1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:20,080 Going to Seed, inspiring a shift in agriculture towards adaptation, community, and diversity. 2 00:00:20,080 --> 00:00:23,540 I am your host Joseph Lofthaus. 3 00:00:23,540 --> 00:00:31,720 This is my first solo podcast after Shane Simonson started his own podcast, Zero Input 4 00:00:31,720 --> 00:00:33,480 Agriculture. 5 00:00:33,480 --> 00:00:37,860 We wish Shane joy and success in his new endeavor. 6 00:00:37,860 --> 00:00:44,780 In this episode, I'm posting the presentation that I did at the Utah Farm and Food Conference 7 00:00:44,780 --> 00:00:50,600 January 11, 2024 in Cedar City, Utah. 8 00:00:50,600 --> 00:00:56,200 Red Acre Center for Food and Agriculture hosts the conference. 9 00:00:56,200 --> 00:01:02,920 Red Acre Center advocated for the passage of Utah's Food Freedom Law, which allows 10 00:01:02,920 --> 00:01:09,000 individuals to sell food to each other without licenses or regulations. 11 00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:16,160 The center attends the legislative sessions each year advocating for increased food freedom 12 00:01:16,160 --> 00:01:20,800 and continuing preservation of the gains already made. 13 00:01:20,800 --> 00:01:28,040 I highly recommend the work of Red Acre Center and pause for a moment of reverence for Sarah, 14 00:01:28,040 --> 00:01:37,200 Symbria, Mark, Sean, and all others involved in supporting this work. 15 00:01:37,200 --> 00:01:46,640 Going to Seed.org sponsors this podcast, join us there for seeds, farmer support, and complimentary 16 00:01:46,640 --> 00:01:51,840 content like video courses and online forums. 17 00:01:51,840 --> 00:01:56,720 Without further delay, here is my presentation. 18 00:01:56,720 --> 00:01:58,860 Welcome everyone. 19 00:01:58,860 --> 00:02:00,760 My name is Joseph Lofthaus. 20 00:02:00,760 --> 00:02:05,320 I will be talking about adaptation agriculture today. 21 00:02:05,320 --> 00:02:13,600 Oh, and I'd like to thank Red Acre Center and Going to Seed for sponsoring my visit 22 00:02:13,600 --> 00:02:14,600 here today. 23 00:02:14,600 --> 00:02:19,240 I come from up in Cache Valley. 24 00:02:19,240 --> 00:02:25,220 So I used to be a wonderful, great farmer, and I would take all kinds of lovely things 25 00:02:25,220 --> 00:02:27,840 to the farmer's market. 26 00:02:27,840 --> 00:02:32,400 I was even taking crops to farmer's market that don't grow in my valley. 27 00:02:32,400 --> 00:02:34,800 Okra, for example. 28 00:02:34,800 --> 00:02:37,880 It's too cold up in Cache Valley to grow okra well. 29 00:02:37,880 --> 00:02:42,420 I was taking musk melons to farmer's market. 30 00:02:42,420 --> 00:02:45,120 That is a really good place to be as a farmer. 31 00:02:45,120 --> 00:02:49,360 The only farmer that has a crop that is super beloved. 32 00:02:49,360 --> 00:02:53,840 I was growing squash, just abundance of squash. 33 00:02:53,840 --> 00:03:00,520 So did all my other neighbors, but you know, it was fun and just really productive in my 34 00:03:00,520 --> 00:03:01,520 garden. 35 00:03:01,520 --> 00:03:10,600 So I was running a CSA, growing about a hundred varieties of vegetables for my customers, 36 00:03:10,600 --> 00:03:17,400 and I was doing all of this without fertilizers, without compost, without pesticides, with 37 00:03:17,400 --> 00:03:23,420 minimal labor, and just having a beautiful time being a farmer. 38 00:03:23,420 --> 00:03:31,840 I was participating in the HB 181, the Utah Freed Food and Law, where I was making value-added 39 00:03:31,840 --> 00:03:35,480 products, selling them to my neighbors. 40 00:03:35,480 --> 00:03:43,840 Thank you to Sarah and Symbria and Mark for all that they did to get that law passed. 41 00:03:43,840 --> 00:03:48,940 Then people kept saying, you should write a book telling us all about how you did all 42 00:03:48,940 --> 00:03:50,200 of this. 43 00:03:50,200 --> 00:03:53,440 And so I'm like, okay. 44 00:03:53,440 --> 00:03:59,720 So I wrote the book, Land Race Gardening, Food Security Through Biodiversity and Promiscuous 45 00:03:59,720 --> 00:04:01,260 Pollination. 46 00:04:01,260 --> 00:04:06,840 It could have also been called How to Grow Food When You Can't Buy Seeds, Fertilizers, 47 00:04:06,840 --> 00:04:08,840 or Pesticides. 48 00:04:08,840 --> 00:04:16,040 My farming came crashing down because my book sold 9,000 copies. 49 00:04:16,040 --> 00:04:25,360 And people wanted me to be going to conferences, translated my book into French. 50 00:04:25,360 --> 00:04:32,400 And so I started going to all these conferences, more than 100 conferences I spoke at. 51 00:04:32,400 --> 00:04:35,240 And this is Chef Dan Barber from New York. 52 00:04:35,240 --> 00:04:44,520 We're on the stage at Baldor Bites, which is the major food chef cooperative in the 53 00:04:44,520 --> 00:04:46,960 East Coast of the U.S. 54 00:04:46,960 --> 00:04:53,160 This is Chef Dan Barber on my farm up in Paradise, Utah, eating in my house. 55 00:04:53,160 --> 00:04:58,120 I fed a five-star Michelin chef in my house. 56 00:04:58,120 --> 00:05:06,440 And this is Chefs Amber and Robin, who have collaborated with me for many years. 57 00:05:06,440 --> 00:05:09,800 Amber used to be an intern at my farm. 58 00:05:09,800 --> 00:05:15,640 And she now owns a restaurant up in Cache Valley. 59 00:05:15,640 --> 00:05:24,680 I spoke in the 13 U.S. states and spoke to thousands of people over the years. 60 00:05:24,680 --> 00:05:32,560 This is both in mega conferences and also in backyard get-togethers all over everywhere. 61 00:05:32,560 --> 00:05:35,040 I was invited to speak in Europe. 62 00:05:35,040 --> 00:05:44,240 I spoke in five countries in Europe, Croatia, France, England, Scotland, and Denmark. 63 00:05:44,240 --> 00:05:50,280 When I stayed in Scotland, they put me up in a medieval castle. 64 00:05:50,280 --> 00:05:57,360 This village happened to be the village where they filmed the TV series Outlander. 65 00:05:57,360 --> 00:06:01,520 When I stayed in England, they put me up in a palace. 66 00:06:01,520 --> 00:06:06,280 Just had a beautiful experience talking about my book. 67 00:06:06,280 --> 00:06:11,280 When I stayed in Croatia, they put me up in a mud hut. 68 00:06:11,280 --> 00:06:17,000 And that is the epitome, the cutting edge of permaculture technology. 69 00:06:17,000 --> 00:06:21,120 So it was just a beautiful experience. 70 00:06:21,120 --> 00:06:23,960 We had a parade. 71 00:06:23,960 --> 00:06:31,320 And we danced and we sang and we just had a beautiful time. 72 00:06:31,320 --> 00:06:37,600 These two people are the editors of my book in French. 73 00:06:37,600 --> 00:06:40,000 Lovely to spend time with them. 74 00:06:40,000 --> 00:06:45,400 The last day I was in Europe, they put me in a car sort of against my will and they 75 00:06:45,400 --> 00:06:49,520 took me to visit my ancestral home in Denmark. 76 00:06:49,520 --> 00:06:56,560 I got to kneel in the church where my grandfather's grandfather worshipped and ancestors before 77 00:06:56,560 --> 00:06:58,720 that. 78 00:06:58,720 --> 00:07:08,840 So how does a farm boy from northern Utah end up traveling the world to talk about farming? 