Hello everyone and welcome back to the Hostel Road Trip Podcast.
The podcast that literally takes its show on the road.
Listen in as James Black and Bobby Dyer, owners of International Travelers House Hostels,
travel around the country to learn about these great locations and incredible people
that come together to provide a unique and exciting experience for travelers from all over the world.
Welcome back to the Hostel Road Trip. The adventure just keeps on getting better.
As we have traveled three hours north of San Francisco to the Oz Farm on the Mendocino Coast
in the town of Point Arena. Absolutely beautiful.
It is just majestic out here. I already feel more relaxed.
And I'm here with the general manager, Dean Fernandez.
How's it going?
And the lovely Miss Margaret Grace, the retreat manager, hospitality manager, administrative director.
What else do you do? I don't know.
Wear lots of hats.
Robert Dyer from ITH.
Good morning.
And Eric Carlos de Frea from World Packers.
Thank you guys. Thanks for hosting us too.
We had the pleasure of staying here last night on the farm and having dinner with the staff.
I don't think I've eaten so healthy in the past month, especially after being on the road.
I feel like a new van. It was a love, the Three Sisters soup. What was inside of it?
Corn. The Three Sisters are corn, squash and beans that grow together. And a little kale salad.
And we had some of the Luna Sea vodka from our friend in Santa Cruz at the Santa Cruz HI.
Made some vodka tonics. It was just a fantastic relaxing candlelit night.
But we're here to talk a bit more about this awesome farm, the journey of you two and how you found yourselves here.
And also what the guests eventually can experience from coming here and finding this gem.
But I'll turn to you, Dean, the mastermind behind this beautiful operation.
Tell us a bit how you found yourself and what we wanted to highlight here is that just like hostiling,
a thing that a lot of younger Americans are getting into and becoming more aware of and spreading that knowledge to the other millennials in their demographic,
young farmers, the average age of a farmer is getting older and older. More young people need to get into it.
And I think this is a type of establishment that can really spread that knowledge about farming. How did you get into farming?
Yeah, like you just said, the average age of a farmer in the United States is 60, which is getting towards retirement.
Just getting towards who's going to do the farming, who's going to grow the food for the population.
Pass the knowledge. Severin is a huge proponent of this and she's a friend of the farm and she's talked all over the country about this.
And we need to grow more young farmers. Yes.
What we developed here is a system of an apprenticeship where young people come usually fresh out of college and they'll stay for the year and learn farming.
And through teaching them farming, we can grow more food around the world than we can just from growing the food here alone.
And the way I got into it is I went to business school, Notre Dame, like classic route, super different than this.
And decided, what am I going to do with my life after that? It was 08, which was during, they call it the Great Recession now.
Yes. Everyone was getting fired from all these business jobs.
And it really gave me the space to be able to ask myself that question of what am I going to do to make myself happy, not rich?
And went back to school in Santa Cruz, studied ecological horticulture. Awesome.
And fell into all these great communities along my stumbling path up here to Oz.
And you know, that was something last night that I picked up at the dinner discussion as we sat down and we were kind of still entering our way into the conversation.
You all were just naturally having your end of the day conversation.
I was like, I feel like I'm sitting around with a bunch of scientists and you know, math wizards and they're like, the project I was like, this is awesome.
And it's so interesting now to come to find out here that you are a very well educated man from the establishment, but you're using that education in an entirely different way.
It's pretty unique. Yeah. But some people call it divine intervention. I don't know what it is.
It's just sometimes when you're following your path, everything seems to line up and nothing was lost along the way.
Everything kind of stacked on itself to build. So you're like standing on the shoulders of giants.
Yeah. What can I say? I love it. Now, how about you, Miss Margaret?
How did you find yourself first into farming and then over to Oz?
Yeah, kind of a similar path in the realm where I started out in fashion design school.
Wow. All right. Nice scarf.
And as I started studying fashion, I got into like sustainable fashion and was really learning more about the industry and getting farther and farther away from what actually felt like I wanted to be doing.
And through that, I found a great like permaculture community living in communal households in San Francisco while going to school and just started like backyard gardening and farming.
And I was also really interested in education. So I started working, excuse me, working with young children and became like after school program, farm and garden teacher.
And then that's organization, the school that I worked for, set me away to do further studying at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, which is where I eventually ended up leaving that job and going to work for them as an intern.
