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MAX IMPACT EP. 306 Regenerative Agriculture with @EBourgeois #ReFiπ³ π¨βπΎ
Recorded: June 16, 2023 Duration: 1:31:01Space Recording
Full Transcription
What's up, Refine Medellin, happy Friday.
NF Trees, GM, GM.
Take me, take me downtown, tonight.
I want to find it.
Big green in the building.
Blind me, I want to, want to disobey you.
It's the people who need you, ease my mind, will you, play that song again, cause we were
in love, we were in love, we were in love.
Some emoji dance moves.
I'm in the air, and if I'm crying, I'll get it from my ears.
Let's grow, let's grow.
Here we grow.
East Coast and adjust, let's grow.
G to the YAM Carbon Counting Club.
Song about Bezos, I want to see who's going to be the next Bezos of refi, the positive
impact version.
Fielding.
Woo!
I want to see who's going to be the next Bezos.
That's a man.
Retweet the room.
Retweet, retweet.
Let's warm up this room.
Happy Friday.
Happy Max Impact.
Let's grow, let's grow, let's grow.
Let's grow.
See some emoji dance moves.
Oh my goodness.
Maximum Impacts.
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Maximum Impacts.
We'll be right back.
I'll be right back.
Next time, take a look.
Let's grow, let's grow.
Let's grow, let's grow.
Let's grow, let's grow.
Let's grow, let's grow.
Let's grow.
Let's grow, let's grow.
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Let's grow.
Hello and welcome, everybody, to the Max Impact Show.
This is the live spaces show that's all about empowering you, the changemakers, to maximize your positive impact in the world by leveraging the latest and greatest technology.
With me today is none other than Ed Bourgeois.
Okay, Ed is a regenerative farmer.
He has 50-plus years of experience in regenerative agriculture.
He's into soil health and epigenetics, innovating in that sector.
He's now developing an online platform for a regenerative farmer-to-farmer network.
Great to have you here on the show.
I love to see regulars do features.
You know the tradition that we have here, Ed.
What's your why?
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Thanks, Jimmy, and everybody that's in the room.
I kind of, my why started so young that I, it's way in my history.
I got a connection with nature and I think I got kind of recruited and to understand agriculture in a nature sense.
And so, I was probably about 10 years old when I realized that and I just, when I became a teen and everybody around me is like, I wonder what I'm going to do with my life and what I'm going to be interested in everything.
And I'm like, I just never felt I had a choice.
It's like, I kind of know what I'm going to do and I'm going to do it for the rest of my life.
So, that's my why.
It just, it got recruited by nature, I guess, to be a friend and I've just continued it my whole life.
It's been mostly an independent study of mine.
Okay, so, tell us that story of how that kind of came to be.
What were some of the first steps that you took when you started to learn about regenerative agriculture?
Maybe it would be great to start with a definition.
What is regenerative agriculture?
How does that differ to, I guess you could say, degenerative agriculture?
Agriculture that is not supporting the environment.
Could you first define that and then tell us how you first heard about this exactly and how you started getting involved more and more?
Yeah, I mean, regenerative agriculture is, I sort of consider there's been two tracks of agriculture.
What was traditionally known as either indigenous or organic, you know, in modern times.
Because I grew up in the era where chemistry was the solution for everything.
And so, and yet, in that era, we also saw all the, you know, Silent Spring was written and we found out DDT was harmful.
And we started to see our farmland, you know, going downhill, degrading and eroding.
And, of course, we had the knowledge of the Dust Bowl.
And, you know, that was because they tilled up the prairie and you got a drought and you get winds and you got dust storms.
And I actually met a couple of farmers when I traveled when I was young that lived through that era.
And, boy, I don't think we can even imagine what that was like living during that era.
So, it just really, you know, and I liked good real food.
My grandmother had a garden and so I ate real food.
And then you went to the supermarket and during that era, things were really changing.
It was food was getting shipped in and it didn't have any taste.
We experienced the first what they called solo pack tomatoes.
They would be four little kind of medium, small tomato and a little plastic tray with a piece of plastic over it.
And they weren't red and they tasted like sawdust or something.
And, you know, I just and I saw nature is like nature seems to do pretty well.
You know, it's it's not perfect.
It's, you know, but it doesn't seem to get devastated and it doesn't need all these chemicals.
And why do we need them in agriculture?
And, you know, I started doing a little research and found out that, you know, a lot of the research that was done on organic was before the Second World War.
And when the Second World War hit and of course, they dropped the atomic bombs and the war ended much quicker than people had thought.
They had these massive stores of nitrogen that they made the bombs out of.
And so they were like, what are we going to do with all this?
And we've got our whole industry creating this nitrogen.
And they thought, well, we could push it on farmers and it could be nitrogen fertilizer instead of having to worry about, you know, organic or manure.
And of course, they didn't know anything back then really about how the soil actually functioned.
And, you know, I mean, it was just it was a mystery and and there was no reason to really study it much because the whole idea of chem ag was to that nature was in competition.
So you didn't you just killed everything in the field.
You killed all the bugs and we didn't realize when you kill the bad bugs, you also kill.
There's a lot of good bugs that help.
And same with the soil organisms.
We didn't know that the soil organisms really did much, you know, there were fun guys in the soil that would attack your plants.
And so it was all just, you know, nature's against us.
It's competitive, you know, so you do monocultures instead of a whole bunch of different plants.
And, you know, I'm looking at, well, gee, how does the rainforest survive?
It's filled with diversity.
It's got no pesticides, it's got no fertilizers.
And yet it's the environment, the ecosystem that we most relate with is like, what an incredible ecosystem.
And why can't we do that on our farms and get rid of all these things?