79 00:07:08,840 --> 00:07:16,520 My family, when I was growing up, were all about control and domination in our farming. 80 00:07:16,520 --> 00:07:19,160 We used pesticides if anything was wrong. 81 00:07:19,160 --> 00:07:21,320 We used herbicides. 82 00:07:21,320 --> 00:07:28,180 We tilled the ground so that it was bare soil and then we had to add synthetic chemical 83 00:07:28,180 --> 00:07:32,920 fertilizers so that we could grow something. 84 00:07:32,920 --> 00:07:36,660 Seeds that I planted were covered in poisons. 85 00:07:36,660 --> 00:07:42,300 After we took that poison seeds in our bare hands, we went and had lunch. 86 00:07:42,300 --> 00:07:47,200 No concern at all for any of those chemicals, what harm they might be doing to us, to the 87 00:07:47,200 --> 00:07:49,120 ecosystem. 88 00:07:49,120 --> 00:07:51,140 So then what did I do? 89 00:07:51,140 --> 00:07:54,480 I went and became a chemist. 90 00:07:54,480 --> 00:08:03,000 And I was working on projects to develop pesticides when I was in high school. 91 00:08:03,000 --> 00:08:06,680 That work continued when I went to the university. 92 00:08:06,680 --> 00:08:11,640 I graduated from university, went to work in the pharmaceutical industry. 93 00:08:11,640 --> 00:08:15,080 Then I went to work in the pesticide industry. 94 00:08:15,080 --> 00:08:22,920 One of the projects I worked on was I was getting samples from tropical climates like 95 00:08:22,920 --> 00:08:24,720 the neem oil. 96 00:08:24,720 --> 00:08:31,680 It was a project I developed 30 years ago to turn neem oil into a pesticide. 97 00:08:31,680 --> 00:08:37,920 Because supposedly for the Japanese, if it's a naturally occurring substance and it's poisonous, 98 00:08:37,920 --> 00:08:41,920 then you can use it because it's okay. 99 00:08:41,920 --> 00:08:47,400 And so, oh, I'll tell you a story that's not on my script. 100 00:08:47,400 --> 00:08:52,440 So in the lab, because we were getting all these samples from all over, we had cockroaches 101 00:08:52,440 --> 00:08:54,960 that were the size of mice. 102 00:08:54,960 --> 00:09:00,160 And it was so fun because every once in a while, you know those toothpicks that you 103 00:09:00,160 --> 00:09:04,780 find that have the little flags on them for making fancy sandwiches? 104 00:09:04,780 --> 00:09:12,240 You'd find a cockroach with that sticking out of its heart, laying in the hallway somewhere. 105 00:09:12,240 --> 00:09:20,520 But anyway, that was so fun. 106 00:09:20,520 --> 00:09:30,760 So that was a terrible time for me because I was involved in an industry that I knew 107 00:09:30,760 --> 00:09:33,640 was based on lies. 108 00:09:33,640 --> 00:09:38,460 The research we did was lies, the way we presented it to people were lies. 109 00:09:38,460 --> 00:09:46,920 And then to make matters worse, I was transferred into a department dealing with chemical weapons. 110 00:09:46,920 --> 00:09:51,400 So I just kept doing my job. 111 00:09:51,400 --> 00:09:54,280 And it was horrible and dark. 112 00:09:54,280 --> 00:09:56,860 You can tell my health suffered from it. 113 00:09:56,860 --> 00:10:00,960 And my body was so inflexible, I could barely move. 114 00:10:00,960 --> 00:10:05,200 My mind was so inflexible, I could barely think. 115 00:10:05,200 --> 00:10:16,180 And then they transferred me to the biological weapons department. 116 00:10:16,180 --> 00:10:18,800 I went back to my desk. 117 00:10:18,800 --> 00:10:26,920 I wrote out a resignation letter, and I left the building never to return. 118 00:10:26,920 --> 00:10:30,720 I ended up in a monastery in Provo, Utah. 119 00:10:30,720 --> 00:10:36,840 I spent three years there while I was recovering. 120 00:10:36,840 --> 00:10:44,520 While I was at the monastery, I says, okay, I'm going to apply my chemical knowledge, 121 00:10:44,520 --> 00:10:48,640 my understanding of science to figure out what is wrong with me. 122 00:10:48,640 --> 00:10:54,560 Why am I like I am? 123 00:10:54,560 --> 00:11:03,240 Turns out for me, the vegetable oils were killing me because of the high concentration 124 00:11:03,240 --> 00:11:10,640 of the omega-6 oils in like the corn oil, the soybean oil, the canola oil, the cottonseed 125 00:11:10,640 --> 00:11:11,640 oil. 126 00:11:11,640 --> 00:11:16,760 Basically, all the oils that I'm eating were causing inflammation in my body, and they 127 00:11:16,760 --> 00:11:19,960 were just making me sick. 128 00:11:19,960 --> 00:11:22,260 So where do those oils come from? 129 00:11:22,260 --> 00:11:28,240 They come from the chemical companies that I had just stopped working for. 130 00:11:28,240 --> 00:11:37,160 The chemical companies own like on corn, 85% of the corn seed that is sold is sold by a 131 00:11:37,160 --> 00:11:40,640 chemical company. 132 00:11:40,640 --> 00:11:46,480 Like 90% of the cottonseed that is sold is sold by a chemical company. 133 00:11:46,480 --> 00:11:52,680 And then in order to grow that crop, you have to apply the chemicals that the chemical company 134 00:11:52,680 --> 00:11:56,000 are applying to your crop. 135 00:11:56,000 --> 00:12:02,440 So that whole system is designed that the chemical companies own the seed companies, 136 00:12:02,440 --> 00:12:09,000 and the chemical companies are determining what we can grow, what we can eat. 137 00:12:09,000 --> 00:12:11,920 After three years, I left the monastery. 138 00:12:11,920 --> 00:12:17,320 I returned to my home village, and I became a farmer. 139 00:12:17,320 --> 00:12:23,080 I said that is the furthest thing away from these chemicals that I can possibly get. 140 00:12:23,080 --> 00:12:28,640 I made a vow that I would never use those chemicals again. 141 00:12:28,640 --> 00:12:31,040 I wouldn't apply poisons to my garden. 142 00:12:31,040 --> 00:12:35,020 I wouldn't apply the fertilizers to my garden. 143 00:12:35,020 --> 00:12:41,280 And I wouldn't use the plastics to protect my crops. 144 00:12:41,280 --> 00:12:45,260 So this field is 5,000 feet elevation. 145 00:12:45,260 --> 00:12:48,080 Those mountains are 9,000 feet elevation. 146 00:12:48,080 --> 00:12:54,560 So all summer long, the cold air comes down out of those mountains into my field. 147 00:12:54,560 --> 00:13:01,200 Makes it super difficult to grow any warm weather crops. 148 00:13:01,200 --> 00:13:07,760 I could not grow the hybrid crops because they totally are dependent on those chemicals. 149 00:13:07,760 --> 00:13:13,200 And they just failed for me when I tried to grow them without chemicals. 150 00:13:13,200 --> 00:13:19,700 And so I thought, whoa, I'll grow these heirlooms, these open pollinated varieties. 151 00:13:19,700 --> 00:13:22,060 They didn't work for me either. 152 00:13:22,060 --> 00:13:25,280 Because what's the definition of an heirloom? 153 00:13:25,280 --> 00:13:30,680 An heirloom is a crop from far away and long ago. 154 00:13:30,680 --> 00:13:37,920 An heirloom was developed for like Iowa, where there's a long growing season. 155 00:13:37,920 --> 00:13:39,380 It's damp. 156 00:13:39,380 --> 00:13:47,480 Or an heirloom was developed for Oregon, where it's always cloudy and low elevation. 