And that's where I met Dean. And that's how I ended up here at Oz.
As you're a member of that society down there as well?
Yeah. We both were interns together.
Oh, right. Okay. That's so cool how the path and then you also with Bernie last night kind of have his path intertwined with you and then one day he calls you in the snowstorm in Minneapolis. What am I doing?
So it's so cool to see how the characters have flowed into this place and then some have stayed for much longer than their apprenticeship. But then you still have that new blood coming in.
That reminded me a lot of the hostile type setup where we have work exchanges and a big part of what we do with that vetting process, a lot of interviewing screening to make sure that it's a person that fits in with the existing family, doesn't upset the herd, if you will.
But we really pitch it to them as a cultural experience and a cultural education that you're going to come in, you're going to be living with people from all over the world. You're going to have to work with people from all over the world.
These are all really good experiences to have and it can really cultivate a person's character.
Yeah. Tell us a little more, Dean, about the facility here and kind of the different, all the different, you obviously got the vegetables and stuff growing and fruits, but different structures you have and just kind of the lay of the land.
We're the, Oz Farm is what we're known as, but it's also Oz Farm and Retreat Center. We focus our energies in two different directions, primarily the farm and the retreat.
So most of the day we're out there farming. We have most of our crew out there in the fields harvesting, weeding, planting, and then the other half of us comes out and prepares the camp for our weekend retreats.
How many people can stay here? How big is the retreat area?
Do you want to take this one, Mike?
Sure. Yeah.
So we have five cabins and two yurts and then the geodesic domes, which are on the other side of the river. So all in total, it sleeps around 30 people.
Nice.
And then we have plenty of overflow camping space. So when we do larger events like weddings, our max for overnight guests is 60 people, and that tends to pretty much fill up.
And then for weddings, it's usually around 100 to 150 people that come for the day.
And the structures are so cool for the listeners out there. You know, you have to come see it to really appreciate it, but you have such a lot of character with the different cabins and yurts and a shout out to Pacific Yurts.
I actually live in the Pacific Yurt up in Big Bear Mountain. Fantastic structures. All the places have these wood stoves. So you really have the feel of the ambiance.
And I think that's really special up here. But that originally starts with its kind of origin, which the history of this place being a former commune called Village Oz or Oz Village, which one was it?
Village Oz.
Village Oz. And as they were saying last night, where'd that name come from? And it was as these hippies were coming out here, it looked like they were coming from Oz.
So I think that's such a cool history to it. But tell the listeners a bit about that so they can understand the foundation of this place.
The whole history of this area is very rural, very kind of country, simple lifestyle until the late 60s when the hippies started coming up here with their back to the land movement and completely transformed this area.
And most of them kind of stayed around and really still have a huge lasting effect. And now they're kind of sitting on the city council and making bigger changes in the community.
But back then in the late 60s, they came here all lived in the 100 year old barn while they built out these little funky structures that we now rent out as cabins.
That's awesome.
Was all the wood that these structures were built with, was that harvested locally?
Most of it, yeah.
Yeah. I feel like just sitting in this room, you can just see the story. I can imagine all the people back in the 60s just like putting these structures together.
We're in the heart of Redwood Country. So a lot of the wood is harvested on site for our building projects.
And that's a cool artistic flair to it. I love that type of stuff as I sit inside these buildings. I look at the in your kitchen, your kitchen table and the other one is just a tree.
Yeah.
That's just been milled and you're just like, this is so cool and rustic and you have benches that are made from logs, log art as you said.
Yeah. If you're talking about permaculture, it's kind of like these what's around.
Yeah.
And Redwood is a great building.
But work with the nature to create your structures and then because you've created your structures out of nature, you're very in tune with it.
You know, naturally as you're not just this cookie cutter that was sent over from another country.
And that's what makes us a little bit unique and you can't replicate this if you're a Marriott or a Hilton.
That's well said, my friend. And that's going to be into a bit of our next topic after we take a quick break here.
We're going to talk about how you have branched out into the hospitality element via hip camp and brought people into this style of accommodation.
That's the reason we're here now is we wanted to highlight this as a really cool place of accommodation that you could come and get an educational experience.
So stay tuned. Oh, one second here.
I want to because this place has been changed like over the years, like a lot of years ago. And I was just curious about is there a mission statement about what you guys are doing right now about the Ospar?