And, you know, maybe our food would taste better and maybe it even be nutritionally better.
And I knew that there had to be farmers around.
I knew a few in my area.
I'm not, I was in Massachusetts, the United States, and it's not a big farming state, but it's a very, population is really spread out.
And there were a lot of small farms.
So there was a lot of direct sales.
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania pretty much have led for many years in sort of direct small farm sales to the public.
And, I mean, I was young, I had my little flock of chickens and, you know, I was in 4-H.
I started when I was nine years old and I would sell my eggs to people in the neighborhood.
And that was a cool experience too, you know, being able to grow food and be able to, as a little kid and be able to sell it to my neighbors.
And they'd be like, your eggs are so good, you know, and it was just inspiring.
And it's like, the supermarket was just a totally different experience.
And I'm like, I think there's a lot of value to this.
And, but we got to figure it out because the whole thing back then was same as we're hearing now.
You know, we got to feed 9 billion people in the world.
So we have to maximize everything, you know, maximize our extraction.
And, but then I'm like, but the Dust Bowl and we're degrading our soils and we're maxing out now for short term.
But what's going to happen in the future?
You know, I'm already visiting farms and they're like, yeah, when I was younger, you know, my soils were darker and they were deeper.
And so I just thought, you know, maybe there's a better way and I need to meet my local farmers.
And then I realized I needed to travel around the country and because I started to talk to people and they're like, yeah, maybe there is something to this, but we've got to really start learning it.
And in that 60s, late 60s, early 70s, there was a lot of back to the land, you know, music, peace and love, you know, Vietnam War era, you know, I mean, there were a lot of people.
That's when organics started.
And so we, there were people and then I met farmers from the Midwest who, you know, had bigger farms.
And I found that were a few of them that were really into that, too, and thinking maybe we, you know, we just got, but we got to figure this out because I had a local state university and being a 4-H-er, the state university runs your 4-H program.
And 4-H is a program for kids that's, you know, a lot around agriculture, but it's a lot of home stuff, too, you know, just learning how to do practical stuff in your life and as a kid and learning that stuff.
And so, and I would talk to the professors and they're all like, oh, no, the future is chemicals, the future is, you know, what we were doing and it's going to even get more intense.
And so I realized, and I'm like, well, what about nature?
And they, if I mentioned nature and, you know, soil should have life in it.
That's how it was designed.
It was defined in the 1940s by Hans Yenny.
You know, there's a distinction with dirt between dirt and soil.
Dirt is the sand, silt, and clay particles, but soil is so much more than that because it's got all the organisms and it's more than just what we see, the earthworms that we all think are, you know, they're good.
So it just became a path of finding these farmers and we started out very much, you know, looking at little bits of research that had been done in the early 1900s and the late 1800s.
We looked at how indigenous people, you know, grew food because all they could do is learn from nature.
You know, they didn't really have the process chemicals.
They had to think of pest protection as organic, you know, that some plants maybe and, you know, are better at fending off.
And so if you plant this around that, it might help protect from, you know, a lot of very early simple stuff.
But and we started to get positive reactions by, you know, doing some of those things.
But then to take it further, you know, we got a lot of interest in the 70s.
I mean, we were back then it was pretty much called all natural and we're because we're kind of growing it by nature and there wasn't any organic certifications or anything at the time.
So, I mean, I kind of like the term, you know, and in the public sort of got interested in the term.
You know, like, yeah, food that's all natural.
That makes a lot of sense because we people didn't think that way.
And I mean, for at least it had been a while since they had thought that way.
And so but then shortly after, all of a sudden, all the corporate food started labeling their stuff all natural.
And it's like, well, wait a minute.
It's really not all natural.
It's got artificial flavors in it and all that.
And that's when I realized there's also a food system and there's also a lot of money in the food system.
Because business knows that people have to eat three times a day or whatever.
They have to eat every day and that's going to go on forever.
So it's a good business to be in.
You know, it's stable.
I mean, if you were making eight track tapes, you knew that your time was probably going to be ending soon.
And so, you know, there's a lot of power in that system and power in USDA of telling why people should just do the chem ag thing.
So but regenerative is it's just mimicking nature.
And we have five principles of soil health that is sort of the foundation of soil health before we even really called it regeneration.
And those are the simple things we see in nature.
Nature doesn't till, doesn't plow, doesn't disturb the soil.
It does in bad weather conditions.
But then it works to heal it.
It's always trying to heal itself.
It's always trying to recover.
You go out and rototill your garden.
And what happens, you know, if you don't plant anything, even when you plant your stuff, mother nature is trying to cover it up and throws in all the weeds.
And you have to go out and get frustrated because you feel you got to get rid of those weeds because they're called weeds, even though a lot of them are beneficial, too.
We've learned that. So least disturbance, diversity.
We got away from the monoculture because we thought, well, look at the rainforest.
It thrives because of diversity.
Maybe there's reasons for that.
We realized that you needed armor on the soil when you didn't till the soil.
Wind would blow it.
Rain would beat on it.
Sun would beat on it.
You walk in the woods or something, there's a nice little covering over the soil that protects it.
And, of course, later on, we learned that that also is what feeds a lot of the organisms.
So another principle is living roots in the ground all year round or as much of the year as you can.
Because those organisms, the soil, have to live all year round.
And you can't just and plant roots put out what they call exudates from their photosynthesis and put sugars and turn them into different compounds.
And they 60, 30 to 60 percent of what they make for sugars to produce themselves.
It's a carbon system.
And all of nature is pretty much a carbon system.
And so all that they put out through the roots to feed the organisms.
And then they trade off nutrients because a lot of the organisms can free up, can basically mine the minerals in the soil.
