Going to Seed, inspiring a shift in agriculture towards adaptation, community, and diversity.
I am your host Joseph Lofthaus.
This is my first solo podcast after Shane Simonson started his own podcast, Zero Input
Agriculture.
We wish Shane joy and success in his new endeavor.
In this episode, I'm posting the presentation that I did at the Utah Farm and Food Conference
January 11, 2024 in Cedar City, Utah.
Red Acre Center for Food and Agriculture hosts the conference.
Red Acre Center advocated for the passage of Utah's Food Freedom Law, which allows
individuals to sell food to each other without licenses or regulations.
The center attends the legislative sessions each year advocating for increased food freedom
and continuing preservation of the gains already made.
I highly recommend the work of Red Acre Center and pause for a moment of reverence for Sarah,
Symbria, Mark, Sean, and all others involved in supporting this work.
Going to Seed.org sponsors this podcast, join us there for seeds, farmer support, and complimentary
content like video courses and online forums.
Without further delay, here is my presentation.
Welcome everyone.
My name is Joseph Lofthaus.
I will be talking about adaptation agriculture today.
Oh, and I'd like to thank Red Acre Center and Going to Seed for sponsoring my visit
here today.
I come from up in Cache Valley.
So I used to be a wonderful, great farmer, and I would take all kinds of lovely things
to the farmer's market.
I was even taking crops to farmer's market that don't grow in my valley.
Okra, for example.
It's too cold up in Cache Valley to grow okra well.
I was taking musk melons to farmer's market.
That is a really good place to be as a farmer.
The only farmer that has a crop that is super beloved.
I was growing squash, just abundance of squash.
So did all my other neighbors, but you know, it was fun and just really productive in my
garden.
So I was running a CSA, growing about a hundred varieties of vegetables for my customers,
and I was doing all of this without fertilizers, without compost, without pesticides, with
minimal labor, and just having a beautiful time being a farmer.
I was participating in the HB 181, the Utah Freed Food and Law, where I was making value-added
products, selling them to my neighbors.
Thank you to Sarah and Symbria and Mark for all that they did to get that law passed.
Then people kept saying, you should write a book telling us all about how you did all
of this.
And so I'm like, okay.
So I wrote the book, Land Race Gardening, Food Security Through Biodiversity and Promiscuous
Pollination.
It could have also been called How to Grow Food When You Can't Buy Seeds, Fertilizers,
or Pesticides.
My farming came crashing down because my book sold 9,000 copies.
And people wanted me to be going to conferences, translated my book into French.
And so I started going to all these conferences, more than 100 conferences I spoke at.
And this is Chef Dan Barber from New York.
We're on the stage at Baldor Bites, which is the major food chef cooperative in the
East Coast of the U.S.
This is Chef Dan Barber on my farm up in Paradise, Utah, eating in my house.
I fed a five-star Michelin chef in my house.
And this is Chefs Amber and Robin, who have collaborated with me for many years.
Amber used to be an intern at my farm.
And she now owns a restaurant up in Cache Valley.
I spoke in the 13 U.S. states and spoke to thousands of people over the years.
This is both in mega conferences and also in backyard get-togethers all over everywhere.
I was invited to speak in Europe.
I spoke in five countries in Europe, Croatia, France, England, Scotland, and Denmark.
When I stayed in Scotland, they put me up in a medieval castle.
This village happened to be the village where they filmed the TV series Outlander.
When I stayed in England, they put me up in a palace.
Just had a beautiful experience talking about my book.
When I stayed in Croatia, they put me up in a mud hut.
And that is the epitome, the cutting edge of permaculture technology.
So it was just a beautiful experience.
We had a parade.
And we danced and we sang and we just had a beautiful time.
These two people are the editors of my book in French.
Lovely to spend time with them.
The last day I was in Europe, they put me in a car sort of against my will and they
took me to visit my ancestral home in Denmark.
I got to kneel in the church where my grandfather's grandfather worshipped and ancestors before
that.
So how does a farm boy from northern Utah end up traveling the world to talk about farming?
My family, when I was growing up, were all about control and domination in our farming.
We used pesticides if anything was wrong.
We used herbicides.
We tilled the ground so that it was bare soil and then we had to add synthetic chemical
fertilizers so that we could grow something.
Seeds that I planted were covered in poisons.