Yeah, our primary mission is to educate young farmers.
Nice.
And by doing that, we invite the public to come share the space and educate them in what sustainable farming is.
And they can come and pass that knowledge on.
And the apprentices that stay here for the year can come and when they leave here, spread that knowledge as well.
And just as you were saying before, just for the young people to pass on to the other generations, the farming culture.
So you don't lose that transfer of knowledge when you're talking about the 60 plus year old farmers.
Yeah, crucial. We're in a very sensitive time period right now.
It's crucial to spread the message. The food's got to be grown from somewhere. We're not going to stop eating food anytime soon.
But I live in Brazil and a lot of permaculture in Brazil as well.
And a lot of people in the permaculture field say that there's a different movement of people moving from the cities to the forest to farming.
Yeah. So that would be the movement that you are building to. Do you see that?
What we're doing here is we're fostering this idea that you can live off-grid. You can live outside of normal society.
And we're talking about internet being so prevalent now. We have Wi-Fi here. We have a lot of the modern technologies that you would have in the city.
It's never been easier to live off the grid and in a place like this. And you're not sacrificing any sort of luxuries that you have in the city necessarily.
You really have all the resources here. You have a river going through your property and you're saying that the fishing's great?
Yeah. We have an abundance of wild sustainable activities like harvesting the redwood trees, harvesting from the river.
The water we get basically is from our riparian rights. It's very sustainable in that regard.
How big is the whole farm?
It's 240 acres. Most of it's in redwood forest. A lot of it is cultivated farmland and the rest of it is put into the retreat spaces.
What percent is the cultivated farmland?
It's 15 acres.
15 acres of farmland. Nice.
Yeah. And half of those acres are orchards. The annual beds are about more like 7 acres.
Okay.
Yeah. What we're the most known for outside of the farm is our apples. We have over 55 varieties of heirloom and antique varietals.
I saw the boxes that you had out there. So you box those up and you sell those organic right to the distributor, right?
Yeah.
There it is.
That ass. All right. We're going to take a quick break and we are back here at the Oz Farm in Northern California. Stay tuned.
We hope you're enjoying this episode of the Hostile Road Trip podcast. We're taking a moment now to talk about a great service called Worldpackers.com.
Worldpackers.com is actually how I got my start with the Hostile Road Trip podcast.
Worldpackers is a great service that connects travelers looking for a place to stay in a new city with the hostiles who need their skills.
You can do anything from house cleaning to reception to media and marketing and so much more.
With a reasonable fee of $50 a year and a little bit of courage, you could find yourself anywhere in the world.
For more information, just go find Grandpa Carlos surfing on the West Coast somewhere between California and Mexico.
If you're having trouble finding him this way, he might be taking a siesta on his surfboard.
If that's the case, scream to the heavens, Grandpa Carlos, we need you. And he'll be sure to answer the call.
But if all else fails, just check out Worldpackers.com. That's W-O-R-L-D-P-A-C-K-E-R-S dot com.
And now we bring you back to your regularly scheduled program.
Welcome back to Hostile Road Trip. We are in the town of Point Arena.
Shout out to the Point Arena Pirates. Three hours north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
We are so happy to be here with Dean and Margaret from the Oz Farm.
Welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. And of course, the handsome Bobby Dyer. Hello.
And the vivacious Eric Ferrea. Thank you. All right. Let's jump back into it.
I still feel so loose from that hot tub session we had last night. Feeling good. Let's do this.
So I want to talk a little bit about the hospitality element on this farm.
So our listeners know that we just didn't want to come up to this farm and have a good time with you for no reason.
There is a hospitality element that is really cool and has taken this place to a different style of operation.
And a big part of that was a new booking OTA that we want to get the word out there about called Hip Camp.
And Hip Camp has a really cool startup history of about five years right now. Right.
And I'm going to let Dean tell us a bit more about how that got started.
Hip Camp I originally found out about through working with the state parks.
And they were the online booking platform for if you wanted to camp at a state park.
We reached out to them when we first showed up here at Oz Farm for a way to branch out and get more online bookings via some sort of platform like this.
They responded saying this is something new that we're going to try that we're going to open up private land.
And this is a big idea but we want you to be one of the first ones to try out this idea with us.
And it's been an extremely fruitful relationship.