But those minerals aren't necessarily plant available.
And they're not even something, a food source for the organism.
The organism needs carbon.
So organisms create a nice little symbiotic relationship.
We'll go out.
You need some boron today.
You need some nitrogen today.
So we'll mine that nitrogen.
We'll make it in plant available form.
And then we'll work through the fungal network, which is what we learn fungi do.
And that'll be the communications and delivery system for those nutrients.
And so the plant puts out carbon.
It puts out a signal.
I need some boron today, just like you would call up for food delivery or Amazon.
And the organisms and fungi work that out and send it off and trade it off for carbon.
And so living roots, we realize, is a way to keep feeding and to keep the soil covered, too, not to till it in the fall, which would destroy and eliminate all the food source for the organisms.
And then we realize another principle is integrating other than plants, whether they be our livestock, whether they be birds, whether they be insects.
We want to encourage all the diversity we can, because what nature does is then balances it out.
So we have farms that regenerative farms that use no pesticides.
And when they're studied, they don't have pests or very small amounts, not enough to damage anything that intensely.
And then you go to a commercial farm next door and that's been spraying the pesticides and they've got 10 times the amount of pests, you know, than the others.
And, of course, they're becoming resistant to chemicals.
And so and then we added context to it, that nature works the same all over the world.
You learn the principles. They all are important, no matter where you're farming or no matter where you're land stewarding.
But then context is your local weather, your local plants that are available.
If somebody says, you know, could we use cover crops to keep those living roots in the offseason?
So what plant species do you have in your area that work best and will and that what you plant is the food then for and the armor for the next year?
And so you have to design your plants, what species you're going to have so that it fits the diet.
The diet of corn is different than the diet of soybeans is different from the diet of a tomato.
So we looked at all that in context. It's your culture. It's your economics.
It's your labor. It's all the local parts to it.
So those are the, you know, the two. There's the principles and then there's the context.
And that's and regenerative ag has sort of, you know, it was the principles of soil health.
And now it's sort of being called the regenerative, the principles of regenerative ag because soil, all we've ever been working on since I started was soil and ecosystem health and understanding and functioning.
And so we were we were not into branding because we knew every time we did it, we did all natural.
And all of a sudden, it's like it's like a greenwashing. No matter what you brand something, it gets exploited.
So we're more into the what's the reality? You know, what's what are the actual critters and creatures and types of plants?
And how do they work and how do they work together and how do they function as a system?
And, you know, same if you're looking at a community, you know, you think, OK, you know, we need a we need a plumber.
We need an electrician. We need carpenters. We need doctors.
You know, you need all those varieties. You wouldn't want to have a monoculture.
You know, you wouldn't have a community and everybody is a lawyer.
You know, I mean, it just wouldn't work. So, you know, it's a lot of that.
It's a mindset change, really, that regenerative agriculture.
And it's basically mimicking nature and learning that we can learn just about everything that we need to do,
both in growing food and in how we live and how we react and what our technology needs to be.
So we do that through nature. And that's really sort of the core of regenerative agriculture.
Right on, Ed. Ed, it's really clear that you care a lot about what you're talking about.
And this regenerative agriculture is a huge part of your life.
And I'm so glad that people like you are really pushing this forward and pioneering it.
Before we move on to a question, which was actually asked in the comments, shout out to Sino.
I know that he does spaces as well and it's got a lot going on.
And so before we go into that, I want to first get to the retweets of the room and just thank everyone who did retweet.
Because it does mean a lot, you know, more people need to learn about regenerative agriculture and these kinds of things.
What we're trying to do here to empower people to maximize their positive impact.
So real quick, much love to Trilana, much love to John, much love to Tree Gents, to Sino, to Fighters Gang, much love to Great Sekhani, much love to James from Carbon County Club, much love to Bit Green.
And I believe Fighters Gang also did a quote tweet.
For those of you who don't know, I retweet every quote tweet and any tweet that I can about Max Impact.
So thank you for putting those out there.
So let's get back to Sino's question.
I know he's probably going to hear the recording of this.
So basically, how can crypto help farmers in your view?
Well, I mean, what I guess I got attracted to is because farming is, you know, especially when you're doing it differently than what conventional is.
And I hear this a lot from larger farmers, you know, if they go to the bank, if you're doing conventional ag, they know the system.
They know how it works.
They know the risks, the positives, the negatives, whatever.
And they can judge.
And, of course, you know, in the conventional system, you have to buy a lot of stuff up front before you ever know if you're even going to be able to harvest a crop.
All your seeds, all your fertilizers, all your chemicals, all your fuel.
You know, it's a lot of expense.
And if you've got hundreds or thousands of acres, those are those can be hundreds of thousands of dollars you've got to put up front.
And if but if you're doing if you go to a banker and you say, you know, I'm going to work with nature and I need 100.
You know, I need some money for something.
You know, it just didn't work because they like we don't understand that in fact, even like with USDA, you know, a lot of the subsidies and the insurances, you know, they're all designed for the chem system.
So if you're doing things different, you don't fit in to those requirements they have, even though you're doing better.
You just don't fit into that.
So we really had to, you know, I started thinking, you know, and the same thing is we're trying to decent.
One thing a big with regenerative agriculture is we want to get backed into more local and regional food systems.
And a lot of those used to be intact with infrastructure and, you know, just simple vegetable processing, you know,
whatever you produce on your farm, the processing of it, marketing, distribution, storage, you know, it got used to be you had local markets around and they would buy your produce or whatever you grew.
And then they all got replaced with large supermarkets and they didn't want to deal with a bunch of small farmer accounts.
So back in the 90s in my area in mid 90s, I started a project.