After we took that poison seeds in our bare hands, we went and had lunch.
No concern at all for any of those chemicals, what harm they might be doing to us, to the
ecosystem.
So then what did I do?
I went and became a chemist.
And I was working on projects to develop pesticides when I was in high school.
That work continued when I went to the university.
I graduated from university, went to work in the pharmaceutical industry.
Then I went to work in the pesticide industry.
One of the projects I worked on was I was getting samples from tropical climates like
the neem oil.
It was a project I developed 30 years ago to turn neem oil into a pesticide.
Because supposedly for the Japanese, if it's a naturally occurring substance and it's poisonous,
then you can use it because it's okay.
And so, oh, I'll tell you a story that's not on my script.
So in the lab, because we were getting all these samples from all over, we had cockroaches
that were the size of mice.
And it was so fun because every once in a while, you know those toothpicks that you
find that have the little flags on them for making fancy sandwiches?
You'd find a cockroach with that sticking out of its heart, laying in the hallway somewhere.
But anyway, that was so fun.
So that was a terrible time for me because I was involved in an industry that I knew
was based on lies.
The research we did was lies, the way we presented it to people were lies.
And then to make matters worse, I was transferred into a department dealing with chemical weapons.
So I just kept doing my job.
And it was horrible and dark.
You can tell my health suffered from it.
And my body was so inflexible, I could barely move.
My mind was so inflexible, I could barely think.
And then they transferred me to the biological weapons department.
I went back to my desk.
I wrote out a resignation letter, and I left the building never to return.
I ended up in a monastery in Provo, Utah.
I spent three years there while I was recovering.
While I was at the monastery, I says, okay, I'm going to apply my chemical knowledge,
my understanding of science to figure out what is wrong with me.
Why am I like I am?
Turns out for me, the vegetable oils were killing me because of the high concentration
of the omega-6 oils in like the corn oil, the soybean oil, the canola oil, the cottonseed
oil.
Basically, all the oils that I'm eating were causing inflammation in my body, and they
were just making me sick.
So where do those oils come from?
They come from the chemical companies that I had just stopped working for.
The chemical companies own like on corn, 85% of the corn seed that is sold is sold by a
chemical company.
Like 90% of the cottonseed that is sold is sold by a chemical company.
And then in order to grow that crop, you have to apply the chemicals that the chemical company
are applying to your crop.
So that whole system is designed that the chemical companies own the seed companies,
and the chemical companies are determining what we can grow, what we can eat.
After three years, I left the monastery.
I returned to my home village, and I became a farmer.
I said that is the furthest thing away from these chemicals that I can possibly get.
I made a vow that I would never use those chemicals again.
I wouldn't apply poisons to my garden.
I wouldn't apply the fertilizers to my garden.
And I wouldn't use the plastics to protect my crops.
So this field is 5,000 feet elevation.
Those mountains are 9,000 feet elevation.
So all summer long, the cold air comes down out of those mountains into my field.
Makes it super difficult to grow any warm weather crops.
I could not grow the hybrid crops because they totally are dependent on those chemicals.
And they just failed for me when I tried to grow them without chemicals.
And so I thought, whoa, I'll grow these heirlooms, these open pollinated varieties.
They didn't work for me either.
Because what's the definition of an heirloom?
An heirloom is a crop from far away and long ago.
An heirloom was developed for like Iowa, where there's a long growing season.
It's damp.
Or an heirloom was developed for Oregon, where it's always cloudy and low elevation.
And so the heirlooms also failed for me.
If I bought a variety from the seed catalog, there would be like a 75% chance of it just
failing on my garden.
And there's no way for me to predict ahead of time which ones would fail and which ones
would do good.
If I tried to grow tomatoes, it would be like a 97% failure rate.
They just weren't happy growing in my garden.
This is an okra plant, the first time I planted okra.
After an entire growing season, it got this high.
And it succumbed to frost on the first little hint of frost and it was gone.
That was pretty typical of anything that I would try to grow.
I was looking around for something that would be interesting for my customers.
Just something that wouldn't be the boring yellow sweet corn that I had tried, that I'd
grown my whole life.
And there was a farmer in Indiana, Alan Bishop, who had a sweet corn with colors in it.