157 00:13:47,480 --> 00:13:50,280 And so the heirlooms also failed for me. 158 00:13:50,280 --> 00:13:58,020 If I bought a variety from the seed catalog, there would be like a 75% chance of it just 159 00:13:58,020 --> 00:13:59,840 failing on my garden. 160 00:13:59,840 --> 00:14:04,520 And there's no way for me to predict ahead of time which ones would fail and which ones 161 00:14:04,520 --> 00:14:06,000 would do good. 162 00:14:06,000 --> 00:14:13,680 If I tried to grow tomatoes, it would be like a 97% failure rate. 163 00:14:13,680 --> 00:14:18,520 They just weren't happy growing in my garden. 164 00:14:18,520 --> 00:14:22,200 This is an okra plant, the first time I planted okra. 165 00:14:22,200 --> 00:14:26,780 After an entire growing season, it got this high. 166 00:14:26,780 --> 00:14:32,540 And it succumbed to frost on the first little hint of frost and it was gone. 167 00:14:32,540 --> 00:14:38,320 That was pretty typical of anything that I would try to grow. 168 00:14:38,320 --> 00:14:43,520 I was looking around for something that would be interesting for my customers. 169 00:14:43,520 --> 00:14:48,600 Just something that wouldn't be the boring yellow sweet corn that I had tried, that I'd 170 00:14:48,600 --> 00:14:51,160 grown my whole life. 171 00:14:51,160 --> 00:15:00,200 And there was a farmer in Indiana, Alan Bishop, who had a sweet corn with colors in it. 172 00:15:00,200 --> 00:15:07,160 And I got that corn and I planted it on the same day that I planted my hybrid sweet corn, 173 00:15:07,160 --> 00:15:13,500 except I'd got smart and I told the guy at the seed store that I wanted my hybrid sweet 174 00:15:13,500 --> 00:15:16,200 corn without the chemicals on it. 175 00:15:16,200 --> 00:15:24,400 So the corn I got from Alan germinated 100%, it grew beautiful, and the corn that I got 176 00:15:24,400 --> 00:15:31,800 from my seed supplier without the poisons germinated at 5%. 177 00:15:31,800 --> 00:15:38,200 When I tasted this, it blew my mind because every color on there is a different flavor 178 00:15:38,200 --> 00:15:41,920 and they're beautiful flavors. 179 00:15:41,920 --> 00:15:52,720 I says to myself, I am going to convert every variety that I grow into this kind of growing. 180 00:15:52,720 --> 00:15:58,600 The name we were using back then for this type of growing is landrace. 181 00:15:58,600 --> 00:16:06,640 And a landrace is a variety that is genetically diverse, it's promiscuously pollinating, and 182 00:16:06,640 --> 00:16:09,880 it's locally adapted. 183 00:16:09,880 --> 00:16:14,600 Because it's locally adapted, it becomes part of the community. 184 00:16:14,600 --> 00:16:19,960 It becomes part of the microbe community, part of the insect community, part of the 185 00:16:19,960 --> 00:16:23,480 human community. 186 00:16:23,480 --> 00:16:29,440 Since that time, we've started calling this adaptation agriculture. 187 00:16:29,440 --> 00:16:34,440 Crops that are promiscuously pollinating and genetically diverse so that they can adapt 188 00:16:34,440 --> 00:16:37,000 themselves to the environment. 189 00:16:37,000 --> 00:16:43,600 What I have found over the years is that the ecosystem does 80% of the selection, and all 190 00:16:43,600 --> 00:16:49,280 I have to do is just stay out of the way. 191 00:16:49,280 --> 00:16:56,040 So the first crop that I decided to work on was cantaloupes. 192 00:16:56,040 --> 00:17:02,320 I gathered together about 30 varieties of cantaloupes that I got from the internet, 193 00:17:02,320 --> 00:17:08,520 from the grocery store, from the farmers market, wherever I could find seeds from cantaloupes. 194 00:17:08,520 --> 00:17:10,480 And I planted them. 195 00:17:10,480 --> 00:17:15,920 And the first year, most of what I planted didn't germinate, or it germinated and got 196 00:17:15,920 --> 00:17:19,720 this big during the growing season. 197 00:17:19,720 --> 00:17:25,560 But a few plants at the end of the growing season produced a few green fruits. 198 00:17:25,560 --> 00:17:29,780 I saved the seeds, replanted them. 199 00:17:29,780 --> 00:17:37,960 The second year, some of the plants grew small, some of them grew abundantly. 200 00:17:37,960 --> 00:17:44,240 There were two plants that second year that produced more fruits than 100 other plants 201 00:17:44,240 --> 00:17:46,160 all combined together. 202 00:17:46,160 --> 00:17:49,680 So save seeds, replanted. 203 00:17:49,680 --> 00:17:59,760 The third year, I was harvesting bushels and bushels and bushels of cantaloupes. 204 00:17:59,760 --> 00:18:06,120 And that third year has pretty much, in my experience, become what I call the magical 205 00:18:06,120 --> 00:18:07,120 year. 206 00:18:07,120 --> 00:18:12,280 Because the first year, anything that isn't suitable for my garden, it just goes ahead 207 00:18:12,280 --> 00:18:13,620 and dies. 208 00:18:13,620 --> 00:18:18,520 The second year, the best of the best cross with each other. 209 00:18:18,520 --> 00:18:22,680 And so by the third year, they can really thrive. 210 00:18:22,680 --> 00:18:26,560 And that happens over and over and over again. 211 00:18:26,560 --> 00:18:34,440 Another thing that happened with the cantaloupes that I was totally unprepared for is that 212 00:18:34,440 --> 00:18:39,040 every year before I save seeds from something, I taste it. 213 00:18:39,040 --> 00:18:43,520 If I don't like the flavor, I throw the seeds away. 214 00:18:43,520 --> 00:18:53,320 And so my cantaloupes ended up being super tasty, super sweet, super aromatic. 215 00:18:53,320 --> 00:18:57,680 One day, it was raining when I harvested and I didn't want them to get wet. 216 00:18:57,680 --> 00:19:03,760 So I put them in the cab of my truck instead of in the back of my truck. 217 00:19:03,760 --> 00:19:10,720 And the aroma gassed me out because they were just so aromatic. 218 00:19:10,720 --> 00:19:14,840 That's beautiful for farmers market. 219 00:19:14,840 --> 00:19:19,840 I had to give these a different name because I would go to farmers market and people would 220 00:19:19,840 --> 00:19:22,800 say, I don't like cantaloupe. 221 00:19:22,800 --> 00:19:26,600 And I'm like, this isn't a cantaloupe. 222 00:19:26,600 --> 00:19:30,240 This is a musk melon. 223 00:19:30,240 --> 00:19:36,800 Because what I was growing was not even close to the same product that the grocery stores 224 00:19:36,800 --> 00:19:40,000 were selling. 225 00:19:40,000 --> 00:19:46,440 So those of you that are farmers in the room or gardeners, you go and you sell this musk 226 00:19:46,440 --> 00:19:49,640 melon for $4 at the farmers market. 227 00:19:49,640 --> 00:19:54,360 It has got $60 worth of seeds in it. 228 00:19:54,360 --> 00:20:00,440 So it didn't take me very long to realize that as a farmer, I could make a lot more 229 00:20:00,440 --> 00:20:06,740 money selling seeds than I could by selling fruits and vegetables. 230 00:20:06,740 --> 00:20:13,000 And so I converted my whole strategy towards the seed growing. 231 00:20:13,000 --> 00:20:16,720 Of course, if I'm growing seeds, I have an abundance of vegetables. 232 00:20:16,720 --> 00:20:23,880 And so I was still going to farmers markets and still supporting a community or a CSA. 233 00:20:23,880 --> 00:20:29,800 But my primary focus was to grow the seeds. 