We got a big grant from the Kellogg Foundation and to redevelop our regional food, our local food system.
And we had to educate the public first about why we're doing it and, you know, all the reasons about fresh food and grow maybe a little better and the environment that we can have around and having kids still have access to knowing, being able to visit a farm and learn where their food comes from.
Because as we started to get bigger and bigger farms that were all chemicals and stuff, you didn't even want to bring kids to the farm because, you know, oh, well, we sprayed pesticides and whatever.
So you should probably just stay here and look at it from a distance.
And so that's I think there's a lot of and we're a paradigm shift in regenerative agriculture and crypto and refi, which is regenerative finance.
So to me, it's a parallel track and I think it's all a paradigm shift and paradigm shifts are hard.
You know, a status, they pretty much any type of paradigm shift or revolution in something is grassroots.
It never comes from the top down.
And I just thought, you know, there was a lot of good ideas, you know, of financing things and promoting change that's really hard for the status quo to handle.
I mean, the old too big to fail.
I think that's one of our thing over my lifetime I've seen really increase is the fact that these corporations, you know, bear or the big chemical or the big fertilizer companies like you are or something.
They don't want to just like, well, we're probably going to in the next 10 years, we're going to lose about 80 percent of our sales.
And of course, the stockholders don't want to hear that.
So whether it's good for the planet or not, it's not good for the machine that is the system, you know, it's not so much about the people I don't find anymore.
It's like we're locked into the system of, you know, old machines that just won't go away and they're hard to get rid of.
And so that's where I see, you know, but it's a matter of bridging, you know, the two paradigm shifts together and and learning about each other.
And, you know, we're not into crypto that much and you're not into agriculture that much, but at least the crypto and the refi especially does care about the environment.
That's what it wants. And I think it makes sense that money should be based more, you know, not on I don't want to put a price on a Jaguar.
You know, I think nature's priceless in a sense, but in some kind of a currency way, I think it makes a lot of sense.
So but it's early, you know, and it's like with us in the beginning, we didn't know much.
We were trying to figure out we were trying to find out who else is interested, trying to create little networks.
You know, farmers are the same as like a Dow. I mean, we're even less less formal about it.
I mean, we don't really set up organizations organizations.
I mean, the biggest realization I had when I started traveling around is meeting farmers are and I was young.
They all work together. They all collaborate. It's not a competition.
Anything we do in competition is just to spur each other along, you know, how did this do for you or whatever?
Oh, you did better and you did this. Oh, well, next year I'm going to do is good.
You know, it was all good stuff. And I think that's a model that I I'm through the Dow sort of thing.
I'm seeing being replicated. So that's, you know, I that's my parallels I see.
But it's it's and I think it's just getting to the time now that, you know, we need both of these groups need to start bridging.
And we're not going to, you know, I'm not going to turn all the farmers into crypto right away.
And that's good. That's fine. And and you're not going to turn you on to, you know, knowing everything about regenerative farming either, you know, or you're not going to have farms.
So necessarily, but I think it's time to start bridging that.
And and I think it's as I said, it's a it's a thing that is not 100 percent go.
I mean, we've learned that in regenerative agriculture.
We don't go to a conventional farmer who's interested in transition, sort of like there was the problem with the organic certified movement, where you've got to go 100 percent or else you're not going to be organic.
We're not trying to tell people that we're trying to let people transition in their own diverse, their own perspective, their own individual ways.
So that's where I sort of at with all of this.
And I'm just trying to recruit, you know, I've got ability to have to reach out to people.
And it's what I've always done. I've always reached out to farmers.
I spent the last 20 years.
I've visited hundreds.
I'm huge into food systems in both global and local.
So I've studied what the food system is going, what the future, what the plans are, this all the centralization stuff, you know, what are their ideas?
Why are they doing this?
What do they think is good and why is it happening?
So, you know, this just fits in for me to go out and explore this area.
Makes sense.
Makes a lot of sense.
You mentioned bridging crypto with farmers, with regenerative agriculture farmers.
You're also developing an online platform for a regenerative farmer to farmer network.
Is that going to lead to that bridging?
Or tell us more about this farmer to farmer network.
Yeah, it's something I've, as the internet, you know, I mean, I used to have to save up money to, for long distance calls to talk with all my network of farmers all over the country.
And actually around the world, too, as I connected with more and more farmers and long distance phone calls were very expensive.
I used to have to travel, you know, all over to meet farmers and meet them at their farm and meet them at, you know, state fairs and conferences and wherever I could go.
And when the internet happened and I was like, oh, my God, because we're communicators.
I mean, we're real collaborators.
The internet happened and I'm like, wow, this is amazing.
We can actually communicate without all that hassle, you know.
And so, and early on in the internet, after AOL chat rooms or something, it got, because we got so excited with being able to actually communicate when we were working on collaborations.
So, not just social media, it was constructive and creative.
That's the way we looked at it.
And there were all these open source platforms that were around before social media.
And I was involved in several of them, one with especially coffee industry, which really got going because of those networks.
We were all learning about how to get what's coffee all about other than commercial coffee and how could we roast it better and all that sort of thing.
And, you know, all the top sort of roasteries in the world, we all started out, you know, just trying to figure it out.
And they were incredibly productive, they were incredibly active, and then social media hit and everything kind of changed.
And especially, like, for example, with Twitter, you know, you had 140 characters to say something.
And so, all of a sudden, major discussions and everything were put down into little simple statements of things, you know.
And threads weren't long, and they didn't go on for days and weeks.
I mean, I created an algorithm for coffee roasting, I had an idea, I set up a crowdsourcing sort of group of people all over the world that were interested in it.