And I got that corn and I planted it on the same day that I planted my hybrid sweet corn,
except I'd got smart and I told the guy at the seed store that I wanted my hybrid sweet
corn without the chemicals on it.
So the corn I got from Alan germinated 100%, it grew beautiful, and the corn that I got
from my seed supplier without the poisons germinated at 5%.
When I tasted this, it blew my mind because every color on there is a different flavor
and they're beautiful flavors.
I says to myself, I am going to convert every variety that I grow into this kind of growing.
The name we were using back then for this type of growing is landrace.
And a landrace is a variety that is genetically diverse, it's promiscuously pollinating, and
it's locally adapted.
Because it's locally adapted, it becomes part of the community.
It becomes part of the microbe community, part of the insect community, part of the
human community.
Since that time, we've started calling this adaptation agriculture.
Crops that are promiscuously pollinating and genetically diverse so that they can adapt
themselves to the environment.
What I have found over the years is that the ecosystem does 80% of the selection, and all
I have to do is just stay out of the way.
So the first crop that I decided to work on was cantaloupes.
I gathered together about 30 varieties of cantaloupes that I got from the internet,
from the grocery store, from the farmers market, wherever I could find seeds from cantaloupes.
And I planted them.
And the first year, most of what I planted didn't germinate, or it germinated and got
this big during the growing season.
But a few plants at the end of the growing season produced a few green fruits.
I saved the seeds, replanted them.
The second year, some of the plants grew small, some of them grew abundantly.
There were two plants that second year that produced more fruits than 100 other plants
all combined together.
So save seeds, replanted.
The third year, I was harvesting bushels and bushels and bushels of cantaloupes.
And that third year has pretty much, in my experience, become what I call the magical
year.
Because the first year, anything that isn't suitable for my garden, it just goes ahead
and dies.
The second year, the best of the best cross with each other.
And so by the third year, they can really thrive.
And that happens over and over and over again.
Another thing that happened with the cantaloupes that I was totally unprepared for is that
every year before I save seeds from something, I taste it.
If I don't like the flavor, I throw the seeds away.
And so my cantaloupes ended up being super tasty, super sweet, super aromatic.
One day, it was raining when I harvested and I didn't want them to get wet.
So I put them in the cab of my truck instead of in the back of my truck.
And the aroma gassed me out because they were just so aromatic.
That's beautiful for farmers market.
I had to give these a different name because I would go to farmers market and people would
say, I don't like cantaloupe.
And I'm like, this isn't a cantaloupe.
This is a musk melon.
Because what I was growing was not even close to the same product that the grocery stores
were selling.
So those of you that are farmers in the room or gardeners, you go and you sell this musk
melon for $4 at the farmers market.
It has got $60 worth of seeds in it.
So it didn't take me very long to realize that as a farmer, I could make a lot more
money selling seeds than I could by selling fruits and vegetables.
And so I converted my whole strategy towards the seed growing.
Of course, if I'm growing seeds, I have an abundance of vegetables.
And so I was still going to farmers markets and still supporting a community or a CSA.
But my primary focus was to grow the seeds.
And I was saving thousands of dollars a year on my seed costs because I wasn't having to
buy seeds commercially because I was growing my own.
And I was getting crops that grew better for me than any crops that I could possibly buy
from a seed catalog.
So I remember the okra that we started out with.
There was one plant in the okra patch at the end of the fall that didn't care about the
fall frost.
And it produced seeds.
So I saved seeds from that, replanted.
Three years later, the okra was taller than the farmer.
I was harvesting okra to take to farmers market just because it was locally adapted.
All of my growing is done without fertilizers, without plastics.
I have a greenhouse.
I use it to start tomatoes and peppers early in the spring.
That's mostly because there's a bug that eats my tomatoes if they germinate in the field.
But if I put three-inch plants out, the tomato can outgrow the bug.
And peppers are just on me up in my cold climate.
But yeah, that was all done without high tunnels, without row covers, anything like that.
The seeds that I grow I send to Experimental Farm Network, which is in New Jersey, and
they distribute them for me so I don't touch them.
Yes, the question was, do I direct so?
And it's like I direct so everything except the tomatoes and the peppers, just because
I have found that that's more reliable if they don't have the transplant shock.
So that gave me time to go to festivals, to party, to have a good time.