234 00:20:29,800 --> 00:20:37,320 And I was saving thousands of dollars a year on my seed costs because I wasn't having to 235 00:20:37,320 --> 00:20:41,000 buy seeds commercially because I was growing my own. 236 00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:45,640 And I was getting crops that grew better for me than any crops that I could possibly buy 237 00:20:45,640 --> 00:20:47,640 from a seed catalog. 238 00:20:47,640 --> 00:20:52,400 So I remember the okra that we started out with. 239 00:20:52,400 --> 00:20:58,280 There was one plant in the okra patch at the end of the fall that didn't care about the 240 00:20:58,280 --> 00:21:02,240 fall frost. 241 00:21:02,240 --> 00:21:04,640 And it produced seeds. 242 00:21:04,640 --> 00:21:10,400 So I saved seeds from that, replanted. 243 00:21:10,400 --> 00:21:14,760 Three years later, the okra was taller than the farmer. 244 00:21:14,760 --> 00:21:22,680 I was harvesting okra to take to farmers market just because it was locally adapted. 245 00:21:22,680 --> 00:21:29,000 All of my growing is done without fertilizers, without plastics. 246 00:21:29,000 --> 00:21:30,220 I have a greenhouse. 247 00:21:30,220 --> 00:21:35,280 I use it to start tomatoes and peppers early in the spring. 248 00:21:35,280 --> 00:21:40,700 That's mostly because there's a bug that eats my tomatoes if they germinate in the field. 249 00:21:40,700 --> 00:21:45,700 But if I put three-inch plants out, the tomato can outgrow the bug. 250 00:21:45,700 --> 00:21:48,520 And peppers are just on me up in my cold climate. 251 00:21:48,520 --> 00:21:57,180 But yeah, that was all done without high tunnels, without row covers, anything like that. 252 00:21:57,180 --> 00:22:02,120 The seeds that I grow I send to Experimental Farm Network, which is in New Jersey, and 253 00:22:02,120 --> 00:22:06,360 they distribute them for me so I don't touch them. 254 00:22:06,360 --> 00:22:10,020 Yes, the question was, do I direct so? 255 00:22:10,020 --> 00:22:15,800 And it's like I direct so everything except the tomatoes and the peppers, just because 256 00:22:15,800 --> 00:22:21,100 I have found that that's more reliable if they don't have the transplant shock. 257 00:22:21,100 --> 00:22:27,800 So that gave me time to go to festivals, to party, to have a good time. 258 00:22:27,800 --> 00:22:39,300 Also I lost 70 pounds because I had stopped eating the seed oils and I had stopped eating 259 00:22:39,300 --> 00:22:45,780 the sugar and the wheat that had been causing me so much problems when I was working in 260 00:22:45,780 --> 00:22:50,860 the chemical industry and my whole life was centered around eating the products of the 261 00:22:50,860 --> 00:22:55,080 chemical industry. 262 00:22:55,080 --> 00:23:02,720 I feel a lot better than I have in the decades before this. 263 00:23:02,720 --> 00:23:09,260 So I was a farmer, and I'm kind of a lazy farmer and I don't like weeding. 264 00:23:09,260 --> 00:23:15,600 I was having a real hard time growing carrots for farmers' market. 265 00:23:15,600 --> 00:23:22,220 So I says, okay, duh, we're going to apply the principles of adaptation gardening to 266 00:23:22,220 --> 00:23:24,320 the carrots. 267 00:23:24,320 --> 00:23:26,060 Because what happens with carrots? 268 00:23:26,060 --> 00:23:33,420 You plant them, they take three weeks to germinate, it's so slow, and by the time they've germinated, 269 00:23:33,420 --> 00:23:37,500 the weeds are this tall and the carrots can't compete. 270 00:23:37,500 --> 00:23:43,180 And so I was just losing my crops over and over again to the weeds. 271 00:23:43,180 --> 00:23:48,520 And so I planted a crop of carrots and did zero weeding on them. 272 00:23:48,520 --> 00:23:57,740 First year, I got some carrots that were about this big and the diameter of a pencil. 273 00:23:57,740 --> 00:24:01,020 I saved them, grew seeds from them. 274 00:24:01,020 --> 00:24:08,940 Whoops, I get ahead of myself. 275 00:24:08,940 --> 00:24:11,740 You know where this is going. 276 00:24:11,740 --> 00:24:19,020 Well, so carrots are a crop that flowers the second year. 277 00:24:19,020 --> 00:24:24,480 And so the first year, they had produced a root. 278 00:24:24,480 --> 00:24:29,960 It was a tiny root, but it was enough of a root that the second year it could go to seed. 279 00:24:29,960 --> 00:24:35,620 And so then the second time I grew the carrots, I got harvested carrots about the size of 280 00:24:35,620 --> 00:24:37,220 my thumb. 281 00:24:37,220 --> 00:24:40,860 And so replanted those, grew seeds. 282 00:24:40,860 --> 00:24:44,700 The third year, I weeded the carrots one time. 283 00:24:44,700 --> 00:24:48,020 You see this little carrot down here? 284 00:24:48,020 --> 00:24:51,820 That is what my carrots used to grow like. 285 00:24:51,820 --> 00:24:56,900 And this is what I had selected for them to grow like. 286 00:24:56,900 --> 00:25:02,200 And the third year, with one weeding, I was harvesting carrots that weighed three to five 287 00:25:02,200 --> 00:25:05,300 pounds each. 288 00:25:05,300 --> 00:25:13,780 And so now I can reliably grow carrots for the farmer's market. 289 00:25:13,780 --> 00:25:19,940 I never sold those except that that photo went into my book and I sold 9,000 copies 290 00:25:19,940 --> 00:25:23,680 of my book. 291 00:25:23,680 --> 00:25:29,060 If you ever want to write a book, make sure that you take lots of photos of your garden 292 00:25:29,060 --> 00:25:32,060 because you might want to put them in your book. 293 00:25:32,060 --> 00:25:36,660 One of the mistakes I made when I was like 10 years ago, my computer was running out 294 00:25:36,660 --> 00:25:38,120 of disk space. 295 00:25:38,120 --> 00:25:42,540 And so I compressed all my photos down to these little photos and then I couldn't use 296 00:25:42,540 --> 00:25:45,320 them when I published my book. 297 00:25:45,320 --> 00:25:53,660 So if I had it to do over again, I'd just buy disk space to store the photos. 298 00:25:53,660 --> 00:26:00,380 So the question was, when we're saving carrots for seeds, do you harvest the roots and store 299 00:26:00,380 --> 00:26:03,180 them inside or in the ground? 300 00:26:03,180 --> 00:26:04,180 Yes. 301 00:26:04,180 --> 00:26:13,340 It's really hard for me to store carrots either way, but I do some of both and sometimes it 302 00:26:13,340 --> 00:26:15,780 works and sometimes it doesn't. 303 00:26:15,780 --> 00:26:20,980 If I had it to do over again, I would select for carrots that could store in the ground 304 00:26:20,980 --> 00:26:25,700 because that's easier for me as a farmer than trying to store them in sand in the garage 305 00:26:25,700 --> 00:26:28,780 or something like that. 306 00:26:28,780 --> 00:26:38,260 If I put straw over top of them in the fall about a foot of straw, they'll store all winter. 307 00:26:38,260 --> 00:26:42,420 Pollination is highly localized. 