And it's grown into we don't even use Hip Camp as much anymore because we're booking bigger retreats because of the original relationship with the camp.
And if anyone owns private land and they're open to renting out space either for camping or they have a semi rustic accommodation.
I highly recommend Hip Camp as a booking platform.
The people that it brings to us are always top drawer.
Nice. And I think that it's such a cool idea.
I tip my hat off to the people that created it because what a great model and a mutually beneficial business model of you've got this land here with the state parks as being utilized.
You've got this booking site idea. Let's merge together.
Everyone's winning and then it's exposing these experiences to the younger culture as well as the culture of getting out there again.
And I think it's so cool that it also sets up the right expectation because while it isn't really camping as we call it because you're not roughing it.
You know you're not out there and you're sleeping bag on the ground.
You're in some type of cool artistic structure or you know you're or TP.
So it really is a bit of glamping and I think that sets up a good expectation because they're always wow this is great.
It's better than I thought. Right. Whereas if you had an Airbnb person they might be coming in and saying like oh my god I don't have a TV in here.
You know so you're setting the right expectations of the right crowd and there's going to be a win win for everyone.
But Margaret tell us a bit more about the implementation of Hip Camp at this particular location since you've gotten on board.
Yeah so I guess logistically the way we handle our bookings here are we allow weddings and retreats the places for people that want to rent the entire space.
Priority to them. Yeah.
So we give them priority booking where they can book up to nine months in advance or a year for a wedding.
And then Hip Camp we open up 30 days in advance.
Filling the gas.
So it's like whenever we don't have a full camp rental or like a group is coming in to take over the whole space we open up each cabin individually.
So you can come just as a couple or a small group.
We also have campsites on Hip Camp so you can come and pitch a tent and then you still have access to this community house.
So everyone that stays in a cabin shares this communal space kind of like a hostel so they can see collaboration on meals together and there's a bath house below.
And so it's neat with Hip Camp weekends you know you might have like five different small groups of people but they're all kind of sharing this space together in the kitchen and having a cocktail or drinking coffee in the morning.
Where do you find most of your travelers come from?
All over really California but mostly from San Francisco Bay Area.
People are trying to just get away for the weekend and kind of unplug a bit.
Yeah and I think that in your description of the Hip Camp process for your nightly guests that is just so lockstep in line with what a hostel experience would be.
You come to this place that has people that are living on site that are cultivating the land and the property as if they're a family living on the property.
And you get to intertwine with them and the other guests within these communal spaces breaking bread together sharing the experience together.
So that's why we see so much similarity in the old style farm that we do with hostels.
And I've often thought we should come up with a word like farmstall or something like that you know that merges them together.
We have a lodge up in Big Bear that we call Lodge Stoll because it's a lodge and it's a hostel.
So I feel like there's so much synergy in the two that it's great to do an episode and I've said to our producers that we should do a farm episode every season.
Because in each region there's going to be a place like this that we should highlight that's doing the same types of things as far as the immersion amongst the guests and the education of the guests.
So I think that's so cool.
It's got the best of both worlds. You have the privacy as well.
Yeah.
And space and then the come togetherness.
That would probably be the biggest benefit I would say in contrast to a hostile experience where you usually are forfeiting all private space.
And if you do have a private room you're amongst everyone else in a building.
But for example the cabin we stayed in down its own little road very secluded you know had our own space really would feel like you're out in the middle of nowhere by yourself.
But a short walk down the road now we're back at the main farm.
That's where everyone's at.
It's made communal buildings and meeting houses so you've got the advantage of a couple hundred acres to spread out that experience.
So that's really cool.
Tell us a little more about how the community kind of accepts you guys here at the farm or how you're integrating the community or sharing with other farmers.
I thought that was pretty interesting.
Yeah the community is super accepting of the farm.
Most people who have been here through the 60s and 70s had their origin here in Alice farm.
That's cool.
That place attracts people initially to the area and then kind of like Bernie we were hanging out with last night came to the area via Oz farm and now lives locally.
I thought it was cool last night you're saying you see people or meet people like the farmers market the groceries are like I was at Oz 20 years ago.
All the time.
Everyone's got an Oz story.
It was definitely like coming from an urban environment and living super rurally it was really easy to make friends because we just kind of had the one up of like oh yeah we're the newbies at Oz farm now and everyone's got their Oz origin story to share.