Also I lost 70 pounds because I had stopped eating the seed oils and I had stopped eating
the sugar and the wheat that had been causing me so much problems when I was working in
the chemical industry and my whole life was centered around eating the products of the
chemical industry.
I feel a lot better than I have in the decades before this.
So I was a farmer, and I'm kind of a lazy farmer and I don't like weeding.
I was having a real hard time growing carrots for farmers' market.
So I says, okay, duh, we're going to apply the principles of adaptation gardening to
the carrots.
Because what happens with carrots?
You plant them, they take three weeks to germinate, it's so slow, and by the time they've germinated,
the weeds are this tall and the carrots can't compete.
And so I was just losing my crops over and over again to the weeds.
And so I planted a crop of carrots and did zero weeding on them.
First year, I got some carrots that were about this big and the diameter of a pencil.
I saved them, grew seeds from them.
Whoops, I get ahead of myself.
You know where this is going.
Well, so carrots are a crop that flowers the second year.
And so the first year, they had produced a root.
It was a tiny root, but it was enough of a root that the second year it could go to seed.
And so then the second time I grew the carrots, I got harvested carrots about the size of
my thumb.
And so replanted those, grew seeds.
The third year, I weeded the carrots one time.
You see this little carrot down here?
That is what my carrots used to grow like.
And this is what I had selected for them to grow like.
And the third year, with one weeding, I was harvesting carrots that weighed three to five
pounds each.
And so now I can reliably grow carrots for the farmer's market.
I never sold those except that that photo went into my book and I sold 9,000 copies
of my book.
If you ever want to write a book, make sure that you take lots of photos of your garden
because you might want to put them in your book.
One of the mistakes I made when I was like 10 years ago, my computer was running out
of disk space.
And so I compressed all my photos down to these little photos and then I couldn't use
them when I published my book.
So if I had it to do over again, I'd just buy disk space to store the photos.
So the question was, when we're saving carrots for seeds, do you harvest the roots and store
them inside or in the ground?
Yes.
It's really hard for me to store carrots either way, but I do some of both and sometimes it
works and sometimes it doesn't.
If I had it to do over again, I would select for carrots that could store in the ground
because that's easier for me as a farmer than trying to store them in sand in the garage
or something like that.
If I put straw over top of them in the fall about a foot of straw, they'll store all winter.
Pollination is highly localized.
When you watch a bee pollinating flowers, it goes from here to here to here to here.
It doesn't go from here and back to here.
And so you can grow multiple crops on your farm if they're separated by whatever the
distances that works for the crop.
Like when I grow squash and they're 100 feet separation, I see about 5% cross pollination
between them, which is okay and I don't mind that.
I love my yellow crook neck.
It always has to be yellow.
It always has to have a crook neck.
And so I grow my yellow crook neck in isolation.
I might grow 20 different varieties of yellow crook neck all mixed together, but they're
always yellow.
They're always the crook neck shape.
With other crops, I like the cross pollination because the cross pollination allows the local
adaptation to occur.
And if we're inbreeding, the plants are getting weaker every generation because a crop that
self-pollinates loses half of its remaining genetic diversity in every generation.
And so this is how I was taught to farm when I was growing up.
Control domination, perfect weeding.
I decided I wasn't going to grow that way anymore.
So this is how I currently grow my beans.
I might run the tiller along the edge of the bean row, but inside the bean row, they're
totally unweeded.
Because of that, I now have beans in my garden that have gone feral.
They plant themselves, they grow themselves, and all I have to do is go to harvest them.
What a beautiful thing for a farmer to do.
Just walk out into the field and harvest something that grew itself.
Which gives me more time to play and have fun and learn to play the guitar and learn
to chant.
So I thought that I would do the same kind of strategy with tomatoes.
Ha.
When the tomatoes were domesticated, 95 percent of the genetic diversity got left in the wild.
That is genetic diversity for how to deal with the farmer's habits, with the soil, with
the diseases, with the bugs.
And so there just wasn't enough genetic diversity left in tomatoes for me to be able to do a
breeding project with them.
So I started looking around.
How can we solve this problem?
It turns out that there are tomatoes growing in the Andes Mountains that are promiscuously
pollinating.
Some plant explorers went and gathered those seeds together 50 years ago.
This is a promiscuous tomato flower from the Andes compared to a domestic tomato flower.
So I crossed those together and found tremendous diversity in the leaf shapes, in the fruits.