308 00:26:42,420 --> 00:26:46,460 When you watch a bee pollinating flowers, it goes from here to here to here to here. 309 00:26:46,460 --> 00:26:51,300 It doesn't go from here and back to here. 310 00:26:51,300 --> 00:26:58,540 And so you can grow multiple crops on your farm if they're separated by whatever the 311 00:26:58,540 --> 00:27:01,380 distances that works for the crop. 312 00:27:01,380 --> 00:27:08,460 Like when I grow squash and they're 100 feet separation, I see about 5% cross pollination 313 00:27:08,460 --> 00:27:16,000 between them, which is okay and I don't mind that. 314 00:27:16,000 --> 00:27:18,420 I love my yellow crook neck. 315 00:27:18,420 --> 00:27:20,320 It always has to be yellow. 316 00:27:20,320 --> 00:27:22,700 It always has to have a crook neck. 317 00:27:22,700 --> 00:27:27,080 And so I grow my yellow crook neck in isolation. 318 00:27:27,080 --> 00:27:31,940 I might grow 20 different varieties of yellow crook neck all mixed together, but they're 319 00:27:31,940 --> 00:27:32,940 always yellow. 320 00:27:32,940 --> 00:27:35,260 They're always the crook neck shape. 321 00:27:35,260 --> 00:27:41,320 With other crops, I like the cross pollination because the cross pollination allows the local 322 00:27:41,320 --> 00:27:43,460 adaptation to occur. 323 00:27:43,460 --> 00:27:51,780 And if we're inbreeding, the plants are getting weaker every generation because a crop that 324 00:27:51,780 --> 00:28:02,460 self-pollinates loses half of its remaining genetic diversity in every generation. 325 00:28:02,460 --> 00:28:06,700 And so this is how I was taught to farm when I was growing up. 326 00:28:06,700 --> 00:28:09,660 Control domination, perfect weeding. 327 00:28:09,660 --> 00:28:13,380 I decided I wasn't going to grow that way anymore. 328 00:28:13,380 --> 00:28:17,780 So this is how I currently grow my beans. 329 00:28:17,780 --> 00:28:22,660 I might run the tiller along the edge of the bean row, but inside the bean row, they're 330 00:28:22,660 --> 00:28:26,800 totally unweeded. 331 00:28:26,800 --> 00:28:32,020 Because of that, I now have beans in my garden that have gone feral. 332 00:28:32,020 --> 00:28:38,580 They plant themselves, they grow themselves, and all I have to do is go to harvest them. 333 00:28:38,580 --> 00:28:41,660 What a beautiful thing for a farmer to do. 334 00:28:41,660 --> 00:28:48,500 Just walk out into the field and harvest something that grew itself. 335 00:28:48,500 --> 00:28:53,740 Which gives me more time to play and have fun and learn to play the guitar and learn 336 00:28:53,740 --> 00:28:55,760 to chant. 337 00:28:55,760 --> 00:29:03,060 So I thought that I would do the same kind of strategy with tomatoes. 338 00:29:03,060 --> 00:29:05,940 Ha. 339 00:29:05,940 --> 00:29:14,420 When the tomatoes were domesticated, 95 percent of the genetic diversity got left in the wild. 340 00:29:14,420 --> 00:29:20,100 That is genetic diversity for how to deal with the farmer's habits, with the soil, with 341 00:29:20,100 --> 00:29:23,900 the diseases, with the bugs. 342 00:29:23,900 --> 00:29:30,260 And so there just wasn't enough genetic diversity left in tomatoes for me to be able to do a 343 00:29:30,260 --> 00:29:35,180 breeding project with them. 344 00:29:35,180 --> 00:29:37,140 So I started looking around. 345 00:29:37,140 --> 00:29:40,860 How can we solve this problem? 346 00:29:40,860 --> 00:29:48,060 It turns out that there are tomatoes growing in the Andes Mountains that are promiscuously 347 00:29:48,060 --> 00:29:50,120 pollinating. 348 00:29:50,120 --> 00:29:55,780 Some plant explorers went and gathered those seeds together 50 years ago. 349 00:29:55,780 --> 00:30:02,100 This is a promiscuous tomato flower from the Andes compared to a domestic tomato flower. 350 00:30:02,100 --> 00:30:11,820 So I crossed those together and found tremendous diversity in the leaf shapes, in the fruits. 351 00:30:11,820 --> 00:30:17,940 But the most amazing thing that came out of this crossing was we were finding flavors 352 00:30:17,940 --> 00:30:20,660 that are totally unknown in tomatoes. 353 00:30:20,660 --> 00:30:28,260 Our taste testers are describing them as tangerine, guava, plum, melon. 354 00:30:28,260 --> 00:30:33,860 Just these beautiful aromatic tropical flavors. 355 00:30:33,860 --> 00:30:37,540 We found one that a chef calls sea urchin. 356 00:30:37,540 --> 00:30:42,820 Anyway, but just these beautiful flavors. 357 00:30:42,820 --> 00:30:48,820 This is the current generation that was grown in Moss Beach, California this summer. 358 00:30:48,820 --> 00:30:53,740 Just delightful tomatoes. 359 00:30:53,740 --> 00:31:01,020 Chef Dan Barber took some of my tomatoes because he's enamored with the flavors of the tomatoes. 360 00:31:01,020 --> 00:31:12,700 And he submitted the tomatoes to Dr. James White, who's a microbiologist at Rutgers University. 361 00:31:12,700 --> 00:31:14,540 See the blue in this? 362 00:31:14,540 --> 00:31:17,760 That's the root hair of one of my tomatoes. 363 00:31:17,760 --> 00:31:28,420 And those are nitrogen fixing bacteria that are living in the roots of my tomatoes. 364 00:31:28,420 --> 00:31:35,540 Fifteen years of not adding fertilizer to my garden, the tomatoes and the microbes figured 365 00:31:35,540 --> 00:31:41,380 out how to support each other. 366 00:31:41,380 --> 00:31:49,260 Those same types of nitrogen fixing bacteria live inside the roots of corn. 367 00:31:49,260 --> 00:31:55,020 People tell you, corn, you have to fertilize it like everything because it decimates the 368 00:31:55,020 --> 00:31:58,220 garden and the soil fertility. 369 00:31:58,220 --> 00:32:04,780 No, corn knows how to have relationships with microbes. 370 00:32:04,780 --> 00:32:11,220 This gel that surrounds the roots of the corn is a host to microbes that make nitrogen for 371 00:32:11,220 --> 00:32:13,740 the corn. 372 00:32:13,740 --> 00:32:20,540 What the chemical companies did is they sprayed pesticides on the fields that damaged the 373 00:32:20,540 --> 00:32:23,100 microbe population. 374 00:32:23,100 --> 00:32:29,700 They sprayed chemical fertilizers on the fields, which damaged the microbe population. 375 00:32:29,700 --> 00:32:34,340 And they selected for corn that doesn't have these roots. 376 00:32:34,340 --> 00:32:39,340 So the corn, even if you didn't apply that kind of chemicals to the field, couldn't make 377 00:32:39,340 --> 00:32:45,580 its own fertilizer because it doesn't have the roots that interact with the microbes. 378 00:32:45,580 --> 00:32:50,340 And so one of the projects that I've been involved in is selecting for those kinds of 379 00:32:50,340 --> 00:32:56,060 roots on corn, which were the ancestral way that corn was grown. 380 00:32:56,060 --> 00:33:02,420 But that little root nodule, when you're tilling your fields, it doesn't break down very easy. 381 00:33:02,420 --> 00:33:04,700 And so it's annoying to farmers. 382 00:33:04,700 --> 00:33:11,700 So if you select against that, you help the farmers. 383 00:33:11,700 --> 00:33:20,220 So if you see corn that has that in your gardens, glom onto it and treat it special. 384 00:33:20,220 --> 00:33:26,700 I apply this same sort of principle everything that I grow. 385 00:33:26,700 --> 00:33:30,660 I like bugs in my garden. 386 00:33:30,660 --> 00:33:33,100 This is a Colorado potato beetle. 