We did it on one of these open source platforms, took us about a year to develop it all and build the hardware and build the software.
And we all just did it as a passion because we were interested in home roasting.
And all of a sudden, it caught on, you know, it was working really well for us.
And we actually donated the whole concept to the specialty coffee industry all over the world.
And it became the best new product of the year.
And it's revolutionized the way people and artists and roasting roast coffee now.
And I realized the power of just individual people who care working together online.
And so, I want to, and then I started realizing, wait a minute, that's the way nature works.
That's exactly the way the fungal networks work to connect all the life and all the organisms and all the plants and all the trees and manage everything and learn from each other.
And so, I've been wanting to build a system using that old open source type platform thing because I found like Discord and the sort of platforms that are a little bit for that sort of thing.
They're not designed well for ease of use, especially for people who aren't computer savvy, for anybody to just sort of do, you know, Discord was, I've heard, developed by gamers.
And that's a little different than your average person who uses a computer just for doing things in their life.
And so, and I've designed, I've got this, been designing the system.
And so, it's, you know, where we can have the experts sort of, the leaders in the organization that keep work together and have a space to develop, to share ideas and get that communications going again, to maybe do experiments together.
And then off of that hub is, would be a network, same as like you have with the fungi in the soil of all your context sites.
So, in other words, the hub deals with the principles of soil health and expanding the knowledge of that.
And then the hubs are the context sites where locally and regionally, you adapt that knowledge and you bring in new people and teach them and help them.
Because when you're doing regenerative agriculture, you could have a problem at five o'clock in the morning.
Who are you going to call?
Ghostbusters?
You know, solve this problem.
So, you need that network and it needs to be open 24 hours and it needs to be available to everybody all over the world.
And so, I see setting up a network of these sites and hopefully going global.
The thing is, I'm at an age where I don't have much money because I'm a supporter of farming.
I mean, if you're poor, you're a farmer.
If you're supporting regenerative ag that isn't supported by industries, you're really poor.
So, and I'm older.
So, I've been trying to find young people and I thought the refi community was a great way to connect into because they're technology minded.
They know computers.
They could even do some financials and eventually it could be an onboarding to the blockchain and to different tokens and all this sort of stuff.
And it's separate from the farming community.
So, instead of having one farmer decide he's going to do it or one farming group and they're like, well, you know, I think it's the way to tie these two systems together.
And they could learn from each other.
You could learn from what the farmers are doing and that creates the opportunities to, oh, here's an opportunity for investment that the public would be really behind.
Because a lot of things the public is behind isn't necessarily what the banksters are behind or a major corporation is behind.
So, I look at it as a way to really grassroots effort but do it in a whole global system, farmer to farmer, because they're a great example of it.
They know how to do it.
They need to do it.
They can't just look up the chemistry.
They need somebody in their area that really understands.
So, I've just been looking for people.
Unfortunately, I think the agriculture part of refi and crypto world is a little less.
There's a little bit in agroforestry.
There's a little bit in permaculture.
But as far as interest in of really like changing the whole world of agriculture, including large-scale guys.
And large-scale guys are actually the most into it.
I mean, I got a good friend, Rick Clark in Indiana.
He's got 6,000 acres he farms.
And he's doing organic regenerative.
And he's just been working on this for many years.
And he's a wonderful person.
And he's a great collaborator.
And he's a great educator.
And I think the young people in the crypto movement or refi movement would really enjoy meeting these people and learning how they live.
And for the people who are, you know, this world is getting a bit crazy.
I think it would be really refreshing.
And I think it'd be refreshing for both sides.
So, that's what I want to do.
I don't have any money to set it up.
And I'm just trying to find young people who would be interested in something like that, get dedicated to it, and start the development of it.
And I would work with them on it.
That makes me sad that, you know, that farmers earn so little, and particularly regenerative agriculture farmers.
And I think that Web3 technologies is a way to change and realign incentives.
And, you know, not just carbon credits, but I think also the ecological credits from the get-go, biodiversity credits, things of this nature can come on chain and try to support more of these things as well.
And there's many other funding sources in Web3, like Gitcoin and all kinds of layer one grants that are out there to really fund.
So, yeah, I'm happy to share some resources with you.
I've been compiling a bunch of grants as well, which might be helpful.
But, yeah, let's get to the hat as well.
Go ahead.
Because farmers have been aware of the carbon credit market.
And, of course, you know, they're not rich, so they could use some money, I mean, especially because they're producing something that's a lot better and they're caring for the environment, you know, and they're doing all these good things, you know, and they're creasing.
It's much more, it's like more of the eco credit kind of thing than the carbon credit because they want to have, you know, better clean water and infiltration and stopping drought and erosion and all these sort of things.
And so, I heard a statistic that 93%, and these are talking about your medium and larger farmers, 93% of them are aware of carbon credits, yet less than 3% are interested in them because it's really not designed very well.
It wasn't designed, they weren't asked to, you know, how could this really work for everybody, work for you and really reflect your farm?
And so, in recent times now, especially in the last year or so, farmers have been starting to get together and we're working on a different strategy and it's modeled after a little program that the U.S. Department of Energy is doing a little pilot on for ethanol.
And we're just using it as a good kind of comparison example, and it's called carbon intensity scoring.
So, what we're doing is we're taking our farm and we're going to, we're collecting, because we always take data, but we're looking at what data do we really need to collect on a farm for all the different interests that want to know what's happening on our farm.
And so, and then instead of just carbon credits or tying it to credit or tying it to something, we're tying it to what we produce that goes out the door.
So, in other words, what's the carbon intensity score of the bushel of apples that just left the farm or the bushel of corn, you know, how much, and you get that score by all these little data points.