Ah grew up going on field trips as a kid or I got married there I used to live in Rainbow Cabin or whatever it is.
Someone has a connection here.
Yeah that's great.
And here you guys focus on fruits and vegetables you say you don't do any livestock but you're able to trade with some of the other farmers.
Yeah and that's another reason why the community is so embracing of us is that we're growing food for the community.
Contributing to the community.
Yeah and yeah we do trades with other farmers of livestock.
That's awesome.
It turns out food is a great.
Resource.
Yeah like a good trade.
Yeah.
You don't have to try and be a master of you know farming vegetables fruit livestock you can just be good at something.
Yeah if you spread yourself out too thin then everything kind of suffers we try and focus mostly on fruits and vegetables.
And yeah that's a little bit about that project management we were talking about and you highlighted last night and when you were talking about it I was like this is a man speaking from experience as you have a lot of new people come in.
They're fresh they're full of energy and get all these ideas.
But a lot of times those ideas are not supplemented with like how are we going to follow through with this.
Who's going to do it.
Yeah.
How much time this is going to take.
Right.
Is it going to take us away from doing stuff we're really good at.
Yeah.
Sacrifice the product over there.
So when you start to speak like that I was like yeah this is really an interesting project management type of thing that you've got going on and similarities to the hostels because you have a lot of creative people that stay at hostels.
They come in with all this energy.
They have all these ideas.
But the follow through and everything else.
Yeah.
Sometimes it's not they're kind of pipe dreaming if you will.
Yeah.
So I think that's great though.
I love hearing everyone's ideas.
Yeah.
We always take it all in.
Soak it in.
Digest it and.
Sometimes two years later you do it.
Yeah.
Sometimes.
Yeah.
For sure.
Sometimes the ideas are great.
Sometimes everyone's got ideas and this place kind of breeds that kind of mentality.
I think it's important to highlight with that though in that bartering system which was so much more prevalent in our culture for thousands of years before that you didn't need to do everything.
You didn't have to own everything.
You didn't have to control everything.
You had to be good at what you were passionate about and what you did well.
Yeah.
And that would get you by because you could trade that service, skill, product with your neighbor or someone out with what they did good and what they were very good at.
And it got away from that Walmart scheme of everything under one roof.
And I've got to have it all.
It's very greedy.
I think I grew up that way where I thought I was going to be able to just live very self-sufficiently.
Yeah.
And I started focusing on how do I grow my own food?
How do I do my own everything?
And then I got to what it was is textiles.
And I was like I'm never going to be able to make my own t-shirt, you know, the cotton that I grow or the wool.
And there's people who focus on that.
And that's part of community.
And that's what I've learned from being at Alice Farms is it takes a community of people.
Margaret's really great at sewing and mending and making clothes.
And I'm good at growing food.
And Abby's really good at making the flowers and arrangements.
And it all kind of comes together into this great project.
It's a great dinnertime discussion with everyone bringing their own skills.
Yeah.
And that reminded us very much of our experience at Hostos because often you have a couple of people from Brazil,
a few people from Asia, a guy from Africa, a few people from Europe, and all their different cultural experiences,
hobbies, passions they bring to the table collectively.
Now you've got this team, you know, beautiful synergy of all these different talents.
And collectively you're able to do so much more than you would individually if you said I'm going to try to achieve all these things myself
by even trying to make people do them for me instead of just organically letting it happen and letting people follow their passions.
Yeah.
Really cool to see that.
And that's so healthy to have international people at the table because as Americans we sometimes have this one-way mirror.
Very short-sighted, narrow-minded, you know, influenced by a lot of our media outlets to think in a certain way.
Totally.
So it can be a really rattling experience sometimes, sobering experience to hear someone from an international perspective.
And it's like, do you want to really know what it's like?
Yeah, it's super healthy.
That was Fox News told you this, you know.
Now I'm going to tell you what's happening on the ground.
It's like, wait, we'll just have one podcast.
As soon as you start traveling and sharing places with other people, you immediately start not believing TV anymore,
the news anymore, start questioning.
Less likely to be influenced by the misinformation and disinformation if you've experienced it in the raw.
You know, so it's going to be tough for us to have some guy from Monsanto say that's not true about our cross-pollinating seeds.
After you come to a farm and talk to organic farmers about what a devastating fucked up practice that is
and how they're just really playing God in a really scary way.
