potential for sustainability than the horse culture. We had it, we made the mistake of abandoning it, we need to bring it back. This is ground-zero stuff. I don't understand why we so perversely resist this part of the discussion. It's not that we're blind to it. It's that we won't have it. The part about the working horse and how essential it was and will be again - IF we get it in time. Let's incorporate this part of the discussion, too. Whether or not we are there ourselves in our practices yet or ready to make some beginnings in that direction. That's not the point. The point is that this is baseline - a sustainable source of work. There was talk about human labor, the Amish, yet the system, the solution that brought us so elegantly to the eve of our crisis never got any mention. Next time let's hope.
12:53 sovereign + serenity?
43:18 this is hopeful
47:11 best practices want to be practiced
51:42 it's the how not the cow
1:24:31 simplify now and beat the rush
Tipping away listening to ye chat. Daniel reminded me of David the good whose YT channel same name. Keep up with these chats there are people listening and doing actions quietly too. Have a great day lads
Good afternoon Nate and Daniel
Thankyou for this.
SOIL so needs to be more sexy, for Sure.
Local Government has little to no power certainly in Scotland, all very concerning, confusing even.
After eighteen months of disconnection and reconnection, wee bit of a spiritual awakening and much more, both Professionally and individually.
Always find these shared conversations reassuring to say the very least.
Sensemaking brain gym.
Most Grateful for your shared work.
💜
Daniel: 31:40
Nate: Hold my organic locally-sourced beer 😅
Living the American eco privileged dream, I would love this yet I'm one who has to produce the bullets, the tractor the gas etc to feed the family, if only equality could have the whole population live like this, oh we can't, not enough land for 8billion to live this dream. Loved this episode and then went back to reality.
I’m sorry you seem so bitter and jaded. I never said what we were doing was THE answer, it’s merely a multigenerational stepping stone to a different way of living. I don’t like having to work as a mechanic and welder to pay our taxes and insurance and for few bullets and fuel we use but I do it knowing it’s part of the path back to a culture and society that can live more closely tied with Creation.
Надзвичайний подкаст, Даніель передав суть того як жили всі люди близько 150-200 років тому.
Мріймо, звершуймо, спрощуймось!
I wish most of the recent government
incentives allocated for so-called renewable energy had been directed toward regenerative agriculture. It is the truly “green“ solution--from the ecosystem, it preserves, to the quality food it yields, to the carbon it sequesters.. A digital account and/or a special debit card could’ve been created for every legal resident targeted solely to the purchase of the products of regenerative agriculture. Kind of like the FSA system used for medical stuff. That, combined with education about consumption, the “growth“ paradigm, and family planning could go a long way toward healing the ecosystem and mitigate the “overshoot“ that is well underway.
Regenerative agriculture AND permaculture.
I got a lot of friends at Earthaven ❤
Great, but just to be devil's advocate - he's standing on the shoulders of giants. This lifestyle was obviously the only way forward 30-40-50 years ago. Heck, I've been doing it for 25+ years, after reading 'The Oil Drum' and listening to Chris Martensen's Crash Course.......but anyway, maybe there's a whole new generation who need to hear this...
Thank you for saying this. There are many quiet ‘arkadians’ out there ❤️
I am a damned good de-weeder, AND I own my own tools. Is that a good start?
Five thumbs up...KUDOS!
If you're interested in these stoff I would warmest recommended you to watch the film 'Code of Survival'.
Thanks!
Hello Mr. Hagen,
I am wondering if you are a religious person.
The reason I ask is:
I'm not religious, but like your guest, I raise and harvest my own meat. And although I am not religious, I, like you, feel almost a religious moment when processing the animals. After I pull the trigger, and confirm the kill, I thank the animals, and give them some parting words.
It is a very complex "transaction", so to speak, with a weight that borders on the transcendent.
Well said, thanks for sharing your experience with this.
I think regen ag is another excuse for most to not do anything, waiting for someone else to provide ordeal.
I was highly interested in this interview. I have overtime formulated an answer to the would be they will show up when shtf. I do get that from time to time as well. My answer to them is in the attempt to get people to think its best to actually produce an oasis of their own.
Here: You will have to get your timing right. If you are too early you will catch a bullet. After I run out of bullets is the perfect time to show up. If you wait too long there will be nothing left because none of you will know how to operate the system. That's why you don't have a growing area for yourself, you don't know how.
I cant find it. But they reference a book at something that they both seem very excited by. Can someone comment that book so I don't have to re watch thru lol
It’s Ishmael by Daniel Quinn…enjoy the read!
What about the negative health impacts of a red meat heavy diet? Is that driven by how we're feeding cattle, or is it inate (or is it just fake)?
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Slaughterday Sunday ☠️😅☠️
I think you can be relatively healthy eating some meat, but what I have been explained, our bodies are built as herbivores (for example dr Milton Mills) and therefore I think it would be optimal to eat a plant only diet (whole foods and ideally organic)
Everyone’s body is different but i feel so much better eating meat from our farm 6 days a week than when I was a vegetarian for over 6 years. What I’d like for folks to take away from this interview is how we grow our food is more important than what the food is. A perennial based diet is the best diet for us and all the other critters we share this world with and the best way I can do that in minnesota is to eat a lot of meat, nuts, fruits and perennial plants. Other bioregions with different climate and ecologies will have different ways to do that. We all need to become more connected with our local ecologies so we can do better at restoring their capacity to support us and all life.
Going "Solo". Sovereign localized.
So many narratives in the comments about how it isn’t possible for billions to live like this. How expensive it is etc. most of these comments are from people who are unwilling to downsize their current lifestyle in any way or any understanding of what a human needs to live. You don’t even need to own your own land, many farmers need unlimited help and can provide food, places to stay/ camp, water etc. creativity and bravery are what we need, not fear and complacency.
Do sovereign individuals also make their own headphones?
No, we borrow them from friends that buy such things. 😉
@big_farts
Pedantic!