It might be, how much fossil fuels do you use compared to, and it's compared to like averages.
So, if the average farm uses so much fossil fuel, if you use a whole lot less, then you get points for that.
If you're not using, if you're using cover crops and you're, then you get points for that.
If you've got water infiltration, you get points for that.
And then the farmer becomes the price maker instead of the price taker, which has been the problem.
Carbon credits, we don't determine what we get.
We sell food, we don't determine what we get.
You know, how many other businesses are like that?
I mean, farmers have just been exploited to the max.
And so, we want to really, we're redesigning it of a system, and it's really sounding exciting.
You know, we've been having meetings.
There was a little summit in Iowa a couple weeks ago, and I'm hoping that we can get, and I think it's what Regen Network is moving towards with the biodiversity credits and the eco credits.
But I think this is even beyond that.
It's sort of more tied to something that people can understand when you go to the supermarket.
If it's tied to the apple that you're buying, that gets the public interested in it, too.
And, of course, it gets the healthcare system interested, gets nutrition interested in it, because a carbon credit for the average person, it's like, well, CO2 isn't even, you can't even see it.
You can't understand it.
It's just, you know, it works in industry of polluters, but as far as a real long, I mean, that was a first-generation attempt, and we're looking at a next-gen.
I think eco credits and biodiversity credits are sort of second-generation, and this is like a whole other way of, a whole other perspective.
And that's where we're heading, and I'd love to connect more of the farmers that are working on this with the crypto and the blockchain, because blockchain would be great to store the data in, and farmers are very transparent.
You know, all my farmers, I know, if you want to come visit, they have an open-gate policy.
So that's another area that I think has really got potential.
Most definitely.
That's a huge gap of how many farmers are aware versus are using it, or versus how many are interested in using the carbon markets.
I think...
Yeah, because it just, they get a few bucks out of it, and there's, you know, whole thousands of dollars in one end, and it all, it's that trickle-down thing, you know, and they realize, drop, and, and you're kind of like,
it's kind of like you're buying our, the ownership of our kids, you know.
Our carbon is very, very precious to us, and it's, and it's volatile.
I mean, we need, we use carbon in that system.
As I said, the whole nature is a carbon-based system.
And so, it's like, you know, what they're doing is they're saying that we want to, like, kind of control your, your, your savings account.
We need carbon in our checking account to feed and grow our plants and our food and all that sort of stuff, and that's sort of a cyclical thing.
But then, what we do with regenerative is because we try to put money in the, in our savings account.
And what you're doing is you're, like, saying, okay, we're going to control your savings account, and you can't even touch it.
Well, we all know that in hard times, every once in a while, you got to be able to, that's why you have a savings account, you know.
You're going to have to maybe draw on it.
Well, if I've sold off my savings account, my savings account's basically locked, you know, I'm being told it's locked, and I can't access it when I need to because I just had a horrible drought or flood or whatever, and I'm going to end up using some of that carbon.
I'll replace it next year on a good year.
They don't understand any of this kind of stuff.
And so, they don't understand how, you know, for the last five years or seven or eight years with the carbon credit, when the word carbon credit comes up in our little farmer meetings, we all just shake our head and be like, we're not going to go there.
It's just, they don't get it.
Nobody gets it.
What that does to the farmer, why it's, it's just, you know, it's a temporary thing.
I mean, there's some good to it.
I understand why people are using it.
It's, it's what the system that we had, it's the same, you know, we got gasoline engines, and we're trying to go electric.
And so, it's just, I understand that, but it's got to evolve.
And I think that the refi and the regen and all that can be, I mean, the crypto community, they're the kind of people, again, that are young, can change, and they're the ones that need to lead these changes and work with us in the financial market to,
to set up these different, different ways to evolve, you know, that we need to evolve.
We need to constantly change.
Yeah, we do.
We need to change, and it needs to improve, and James has been very patient with his hand.
Let's get to the hand.
Go ahead, James.
No, I'm happy to wait.
It is great to hear Ed's experience and let him share his years of experience and knowledge with us.
I do love, you know, big points on education.
I did want to add some data points for references for land usage.
During the medieval times is about the earliest we have recorded history of crop production.
But it took about four farmers on four acres to feed five people.
What's your average medieval production rate?
Today, it takes one farmer to feed about 150 people, but we use about 400 acres, putting it about two acres, over two acres per person to be fed in a traditional system.
Now, if we look at regenerative agriculture in tropical systems, I've seen less than a half an acre feed 20 people, but that did take significantly more human input.
So that's where costs of labor and things making this economically viable becomes a challenge is because we actually need to keep people happy and fed.
But the land usage of what we used to do to what we do now to the knowledge we have acquired in the last few years, we can produce far more food on far less land.
It has already been proven time and time again with these regenerative agriculture projects.
So please do check them out.
I do also love listening and hearing people share knowledge, the mycelia networks underneath forests and stuff.
Trees create sugar from the carbon dioxide in the air.
They will send that sugar for miles across forests into funguses and other plants that need that nutrient, that sugar.
And what the mushrooms or the fungus will collect is minerals that they'll trade for those sugars.
And they'll transport those for miles across the underground networks and forests as well.
These very vast and complex systems and everybody wins is the amazing part, generally speaking.
So it is a good place to try and look and grow from.
So thank you for coming and talking about that stuff, helping raise awareness.
I do also understand the funding challenges that come from trying to do something different than other people are.
People are like, I don't know, why don't you just do the same thing they're doing because we know that works.
Well, that only works so many times, for one.
And for two, it isn't working forever, is the problem that we're actually running into.
The people who are producing, you know, in these regenerative methods are increasing yields.