It's hard to battle the fact that you can legitimately patent genetics of plants and own a plant as a farmer doesn't make any logical sense.
And I often like this, you know, people, last night the conversation came up a lot of like the flaws of capitalism.
I went to a school that was Jesuit University educated and they spoke of conscious capitalism,
which is something that resonated a lot with me because like you can be a capitalist,
but you don't have to be a greedy monger, destructive person, you know.
You can operate within this in your ambitions.
And it's tough to do, but it's really a difficult thing that we live with now in trying to combat that.
Thanks for mentioning that.
I think what we operate here on, which I did learn at the number one business school,
is a triple bottom line that instead of profit, people, planet, then profit.
That's beautiful.
Highlight that listeners, learn from that one because that is so true.
You don't have to completely unprogram yourself, you know, you can still be an ambitious person.
You can still work hard and go after what you want to do,
but you can look at it in a different way on the bottom line and that will bring you to a different product and experience.
There's so much more value to and other things besides money.
You can live very abundantly having fresh water, clean air to breathe, food that's grown right by your own hands.
And you know, money causes a lot of trouble.
Yeah.
It can be scary sometimes too because with the internet, online world, everything goes so fast.
Like a marketing position five years ago, 10 years ago, is a completely different position today.
That's true.
But growing food, you always need food.
Yeah, yeah.
Which one's more valuable?
There's certain things, right?
Yeah, definitely.
Good.
All right, we're going to take a quick break here for our sponsorship plug.
And we'll be back at the Oz Farm with Dean and Margaret.
It's been a fantastic experience, but we've got to wrap up and hit the road and head for the mountains of Tahoe.
Stay tuned.
Thanks again for listening to the Hostile Road Trip podcast with us.
We want to take a second to talk about one of our sponsors that keeps the road trip alive.
That is the International Travelers House Hostels located in San Diego at three locations, Big Bear Lake and Newport, Rhode Island.
International Travelers House provides a unique experience at each one of their locations with great staff, great food,
and tons of connections to the local community so that you can have a great time vacationing, traveling through, or staying for a while.
If you want more information on ITH, check out ithhostels.com to check out videos, pictures, blogs, and direct booking to our locations.
Thank you again for listening.
We hope you enjoy the conclusion of this episode.
Welcome back to Hostile Road Trip.
We are here at the Oz Farm in the community house, which was built in 1969 by the original OG hippies that came out here
and created the Oz Village Intentional Community Commune.
It's just such a cool setting to see because you can still feel the energy of these hippies, I feel like, that built this place
and the spirits of them floating around, if you will.
It's just so rustic and natural, but with a lot of natural light from the windows and the skylights built for that purpose of being with nature, you can tell.
You're right. A lot of them were professors and actual intelligent society contributors from where they came from.
They came up here and built everything very intentionally, south facing direction, natural solar heat warming these buildings during the day.
And because it's been off grid since its inception, there's a lot of wood stoves and just natural ways of doing things.
We're one of the pioneers of solar technology and batteries technology, all this stuff.
And to this day, we're still innovating with new technologies.
I was telling you guys about how we run off these car batteries, Tesla car batteries.
That's awesome.
The amyon is something we've adopted and still trying to improve the off grid living so you're not actually sacrificing anything by living off grid.
And you're just gaining a lot more by not having to be tied to the grid.
And now another one you mentioned last night, micro hydro micro hydro.
So water comes from the rivers.
When it's not sunny, it's either windy or and or rainy.
We have a lot of natural flowing water during the winter.
We just capture the water as it's going down the stream and run it through a pipe.
So it powers motor basically when a motor runs backwards, it generates power instead of using power.
So it just turns a motor and that motor calls into a battery bank.
So you're not even disturbing the flow of the river at all.
You're just letting it flow through an apparatus that controls the motor into a battery.
I never knew that was how those hydro facilities work.
But the micro when you said last night, I think you get the wind, you get the solar and then you get this micro hydro like this is bad ass.
Yes, well, you need because sunlight only happens during the day.
And the whole thing about batteries is that it has to get you through the night.
You're using lights and a lot of stuff during the day.
So if you're running one of these micro hydro or wind turbines, you can wake up with a full battery bank.
It's pretty luxurious.
We lived on a sailboat.
That's kind of where we started our hostile vision.
We got living on a sailboat in San Diego.