But the most amazing thing that came out of this crossing was we were finding flavors
that are totally unknown in tomatoes.
Our taste testers are describing them as tangerine, guava, plum, melon.
Just these beautiful aromatic tropical flavors.
We found one that a chef calls sea urchin.
Anyway, but just these beautiful flavors.
This is the current generation that was grown in Moss Beach, California this summer.
Just delightful tomatoes.
Chef Dan Barber took some of my tomatoes because he's enamored with the flavors of the tomatoes.
And he submitted the tomatoes to Dr. James White, who's a microbiologist at Rutgers University.
See the blue in this?
That's the root hair of one of my tomatoes.
And those are nitrogen fixing bacteria that are living in the roots of my tomatoes.
Fifteen years of not adding fertilizer to my garden, the tomatoes and the microbes figured
out how to support each other.
Those same types of nitrogen fixing bacteria live inside the roots of corn.
People tell you, corn, you have to fertilize it like everything because it decimates the
garden and the soil fertility.
No, corn knows how to have relationships with microbes.
This gel that surrounds the roots of the corn is a host to microbes that make nitrogen for
the corn.
What the chemical companies did is they sprayed pesticides on the fields that damaged the
microbe population.
They sprayed chemical fertilizers on the fields, which damaged the microbe population.
And they selected for corn that doesn't have these roots.
So the corn, even if you didn't apply that kind of chemicals to the field, couldn't make
its own fertilizer because it doesn't have the roots that interact with the microbes.
And so one of the projects that I've been involved in is selecting for those kinds of
roots on corn, which were the ancestral way that corn was grown.
But that little root nodule, when you're tilling your fields, it doesn't break down very easy.
And so it's annoying to farmers.
So if you select against that, you help the farmers.
So if you see corn that has that in your gardens, glom onto it and treat it special.
I apply this same sort of principle everything that I grow.
I like bugs in my garden.
This is a Colorado potato beetle.
It likes to eat potatoes.
And in my garden, I made a contract with the Colorado potato beetles.
I said, I will never spray you.
I will never poison you.
I will never harm you in any way as long as you don't eat my potatoes or my tomatoes.
Because I have a wild weed that I grow in my garden.
Let's see, what's it called?
Ficellifolium is the old name, but it was the original food for the Colorado potato
beetle before we imported potatoes and tomatoes.
They can eat that all day long, and I won't ever bother them if they're eating that plant.
If they eat one of my potatoes or my tomatoes, I'll kill the eggs.
I'll kill the adults that I find on the potatoes.
And so what that has done, basically it's a breeding project for the beetles.
Teaching them what is their preferred food source and what is totally safe for them to
eat.
But if I have a potato or a tomato, an eggplant that attracts the bugs more than once, then
I'll kill my tomato so that I don't mix up the contract.
That kind of relationship wouldn't work with the cabbage white moths because they blow
in on the wind.
But the Colorado potato beetles, they live on my farm year round.
So we just developed a nice working relationship with each other.
Ha.
I'll tell you a story about Julie Sheen.
We'll have something from her later on too.
But she asked if she could plant squash in my garden.
And I'm like, sure, go ahead.
So she bought seeds from the seed catalog and planted them in my garden.
And to me, I've never had any problems with squash or with squash bugs or disease of squash
in my garden at all.
They just grow abundantly.
I don't have to worry about them.
I just add irrigation water.
When she planted them, the squash bugs just pounced on her stuff.
And the diseases pounced on her stuff.
I know it's naughty of me, but I was so happy.
Because it showed that by allowing my plants to figure out how to deal with these things,
my plants were strong and those diseases and bugs existed in my garden, but my plants didn't
care.
So just a great object lesson for me.
So raccoons used to come into my corn patch and they would eat my corn.
And so I'm like, I'm going to apply these same kind of principles to my corn.
So the first year I planted corn in the most skunk and raccoon infested field that I had.
The animals came in and ate 90% of my corn crop.
Wonderful result.
So second year I replanted in that same field the skunks and the raccoons only ate 50% of
my corn crop.
Making progress.
So the third year they didn't touch my corn because the corn had learned how to be strong,
healthy, how to outcompete the skunks and the raccoons.
Because they're kind of lazy animals.
They don't want to climb up a corn stalk to eat a cob.