387 00:33:33,100 --> 00:33:35,900 It likes to eat potatoes. 388 00:33:35,900 --> 00:33:40,540 And in my garden, I made a contract with the Colorado potato beetles. 389 00:33:40,540 --> 00:33:42,700 I said, I will never spray you. 390 00:33:42,700 --> 00:33:44,460 I will never poison you. 391 00:33:44,460 --> 00:33:51,900 I will never harm you in any way as long as you don't eat my potatoes or my tomatoes. 392 00:33:51,900 --> 00:33:56,820 Because I have a wild weed that I grow in my garden. 393 00:33:56,820 --> 00:33:59,820 Let's see, what's it called? 394 00:33:59,820 --> 00:34:08,180 Ficellifolium is the old name, but it was the original food for the Colorado potato 395 00:34:08,180 --> 00:34:13,260 beetle before we imported potatoes and tomatoes. 396 00:34:13,260 --> 00:34:18,700 They can eat that all day long, and I won't ever bother them if they're eating that plant. 397 00:34:18,700 --> 00:34:24,100 If they eat one of my potatoes or my tomatoes, I'll kill the eggs. 398 00:34:24,100 --> 00:34:28,220 I'll kill the adults that I find on the potatoes. 399 00:34:28,220 --> 00:34:34,420 And so what that has done, basically it's a breeding project for the beetles. 400 00:34:34,420 --> 00:34:38,980 Teaching them what is their preferred food source and what is totally safe for them to 401 00:34:38,980 --> 00:34:40,380 eat. 402 00:34:40,380 --> 00:34:47,940 But if I have a potato or a tomato, an eggplant that attracts the bugs more than once, then 403 00:34:47,940 --> 00:34:55,100 I'll kill my tomato so that I don't mix up the contract. 404 00:34:55,100 --> 00:35:00,920 That kind of relationship wouldn't work with the cabbage white moths because they blow 405 00:35:00,920 --> 00:35:02,780 in on the wind. 406 00:35:02,780 --> 00:35:08,840 But the Colorado potato beetles, they live on my farm year round. 407 00:35:08,840 --> 00:35:13,660 So we just developed a nice working relationship with each other. 408 00:35:13,660 --> 00:35:16,140 Ha. 409 00:35:16,140 --> 00:35:19,980 I'll tell you a story about Julie Sheen. 410 00:35:19,980 --> 00:35:22,940 We'll have something from her later on too. 411 00:35:22,940 --> 00:35:28,200 But she asked if she could plant squash in my garden. 412 00:35:28,200 --> 00:35:32,260 And I'm like, sure, go ahead. 413 00:35:32,260 --> 00:35:37,980 So she bought seeds from the seed catalog and planted them in my garden. 414 00:35:37,980 --> 00:35:45,820 And to me, I've never had any problems with squash or with squash bugs or disease of squash 415 00:35:45,820 --> 00:35:47,460 in my garden at all. 416 00:35:47,460 --> 00:35:49,420 They just grow abundantly. 417 00:35:49,420 --> 00:35:50,700 I don't have to worry about them. 418 00:35:50,700 --> 00:35:54,220 I just add irrigation water. 419 00:35:54,220 --> 00:35:58,020 When she planted them, the squash bugs just pounced on her stuff. 420 00:35:58,020 --> 00:36:01,980 And the diseases pounced on her stuff. 421 00:36:01,980 --> 00:36:07,900 I know it's naughty of me, but I was so happy. 422 00:36:07,900 --> 00:36:14,260 Because it showed that by allowing my plants to figure out how to deal with these things, 423 00:36:14,260 --> 00:36:19,780 my plants were strong and those diseases and bugs existed in my garden, but my plants didn't 424 00:36:19,780 --> 00:36:22,580 care. 425 00:36:22,580 --> 00:36:28,460 So just a great object lesson for me. 426 00:36:28,460 --> 00:36:34,820 So raccoons used to come into my corn patch and they would eat my corn. 427 00:36:34,820 --> 00:36:42,540 And so I'm like, I'm going to apply these same kind of principles to my corn. 428 00:36:42,540 --> 00:36:49,300 So the first year I planted corn in the most skunk and raccoon infested field that I had. 429 00:36:49,300 --> 00:36:54,420 The animals came in and ate 90% of my corn crop. 430 00:36:54,420 --> 00:36:55,940 Wonderful result. 431 00:36:55,940 --> 00:37:04,660 So second year I replanted in that same field the skunks and the raccoons only ate 50% of 432 00:37:04,660 --> 00:37:06,460 my corn crop. 433 00:37:06,460 --> 00:37:07,820 Making progress. 434 00:37:07,820 --> 00:37:15,460 So the third year they didn't touch my corn because the corn had learned how to be strong, 435 00:37:15,460 --> 00:37:19,780 healthy, how to outcompete the skunks and the raccoons. 436 00:37:19,780 --> 00:37:21,620 Because they're kind of lazy animals. 437 00:37:21,620 --> 00:37:27,020 They don't want to climb up a corn stalk to eat a cob. 438 00:37:27,020 --> 00:37:32,900 They like to just come and push the plant over, eat it off of the ground. 439 00:37:32,900 --> 00:37:38,500 And so my corn, instead of the cobs being this high off the ground, they had went up 440 00:37:38,500 --> 00:37:41,140 to like higher. 441 00:37:41,140 --> 00:37:43,140 The stalks were stronger. 442 00:37:43,140 --> 00:37:51,780 So they had figured out for themselves how to live in my garden with the animals. 443 00:37:51,780 --> 00:37:52,780 Yeah. 444 00:37:52,780 --> 00:37:57,240 What is your irrigation method? 445 00:37:57,240 --> 00:38:01,980 So I sprinkle irrigate once a week or twice a week. 446 00:38:01,980 --> 00:38:06,200 The university would like me to irrigate twice a week, but that's kind of annoying. 447 00:38:06,200 --> 00:38:10,540 So once a week works better for me. 448 00:38:10,540 --> 00:38:12,340 For a long time? 449 00:38:12,340 --> 00:38:15,980 Our irrigation system is set up for one inch of water a week. 450 00:38:15,980 --> 00:38:21,780 So that's 12 hours a week of whether I run it six hours twice a week or 12 hours once 451 00:38:21,780 --> 00:38:25,300 a week. 452 00:38:25,300 --> 00:38:31,220 I welcome bugs, pests, viruses, and molds into my garden. 453 00:38:31,220 --> 00:38:34,100 They are teaching my plants how to survive. 454 00:38:34,100 --> 00:38:40,700 They're selecting for plants that thrive in the ecosystem exactly as it exists. 455 00:38:40,700 --> 00:38:46,500 That is my whole adaptation agriculture summed up into one word. 456 00:38:46,500 --> 00:38:49,700 So I do not practice crop rotation. 457 00:38:49,700 --> 00:38:55,780 I want as many diseases in my garden as I can possibly have so that the plants can figure 458 00:38:55,780 --> 00:38:58,300 out how to survive. 459 00:38:58,300 --> 00:39:02,740 Because these plants have been surviving millions of years before people came along. 460 00:39:02,740 --> 00:39:04,780 They know how to do this stuff. 461 00:39:04,780 --> 00:39:06,040 We don't have to interfere. 462 00:39:06,040 --> 00:39:08,820 We don't have to control everything. 463 00:39:08,820 --> 00:39:11,860 Ha! 464 00:39:11,860 --> 00:39:16,420 So I went to Europe and they started heckling me. 465 00:39:16,420 --> 00:39:24,140 Oh, this is wonderful for you in the US, but how do you deal with slugs? 466 00:39:24,140 --> 00:39:26,360 And I'm like, I don't have slugs. 467 00:39:26,360 --> 00:39:29,460 How do I know how to deal with slugs? 468 00:39:29,460 --> 00:39:35,540 So I started interviewing every farmer I could interview in Europe about how to deal with 469 00:39:35,540 --> 00:39:37,100 slugs. 470 00:39:37,100 --> 00:39:43,540 The bottom line was the more life you have in your garden, the less problem you have 471 00:39:43,540 --> 00:39:46,660 with slugs. 