And that should be assigned to your average farmers, and it has been.
So I always gratefully appreciate people out there talking to farmers and getting it done.
I would have a question for you, though.
If you could tell people to do one thing that could help support this kind of effort,
that they could just do day to day, what would you suggest people do?
Learn about it.
I mean, our number one thing is not so much money in the sense of, like, let's say in the Chem Ag world with climate change,
you know, when they talk about, let's say, Africa or something, they're like, they need more, you know, their yields, their drought, you know,
they have all these issues.
And so we need a lot of money so that we can bring them more fertilizers and set up irrigations and pest sell them, you know,
they need more pesticides so they don't lose their crops.
And they need, you know, bigger tractors to pull plows.
And, you know, and so when they estimate the cost, it's in the billions and trillions of dollars.
And the reason why regenerative agriculture is so exciting, and especially with climate change happening,
is you got a regenerative farmer and a drought hits and the guy next door, he's tilled and all that.
And so he's got no carbon, carbon in the soil holds water, carbon in the soil builds structure.
So when you have heavy rains, you don't flood.
And so with all these climate change extremes that are happening, they look across the fence and it's like, you know,
their corn crop is dust and the guy next door is doing well and he's not spending the money.
You know, all of a sudden, the guy who spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy all these inputs, his crop just fried and he's in big trouble.
And so that's been the biggest thing that, you know, has gotten the transition, because one thing with regenerative agriculture is farm.
These farms are now profitable because they're not spending all the money on inputs.
And even if they have a slight reduction in yield, I mean, for a real in Africa, we can certainly increase yields.
But in farms in the United States that were maximizing yields through chemistry and everything,
even if they have a slight reduction in yield, their profits are often at least double what is.
And it's not just the profit. It's being able to not go bankrupt because that's what's happening around the world.
I mean, farmers just going bankrupt. Well, last year with the nitrogen prices, I mean, farmers just nailed, you know,
it's like our gas crisis, but nitrogens, you know, one for our commercial farm or most farms, it's like one of the that's the biggest expense.
And so they were just getting in serious trouble. So that's the transition.
I mean, there's there's like thousands of reasons. I mean, we can produce nutrient dense food so people don't have to eat as much.
And our food has a bigger nutrient spectrum. So our health will improve if we can just save money on our health care system.
And I've been just feeling healthy so that your your mind is good and you can do your job and you can be happy and you have the energy to go do things in your community.
All of these things are, you know, John Kemp, a friend of mine, he did a little keynote a couple of weeks or a couple of months ago at an event he was at.
And he's like, you know, we have to think about, you know, the entire supply chains of things need to be regenerative.
And everybody has to contribute into it because it's creating advantages all the way along that system.
And we got to stop thinking about everybody that, you know, as he says, and sort of the environmental community thought, you know, people are basically you put people on land and all they do is exploit it and wreck it and extract from it and all that.
And that's humans. And that's what they've done for a long time. And so we're kind of like a pest, you know, and he says, but are we really a pest?
You know, we can look also look back in history and a lot of digital civilizations and they were stewards of the thing.
And, you know, maybe our species is being human is really our thing is our ability to steward.
And, of course, our farmers realize that they can take a piece of land that's degraded and maybe been not farmed and, you know, let to go so-called rewild.
And, of course, it gets covered with a lot of invasive plants and the lives, you know, the animals don't really come back because there's too much population and all this.
And they're like, if we intentionally steward using nature as our criteria, maybe that's what we really have to change the mindset of people that we aren't these evil pests, that we're actually good stewards of the environment and that that's the mindset we have to have.
And that's the wonderful mindset I get from all my farmers.
They just have a, you know, you take a walk in nature with them and they just they they see so much more.
We go out in nature and it's beautiful. But it's it's like, you know, you meet a pretty girl and she's beautiful.
But really, the thing about it is it's like, but what's really beautiful is understanding her and what what her interests are and all the good things about people and their perspectives on life so you can learn from.
And so we need to that's a whole mindset we need to change.
And I think we're going to need to we need to move people out of cities instead of pushing them all in cities and they could all re steward and we, you know, take all our debt or degraded soils and our degraded lands and our desert desertifications all in the world.
And we could green all that in a very short period of time.
And if you want to solve the problems with droughts and floods and heat from climate change, you'll do that a hell of a lot faster if you do in an ecological way with the environment than just reducing CO2.
While reducing CO2 is important, that's a long term process to really because people don't realize a lot of CO2 has gone in the ocean.
So if we put a lot back into the ground and we lower it over our land, it's going to rebalance again out of the ocean because we put too much in the ocean.
So it's going to take a long time to really affect the lives of people of droughts and floods.
And so ecologically, stewardship is really the powerful thing that we need to the mindset we need to change.
Thank you, Ed.
And as you were talking as well before about how these carbon markets would, you're comparing it to the savings account and how, you know, they would lock that away.
So you're basically saying that it's not possible to access the carbon credits.
It can take quite a while for those to kind of come through and they're locked away.
You don't have kind of more short-term funds for the rainy day if you need it.
Well, what about the potential of carbon forwards here where even maybe future seasons of the crops, right, even before you've planted them, could be sold to investors?
If that were to be a bit more of a liquid and easy way to do that, then do you think that could be a potential solution to the farmers not being able to access carbon credit revenue and not having that rainy day fund?
You know what I mean?
Ed, you're still muted there, buddy.
We're not talking about money.
We're talking about carbon in the soil, which is the currency of our farm and of an ecosystem.
So money doesn't do us any good if we don't have any carbon in our soil.
And so what we want to get is we need to support people to be stewards.
That's what the support needs to go because you're a good steward and you prove it through your data.