They like to just come and push the plant over, eat it off of the ground.
And so my corn, instead of the cobs being this high off the ground, they had went up
to like higher.
The stalks were stronger.
So they had figured out for themselves how to live in my garden with the animals.
Yeah.
What is your irrigation method?
So I sprinkle irrigate once a week or twice a week.
The university would like me to irrigate twice a week, but that's kind of annoying.
So once a week works better for me.
For a long time?
Our irrigation system is set up for one inch of water a week.
So that's 12 hours a week of whether I run it six hours twice a week or 12 hours once
a week.
I welcome bugs, pests, viruses, and molds into my garden.
They are teaching my plants how to survive.
They're selecting for plants that thrive in the ecosystem exactly as it exists.
That is my whole adaptation agriculture summed up into one word.
So I do not practice crop rotation.
I want as many diseases in my garden as I can possibly have so that the plants can figure
out how to survive.
Because these plants have been surviving millions of years before people came along.
They know how to do this stuff.
We don't have to interfere.
We don't have to control everything.
Ha!
So I went to Europe and they started heckling me.
Oh, this is wonderful for you in the US, but how do you deal with slugs?
And I'm like, I don't have slugs.
How do I know how to deal with slugs?
So I started interviewing every farmer I could interview in Europe about how to deal with
slugs.
The bottom line was the more life you have in your garden, the less problem you have
with slugs.
No till gardeners, no problem at all with slugs.
Where the slugs were a problem for people was where they were tilling and they were
making a moonscape and then they were putting their plants in the garden.
And so the only thing the slugs had to eat was the plants that had just been put in the
garden.
But the farmers that took their prunings from their orchard and they put them in little
rows in the garden so that there would be microbes and fungus and beetles living in
the garden and having an ecosystem to live in.
The farmers that had 100 species in their garden instead of 5 species in their garden
had little problem with slugs.
The more life, the healthier a garden.
So I am starting to get old and I'm not liking to work even less now than I used to.
So I land race everything.
My chickens, I'm working on land racing trees because a tree is something that can out compete
the weeds and it can just grow and take care of itself and I go as a farmer and harvest
it once a year.
While I was in Europe, I paid a lot of attention to the food that was in Europe.
There was some nice food.
There was also a bunch of ho-hum food.
And what I decided at the end was the food that was grown by Amber, my local baker, is
every bit as good as anything I had in Europe.
Amber sources her wheat locally.
It's milled by a local miller.
It is inoculated with a local sourdough starter.
It's prepared by her local staff.
Nowhere in Europe did I have bread that tasted better than that local bread that she was
producing for me.
So one of the beautiful things about saving my own seeds is that I get to taste every
fruit in every generation before I save seeds from it.
So that the stuff I grow just becomes beautiful tasting to me, to my customers.
If I take a Hubbard squash, I cross it with a banana, I get a hybrid.
And that hybrid is not a monster.
It doesn't develop poisons.
It doesn't develop spines.
It doesn't creep out in any way.
It's just a beautiful squash.
This particular hybrid combines the savoriness of this with the sweetness of this.
It's a beautiful variety.
One of the joys of tasting squash is that it is best done as community.
So we get together and we have squash tasting parties.
We have popcorn tasting parties.
Anyway, beautiful times together.
So remember this dire thing that I started with about how the chemical companies own
the seeds and turns out that 80 to 90% of the seed that is grown in the world is grown
by farmer seed networks.
It's not grown by these big companies.
It's grown by farmers that share with each other.
It's grown by backyard gardeners.
It's grown by small regional seed companies.
So we can pretty much just forget about this system and ignore it and focus on our local
efforts.
Our local efforts are already doing amazing work and we're already plugged into that.
So let's continue to do what we're doing and not feel like we have to be inadequate because
we don't have a university degree.
Every variety that I grow was developed by indigenous farmers who were illiterate, who
had no understanding of DNA.
They were farmers that went out into their field.
They found something that they loved.
They saved it.
They replanted.
Every one of us can do that same kind of work.
While I was in Europe, this was the best meal that I ate.
And why?
This butter was produced by a farmer a mile from where I ate it.
He added salt to the butter with his own hands and there were still little pieces of, maybe
you can see it here, little pieces of the whey that were still in the butter.
It was just delightful.