472 00:39:46,660 --> 00:39:52,620 No till gardeners, no problem at all with slugs. 473 00:39:52,620 --> 00:39:57,980 Where the slugs were a problem for people was where they were tilling and they were 474 00:39:57,980 --> 00:40:02,460 making a moonscape and then they were putting their plants in the garden. 475 00:40:02,460 --> 00:40:07,300 And so the only thing the slugs had to eat was the plants that had just been put in the 476 00:40:07,300 --> 00:40:08,980 garden. 477 00:40:08,980 --> 00:40:15,260 But the farmers that took their prunings from their orchard and they put them in little 478 00:40:15,260 --> 00:40:21,300 rows in the garden so that there would be microbes and fungus and beetles living in 479 00:40:21,300 --> 00:40:24,580 the garden and having an ecosystem to live in. 480 00:40:24,580 --> 00:40:29,580 The farmers that had 100 species in their garden instead of 5 species in their garden 481 00:40:29,580 --> 00:40:31,860 had little problem with slugs. 482 00:40:31,860 --> 00:40:37,600 The more life, the healthier a garden. 483 00:40:37,600 --> 00:40:45,940 So I am starting to get old and I'm not liking to work even less now than I used to. 484 00:40:45,940 --> 00:40:48,620 So I land race everything. 485 00:40:48,620 --> 00:40:56,360 My chickens, I'm working on land racing trees because a tree is something that can out compete 486 00:40:56,360 --> 00:41:01,580 the weeds and it can just grow and take care of itself and I go as a farmer and harvest 487 00:41:01,580 --> 00:41:04,900 it once a year. 488 00:41:04,900 --> 00:41:11,460 While I was in Europe, I paid a lot of attention to the food that was in Europe. 489 00:41:11,460 --> 00:41:13,340 There was some nice food. 490 00:41:13,340 --> 00:41:16,260 There was also a bunch of ho-hum food. 491 00:41:16,260 --> 00:41:27,480 And what I decided at the end was the food that was grown by Amber, my local baker, is 492 00:41:27,480 --> 00:41:31,700 every bit as good as anything I had in Europe. 493 00:41:31,700 --> 00:41:36,180 Amber sources her wheat locally. 494 00:41:36,180 --> 00:41:42,240 It's milled by a local miller. 495 00:41:42,240 --> 00:41:46,500 It is inoculated with a local sourdough starter. 496 00:41:46,500 --> 00:41:50,340 It's prepared by her local staff. 497 00:41:50,340 --> 00:41:56,300 Nowhere in Europe did I have bread that tasted better than that local bread that she was 498 00:41:56,300 --> 00:42:00,140 producing for me. 499 00:42:00,140 --> 00:42:07,940 So one of the beautiful things about saving my own seeds is that I get to taste every 500 00:42:07,940 --> 00:42:13,300 fruit in every generation before I save seeds from it. 501 00:42:13,300 --> 00:42:21,080 So that the stuff I grow just becomes beautiful tasting to me, to my customers. 502 00:42:21,080 --> 00:42:28,320 If I take a Hubbard squash, I cross it with a banana, I get a hybrid. 503 00:42:28,320 --> 00:42:31,720 And that hybrid is not a monster. 504 00:42:31,720 --> 00:42:33,460 It doesn't develop poisons. 505 00:42:33,460 --> 00:42:35,300 It doesn't develop spines. 506 00:42:35,300 --> 00:42:37,740 It doesn't creep out in any way. 507 00:42:37,740 --> 00:42:42,200 It's just a beautiful squash. 508 00:42:42,200 --> 00:42:49,020 This particular hybrid combines the savoriness of this with the sweetness of this. 509 00:42:49,020 --> 00:42:56,980 It's a beautiful variety. 510 00:42:56,980 --> 00:43:02,180 One of the joys of tasting squash is that it is best done as community. 511 00:43:02,180 --> 00:43:05,780 So we get together and we have squash tasting parties. 512 00:43:05,780 --> 00:43:08,980 We have popcorn tasting parties. 513 00:43:08,980 --> 00:43:13,300 Anyway, beautiful times together. 514 00:43:13,300 --> 00:43:20,180 So remember this dire thing that I started with about how the chemical companies own 515 00:43:20,180 --> 00:43:28,380 the seeds and turns out that 80 to 90% of the seed that is grown in the world is grown 516 00:43:28,380 --> 00:43:31,180 by farmer seed networks. 517 00:43:31,180 --> 00:43:33,140 It's not grown by these big companies. 518 00:43:33,140 --> 00:43:35,580 It's grown by farmers that share with each other. 519 00:43:35,580 --> 00:43:38,900 It's grown by backyard gardeners. 520 00:43:38,900 --> 00:43:44,100 It's grown by small regional seed companies. 521 00:43:44,100 --> 00:43:50,180 So we can pretty much just forget about this system and ignore it and focus on our local 522 00:43:50,180 --> 00:43:51,300 efforts. 523 00:43:51,300 --> 00:43:57,880 Our local efforts are already doing amazing work and we're already plugged into that. 524 00:43:57,880 --> 00:44:04,360 So let's continue to do what we're doing and not feel like we have to be inadequate because 525 00:44:04,360 --> 00:44:07,740 we don't have a university degree. 526 00:44:07,740 --> 00:44:15,180 Every variety that I grow was developed by indigenous farmers who were illiterate, who 527 00:44:15,180 --> 00:44:19,820 had no understanding of DNA. 528 00:44:19,820 --> 00:44:22,780 They were farmers that went out into their field. 529 00:44:22,780 --> 00:44:25,380 They found something that they loved. 530 00:44:25,380 --> 00:44:26,380 They saved it. 531 00:44:26,380 --> 00:44:28,700 They replanted. 532 00:44:28,700 --> 00:44:35,540 Every one of us can do that same kind of work. 533 00:44:35,540 --> 00:44:41,700 While I was in Europe, this was the best meal that I ate. 534 00:44:41,700 --> 00:44:44,520 And why? 535 00:44:44,520 --> 00:44:50,820 This butter was produced by a farmer a mile from where I ate it. 536 00:44:50,820 --> 00:44:59,160 He added salt to the butter with his own hands and there were still little pieces of, maybe 537 00:44:59,160 --> 00:45:06,220 you can see it here, little pieces of the whey that were still in the butter. 538 00:45:06,220 --> 00:45:08,140 It was just delightful. 539 00:45:08,140 --> 00:45:16,460 That sausage was made by a farmer that had raised the pig himself that was within five 540 00:45:16,460 --> 00:45:18,980 miles of where I ate that sausage. 541 00:45:18,980 --> 00:45:23,460 He put that sausage in that little tube all by himself. 542 00:45:23,460 --> 00:45:30,220 The local food that I eat is always the best food that I've ever eaten. 543 00:45:30,220 --> 00:45:35,500 If we can move ourselves towards having some local food more often, it'll be easier to 544 00:45:35,500 --> 00:45:39,660 plug into the local food networks. 545 00:45:39,660 --> 00:45:45,980 So let's talk about some people that are doing local food right. 546 00:45:45,980 --> 00:45:48,820 Redmond Heritage Farms. 547 00:45:48,820 --> 00:45:56,100 We have kitchens in Sugar House in Orem and they are cooking their french fries in coconut 548 00:45:56,100 --> 00:45:58,220 oil. 549 00:45:58,220 --> 00:46:05,060 That's a safe oil that's not damaging people's health by the high concentration of omega-6 550 00:46:05,060 --> 00:46:06,060 oils. 551 00:46:06,060 --> 00:46:11,980 Shout out to Redmond for doing that. 552 00:46:11,980 --> 00:46:19,220 Grand Prismatic Seed in Salt Lake City, Utah is a local. 553 00:46:19,220 --> 00:46:22,900 All right. 