So we know a lot about that was our living off the grid.
Yeah.
Living on battery banks and solar panels and stuff like solar panel wind.
And then, you know, living very minimalist, you know, as a sailor, you live at one bag.
That's the only space you have.
You start to realize a lot of this stuff I don't need.
It's a lot like a tiny home.
It is very much like a tiny home.
Yeah. Yeah.
Some of the better times on that one.
Now, with the solar element, does that make it more challenging to keep your status as organic, which you are organic status,
which is extremely hard and difficult and power to you for keeping that going as it's always run that way?
But is that challenging to do or is it easier to do with intertwining that green energy?
That's a good question.
A lot of the certification for organic doesn't rely upon energy consumption as much.
Okay.
For the energy consumption, it's a lot harder to have things like cold storage.
So what we're doing is we're harvesting and delivering day of.
Ah.
But the organic certification is difficult.
The reason why we do it is because outside of the local community, that word organic carries a lot of weight.
If you're organic, you're automatically non-GMO.
Yeah.
You're automatically not using any pesticides.
It says a lot about your production as a farm.
When we send our apples to San Francisco, that word fetches double the price for our apples.
That's correct.
And it's more than worth the hoops we have to jump through to try and keep the certification.
It's a little bit challenging, but we're not doing anything that's not organic.
We just have to keep up a lot of record keeping and things like that.
You have that annual inspection.
Now, but the original commune that came out here was organic, right?
I think you can be organic without the certification.
Sure, but they were probably operating along with it.
They were definitely.
Ahead of their time.
Yeah, yeah.
Very high standards and morals for living.
And you were mentioning earlier some cool things with the county itself being an area where you can't bring in these genetically modified seeds.
And you have a seed bank at the library.
I mean, that's just so cool.
But people, I think a lot of younger people especially, don't understand how sensitive this seed issue is.
And what companies like Monsanto and their underling companies that they've created to try to slip by the fact that people hear Monsanto and now think Lucifer for the right reason.
Not to hurt the dog's name though.
But what would you say is something that you would want to share with the listeners about this movement of these genetically modified seeds that they cross-pollinate and then it makes them that they don't come about each season.
Yeah, well that's the Terminator gene is what they're trying to put into seeds nowadays.
And the patent literally makes it illegal for you to have a farm growing organic seeds.
If something like corn is being grown, it's wind pollinated, so it's transferring into your crop.
It's no longer organic if your neighbor is growing any sort of Terminator gene or Roundup Ready kind of seed.
So it's really tough.
I'm at Mendocino where we live and I'm from San Diego as well.
I left because I was swimming against the current of the society down there.
I moved up here because we're very much swimming with the current here.
We're organic. It's easy to be organic because everyone wants organic up here.
Everyone understands the value of it and appreciates it.
The county is non-GMO county.
No one's allowed to grow GMO crops in this county.
But like I said, the library carries, same way they carry books, they carry a seed library as well.
And you can go there for free, get seeds to grow your own food.
Yeah, and you watch a lot of those science sci-fi movies and whenever there's an armageddon,
I always remember that they're always carrying a bag of seeds.
That's the most important thing that you've got to get is these seeds.
I was reading a book the other day and we were talking about how back in the day,
if you were able as an explorer to take a seed from one country or continent to another continent
and proliferate this, you were like a god.
You're like, oh my god, you brought tobacco over.
Not that that's a good one to bring.
But an example of it was so much more respected and valued.
And now I think that we've just been tuned out from it.
And it's just become like that capitalized thing, just like health care and other areas
where it shouldn't get involved with, why are they fucking with the seeds
and how much of a damage that could create.
But the story that you told us of the farmer who would be farming for generations
and the cross-pollination would then put him in a situation where he gets sued by Monsanto,
shut down by Monsanto, then I'm sure they'd come at him and say,
well, why don't you buy these seeds right back in business?
You know, the guy had no choice.
So I think it's so cool that you've all banded together as a county
and a large community to say no to that so that it couldn't happen.
And I hope that more communities out there and younger people listening
are aware of this and start to take this more of a serious issue.
It's really important.
I mean, especially with organic certification, if you're farming next to another farm
that is growing GMO seeds and isn't doing organic practices,
it makes the process of having your certification way more difficult.
And a lot of times you can't even get certified because your neighbors aren't doing it.
How frustrating that was.