That sausage was made by a farmer that had raised the pig himself that was within five
miles of where I ate that sausage.
He put that sausage in that little tube all by himself.
The local food that I eat is always the best food that I've ever eaten.
If we can move ourselves towards having some local food more often, it'll be easier to
plug into the local food networks.
So let's talk about some people that are doing local food right.
Redmond Heritage Farms.
We have kitchens in Sugar House in Orem and they are cooking their french fries in coconut
oil.
That's a safe oil that's not damaging people's health by the high concentration of omega-6
oils.
Shout out to Redmond for doing that.
Grand Prismatic Seed in Salt Lake City, Utah is a local.
All right.
She's giving me the 10-minute warning like late.
But they're producing local seeds in Salt Lake City, Utah.
No GMO, no pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers, just beautiful seeds.
Snake River Seed Co-op up in Boise, Idaho.
They're a little bit outside of our ecoregion, but we're pretty close.
We're high altitude, we're dry.
And so Snake River Seed Cooperative, one thing they have going on is they will tell you where
every lot of seed was grown, who the farmer was, where the farmer's location is, so you
can really get local seed.
A lot of the heirloom seed catalogs that you get like, I won't name names because that
would be rude, but they buy their seed in the Netherlands, they buy it in Vietnam, they
buy it in Oregon, places that are totally different than our local ecosystem.
And so when the seeds get here and they don't know how to grow, we blame ourselves for being
bad farmers when we should be looking at our seed source and saying, why did that seed
fail because it's not locally adapted.
Giving ground seeds.
This is the company owned by Julie Sheen that I told you about with the squash bugs up in
Pocatello.
When she left my farm, she took many of my varieties with her.
They're available in her seed catalog.
Here's another thing that I really like by the Buffalo Seed Company.
They say, this is where our crops are likely to do super well because that's the best match
to our ecosystem.
And then they say, well, they might do okay in this other region.
I also sent Buffalo Seed Company a complete archive of my garden and many of my varieties
are for sale from the Buffalo Seed Company, but grown in Kansas.
And so they're going to be more locally adapted to Kansas now than they are to my garden up
in Cache Valley, but still a beautiful resource for genetically diverse crops.
The Open Source Seed Initiative is an organization that's devoted to keeping seeds.
Did you just do me five minutes?
Okay.
To keeping seeds free.
I am an admin for the Open Source Plant Breeding Forum, which they host, where we talk about
plant breeding.
The organization that sent me here today is Going to Seed, whose mission goal is shifting
agriculture towards adaptation, community, and diversity.
We have courses.
Julia Dakin here called me up after I published my book and says, I want to make a video course
about your book.
And so there's a video course about my book that's freely available.
Dr. James White made a course for us about microbes.
We hired some farmers down in Mexico to make a video about traditional farming methods.
All of those are available for free on the Going to Seed website.
This is some of the staff at Going to Seed.
This is Anna Muritz down in Moss Beach, California.
She put together this slide deck for me and made many of the graphics, and she helps me
to figure out how to be a better storyteller and stuff like that.
And so thank you, Anna.
There was supposed to be a video here which we're going to skip, but I'll tell it to you
anyway.
So I don't have any patience for blossom and rot in my garden.
I see something with blossom and rot.
I yank it out and toss it, because I'm not a bad farmer, because I don't know how to
water, because I don't put calcium on my tomatoes.
That's a genetic defect in the tomato.
So it shouldn't be growing in my garden, because I don't appreciate it.
Let's not blame ourselves.
So we have an online discussion forum where we talk about these principles.
We do online get togethers and Zoom calls and just chat or have guest speakers.
I do a podcast.
We attend conferences all over.
This was in California at the Heirloom Seed Expo.
We do a seed share where we gather together genetically diverse crops from all over, dump
them all into a jar, redistribute them.
That makes it really inexpensive to collect genetic diversity.
For some of the projects I've worked on, I've had to buy like 30 or 100 packets of different
varieties of seeds and combine them in my garden.
That's really expensive.
But if we cooperate as a community, that can be really easy.
We're going to open the seed share for this year up to the public on, I think, February
5th.
So if you want to jump on the Going to Seed website and join our mailing list, we'll send
you a notice when that becomes available or just watch the website.
This was my contribution.
There are...
Okay, one minute.
All right.
So we...
Anyway, the end.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.