554 00:46:22,900 --> 00:46:30,380 She's giving me the 10-minute warning like late. 555 00:46:30,380 --> 00:46:36,660 But they're producing local seeds in Salt Lake City, Utah. 556 00:46:36,660 --> 00:46:45,140 No GMO, no pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers, just beautiful seeds. 557 00:46:45,140 --> 00:46:49,500 Snake River Seed Co-op up in Boise, Idaho. 558 00:46:49,500 --> 00:46:55,300 They're a little bit outside of our ecoregion, but we're pretty close. 559 00:46:55,300 --> 00:46:59,140 We're high altitude, we're dry. 560 00:46:59,140 --> 00:47:06,460 And so Snake River Seed Cooperative, one thing they have going on is they will tell you where 561 00:47:06,460 --> 00:47:13,180 every lot of seed was grown, who the farmer was, where the farmer's location is, so you 562 00:47:13,180 --> 00:47:16,820 can really get local seed. 563 00:47:16,820 --> 00:47:23,460 A lot of the heirloom seed catalogs that you get like, I won't name names because that 564 00:47:23,460 --> 00:47:30,740 would be rude, but they buy their seed in the Netherlands, they buy it in Vietnam, they 565 00:47:30,740 --> 00:47:36,860 buy it in Oregon, places that are totally different than our local ecosystem. 566 00:47:36,860 --> 00:47:41,540 And so when the seeds get here and they don't know how to grow, we blame ourselves for being 567 00:47:41,540 --> 00:47:47,980 bad farmers when we should be looking at our seed source and saying, why did that seed 568 00:47:47,980 --> 00:47:53,820 fail because it's not locally adapted. 569 00:47:53,820 --> 00:47:55,840 Giving ground seeds. 570 00:47:55,840 --> 00:48:03,140 This is the company owned by Julie Sheen that I told you about with the squash bugs up in 571 00:48:03,140 --> 00:48:04,740 Pocatello. 572 00:48:04,740 --> 00:48:08,700 When she left my farm, she took many of my varieties with her. 573 00:48:08,700 --> 00:48:12,060 They're available in her seed catalog. 574 00:48:12,060 --> 00:48:17,020 Here's another thing that I really like by the Buffalo Seed Company. 575 00:48:17,020 --> 00:48:22,780 They say, this is where our crops are likely to do super well because that's the best match 576 00:48:22,780 --> 00:48:25,300 to our ecosystem. 577 00:48:25,300 --> 00:48:30,780 And then they say, well, they might do okay in this other region. 578 00:48:30,780 --> 00:48:38,260 I also sent Buffalo Seed Company a complete archive of my garden and many of my varieties 579 00:48:38,260 --> 00:48:43,180 are for sale from the Buffalo Seed Company, but grown in Kansas. 580 00:48:43,180 --> 00:48:48,320 And so they're going to be more locally adapted to Kansas now than they are to my garden up 581 00:48:48,320 --> 00:48:54,800 in Cache Valley, but still a beautiful resource for genetically diverse crops. 582 00:48:54,800 --> 00:49:01,740 The Open Source Seed Initiative is an organization that's devoted to keeping seeds. 583 00:49:01,740 --> 00:49:04,060 Did you just do me five minutes? 584 00:49:04,060 --> 00:49:05,060 Okay. 585 00:49:05,060 --> 00:49:08,100 To keeping seeds free. 586 00:49:08,100 --> 00:49:14,660 I am an admin for the Open Source Plant Breeding Forum, which they host, where we talk about 587 00:49:14,660 --> 00:49:18,440 plant breeding. 588 00:49:18,440 --> 00:49:24,400 The organization that sent me here today is Going to Seed, whose mission goal is shifting 589 00:49:24,400 --> 00:49:30,020 agriculture towards adaptation, community, and diversity. 590 00:49:30,020 --> 00:49:32,700 We have courses. 591 00:49:32,700 --> 00:49:37,880 Julia Dakin here called me up after I published my book and says, I want to make a video course 592 00:49:37,880 --> 00:49:39,560 about your book. 593 00:49:39,560 --> 00:49:43,820 And so there's a video course about my book that's freely available. 594 00:49:43,820 --> 00:49:50,740 Dr. James White made a course for us about microbes. 595 00:49:50,740 --> 00:49:56,900 We hired some farmers down in Mexico to make a video about traditional farming methods. 596 00:49:56,900 --> 00:50:01,600 All of those are available for free on the Going to Seed website. 597 00:50:01,600 --> 00:50:05,340 This is some of the staff at Going to Seed. 598 00:50:05,340 --> 00:50:09,420 This is Anna Muritz down in Moss Beach, California. 599 00:50:09,420 --> 00:50:15,720 She put together this slide deck for me and made many of the graphics, and she helps me 600 00:50:15,720 --> 00:50:19,380 to figure out how to be a better storyteller and stuff like that. 601 00:50:19,380 --> 00:50:22,260 And so thank you, Anna. 602 00:50:22,260 --> 00:50:27,100 There was supposed to be a video here which we're going to skip, but I'll tell it to you 603 00:50:27,100 --> 00:50:28,300 anyway. 604 00:50:28,300 --> 00:50:32,640 So I don't have any patience for blossom and rot in my garden. 605 00:50:32,640 --> 00:50:34,700 I see something with blossom and rot. 606 00:50:34,700 --> 00:50:41,100 I yank it out and toss it, because I'm not a bad farmer, because I don't know how to 607 00:50:41,100 --> 00:50:45,800 water, because I don't put calcium on my tomatoes. 608 00:50:45,800 --> 00:50:49,540 That's a genetic defect in the tomato. 609 00:50:49,540 --> 00:50:53,540 So it shouldn't be growing in my garden, because I don't appreciate it. 610 00:50:53,540 --> 00:50:55,740 Let's not blame ourselves. 611 00:50:55,740 --> 00:51:01,760 So we have an online discussion forum where we talk about these principles. 612 00:51:01,760 --> 00:51:09,380 We do online get togethers and Zoom calls and just chat or have guest speakers. 613 00:51:09,380 --> 00:51:12,420 I do a podcast. 614 00:51:12,420 --> 00:51:16,700 We attend conferences all over. 615 00:51:16,700 --> 00:51:21,380 This was in California at the Heirloom Seed Expo. 616 00:51:21,380 --> 00:51:29,460 We do a seed share where we gather together genetically diverse crops from all over, dump 617 00:51:29,460 --> 00:51:32,700 them all into a jar, redistribute them. 618 00:51:32,700 --> 00:51:38,220 That makes it really inexpensive to collect genetic diversity. 619 00:51:38,220 --> 00:51:44,300 For some of the projects I've worked on, I've had to buy like 30 or 100 packets of different 620 00:51:44,300 --> 00:51:49,460 varieties of seeds and combine them in my garden. 621 00:51:49,460 --> 00:51:51,340 That's really expensive. 622 00:51:51,340 --> 00:51:55,940 But if we cooperate as a community, that can be really easy. 623 00:51:55,940 --> 00:52:01,140 We're going to open the seed share for this year up to the public on, I think, February 624 00:52:01,140 --> 00:52:02,500 5th. 625 00:52:02,500 --> 00:52:07,420 So if you want to jump on the Going to Seed website and join our mailing list, we'll send 626 00:52:07,420 --> 00:52:13,620 you a notice when that becomes available or just watch the website. 627 00:52:13,620 --> 00:52:16,540 This was my contribution. 628 00:52:16,540 --> 00:52:17,740 There are... 629 00:52:17,740 --> 00:52:22,020 Okay, one minute. 630 00:52:22,020 --> 00:52:23,020 All right. 631 00:52:23,020 --> 00:52:24,020 So we... 632 00:52:24,020 --> 00:52:25,020 Anyway, the end. 633 00:52:25,020 --> 00:52:26,020 Thank you. 634 00:52:26,020 --> 00:52:38,140 Thank you, everyone.