We're really blessed to be in a community where it's supported in that realm.
We're blessed that Juniors like this exist. So that's fantastic.
Now, what about, you've got yourself established here.
You're a young, well-educated man. You've got a vision.
You've got a great crew around you. You've got an awesome thing going on here.
Where are you looking to take this place? What's the vision going forward?
It's an exciting time because we're in this cool stage of growth
where via the internet and HIPCamp and our social networks, I guess,
we have established ourselves as a functioning retreat center.
We're already, I'd say, 90% booked for next year.
And we're looking into where do we go to make the business function well,
but make our lives function well here and feed our souls.
From there, we start talking about visioning for curating our own content here.
We're doing our own retreats, basically.
Nice.
We're starting to focus on the human potential movement,
what we can do philosophically, ecologically,
host weekends here that are educational,
not just for the people who come and enjoy themselves, but for ourselves as well.
Outstanding. Now, Margaret, over to you now,
back for a bit of the guest experience that intertwining with this educational experience
that Dean's talking about.
If you were just coming up, not on one of these retreats,
but just a solo person coming and renting a cabin,
what would be kind of like your daily experience at the farm here
that you could kind of expect to take in?
Well, it's a really windy road to get here.
So I think in that realm, you start to feel the dips and turns of like,
oh, I'm leaving a larger society and I'm headed into the countryside
to really just be able to take in a big breath of fresh air and to unplug.
We don't have cell phone service here, so literally phones can just stay in the car.
You don't even have to lock your car.
Find your way into your cabin. If it's cold out, get a fire going.
And then you really just get to enjoy the nature and be in the beauty that surrounds you.
So walking through the fields and seeing how broccoli grows
and connecting to the food here. You get to eat the food that we grow.
Yeah.
Hanging out in the Garcia River. It's one of the cleanest watersheds we have in California.
It's really beautiful. And then we're just about two miles from the ocean.
So you can head to the beach. Really good surf. Really great surf.
There's tons of awesome hiking trails around here that are just beautiful.
You have one on site, right? We have a couple on site.
We have a trail system on site. And Obama, I think it was 2010,
started the local national monument with a storm at a public lands.
And it's a cool trail system right on the bluffs. Super beautiful.
Tallest lighthouse on the West Coast. Oh, nice.
And then I have to make you plug this hot tub as I experienced it last night.
A cedar wood fired hot tub. Tell us a bit about this bad boy.
Yeah. So just on the topic of the shared economy, we actually got the hot tub on a trade.
So we had a group of friends that come here every year to celebrate New Year's.
They've been doing it for I think almost 10 years now.
And a couple in that group wanted to get married. So they were like, hey, how about we do a trade?
We'll install this hot tub and then we can get married. And we thought that was a great deal.
And then the next year, another friend, we're like, how about we build a deck and put in a cold plunge in a shower
and beautify the hot tub zone even more for a trade. So we got really fortunate with that.
We had like people willing to put in the sweat and the labor and make it happen.
And now we have this beautiful amenity we get to share.
It's always if you come and rent the space and you do a full camp rental, the hot tub's included.
If it's a hip camp weekend, it's kind of hit or miss depending on who's weekend warrior and whether or not they're going to light it.
So we share responsibilities within the intentional community that lives here.
As far as every weekend, someone is in charge of making sure the guests are comfortable, the greenhouse gets watered and things like that.
And every day you come together for a family dinner?
Yeah, we have communal meals Monday through Friday and we just do a rotating shift on that.
Awesome. That was delicious last night.
You guys got lucky Margaret was cooking.
Yeah, we did. So we had the three sisters soup, we had the kale salad.
We had fresh bread from our friend James, James Pelican bread.
He knows all his own grain that he gets from Mendocino County.
I woke up this morning feeling certified organic.
It was great. I didn't put anything in my body last night, but a plant.
It was fantastic.
All right. Well, Dean Margaret, it has been an absolute pleasure.
I thank you for having us in your hospitality, sharing the experience with us so we can preach and go forward and spread the word for you.
And also taking the time out of your busy day to record this session with us to help us finish up season two of the Hostel Road Trip podcast series
and be a platform that we can use to get this word out there about this awesome experience up at the Oz Farm in the town of Poinarina, Mendocino County.
Until next time, we're hitting the road and heading for the mountains of Tahoe. Stay tuned.