And so that's where you should be getting support from all the way up the supply chain for all the good you're doing.
I mean, if we want clean water and we want to replenish our our water supplies by having water infiltrate again instead of going down our rivers and polluting and, you know, lowering our aquifers and all that sort of thing, then we should support the stewardship of that.
You know, instead of instead of instead of, as I said, this our carbon currency that a farmer needs, the nature part.
I mean, you're you're basically controlling our nature and saying that we can't touch it.
And, you know, we try to build on that just like anybody does with their savings account, you know, because you do that for when you have a problem.
You know, you wreck the car, your kid gets sick and you don't have enough and, you know, all that sort of stuff.
And farmers work in the same way.
And so it's how we're looking at how do you support the system and how do you support ecology?
Because that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to do how do we fund so that we get better ecology?
And that's funding the stewardship of that more than controlling and buying up the farm.
I mean, it's it's been a thing, you know, they want to I mean, farmers, you know, more and more of them.
They lost the farm more and more young people.
They have to lease a farm.
You know, somebody else owns it.
Somebody else has to agree to what you're doing.
And you can't farm anymore, you know, and you can't be a steward.
You're just you're just a worker in the system.
And that's not the perspective that people have to have about life on Earth.
They have to think about being good stewards and care about it, whether it be in your little home environment.
I mean, not doing, you know, not paving over your lawn because you're tired of doing it or not cutting your lawn or maybe planting trees on your lawn and maybe planting a diversity of stuff on your lawn.
All the little things you do, you know, you don't throw your crap out out the window into the yard because you realize that's what everybody want.
Everybody wants to be a good steward.
And now we're realizing because of climate change, because of pollution, because of litter, because of plastic waste, you know, that being a steward is something that's important.
And it's a mindset that people have to have.
And we need to start valuing stewardship of the planet and the families and the cultures of everything we live in.
So that's that's where we got to change.
It's not about money of everything, you know, and putting a value on everything, as I say, is a is a lion worth more than a tiger worth more or less than an elephant?
No, they're all priceless, you know, but we have to live with some sort of a currency in life, just like nature does with carbon.
And but that doesn't mean we put money on carbon and then you buy it, you control it of a farmer just to give them five or 10, 15 dollars an acre, you know, which is a spit in the bucket, you know, for a farmer and what their costs are.
So it's really a change in all of this and carbon credits are part of it.
I say it's a great initial idea, but it's got to evolve and it's got to get more into the reality of the grassroots and really mimic nature and really mimic what we're trying to do to solve these problems, because I'm just not seeing it happening.
You know, these offsets and, you know, corporations, I can buy an offset and then I'm net zero and but they're still polluting.
They're still using fossil fuels. It's not change. They're not getting any better.
And if they can do that for X amount of dollars instead of spending twice as much to actually cut down their problems, it's an easy road out, you know.
And again, the machine will say, go that way because, you know, our stockholders are going to be happy.
So those are the changes.
Yeah, I think there's definitely some companies that aren't changing.
I do know of some more like I guess you could call these more social enterprise, but they are purely for profit businesses that are trying to both reduce their emissions, try to be more efficient with their inputs and at the same time offset to become carbon neutral.
I mean, it becomes cheaper for them to become carbon neutral when you're also being more efficient and reducing emissions too, right?
So hopefully those things go hand in hand.
Could you help me understand the disconnect here real quick?
Because, I mean, what the carbon markets have initially done is put a value on carbon.
So carbon sequestration and you're saying that the soil is more rich when it's holding more carbon.
So that seems pretty aligned.
And then we're talking about biodiversity as well and, you know, biodiversity credits, forms of carbon, of eco credits.
Is that not aligned as well for you having a variety of crops?
What exactly are they controlling in terms of your crops and what you're able to do on your farm?
Well, as I said, let's say, you know, let's say, I mean, if you equate it again to like your checking or savings account, you know, we know, like in the United States, it's talked about, you know, people don't have money in their reserve.
You know, there's, I've heard statistics of like, if people needed it, they don't have a thousand dollars to deal with the emergency.
And so same in our farm in a sense, but so we, we encourage people, we hope people can build up a savings account, you know, so they'll have it.
And hopefully they don't have to use it, but they have the security of that and they may have to use it, but you wouldn't give a carbon credit for having a savings account and say, but if you, that carbon goes down and you lose that carbon, if your savings account goes down, then.
You don't get the value that you got reaview credit because you were building your savings account and the same with a farmer, you know, he feels like I can't, I'm on an edge because if I have a bad year and naturally in the system, I can't replenish the, that's what a cover crop does.
It adds carbon to the soil.
That's what exudates do.
They add carbon to the soil.
That's how it's built through.
And by having as much of that going on, we encourage that we build a better savings account because for many years, what happened was people started out with a huge savings account or they like kind of like when you, you know, family member dies and you get a bunch of money.
And it's then it's how, but what happened over the years was we just exploited that money and we spent it all down.
So farms used to have eight, 10% carbon now have half or 1% and now there's not even enough left to, for the system to even work anymore.
So what exactly is causing the carbon?
Oh, go ahead.
Go ahead.
I think I can help clarify this for you, Jimmy.
It's the land use options are reduced when you assign into these contracts.
Many farmers will plant cover crops or allow areas that they just don't use for periods of time.
If the farm's doing well and they don't need to use areas, they just won't use large areas.
And then if something happens or they'll rotate through, but they'll even just skip place, you know, parts of their fields or sections of their land if the rest of their land is producing well enough because they know that savings, that building of carbon on that land will help them in the future if they need to use that land.
And once you get into the carbon markets and locking in use cases long term, it removes the farmer's options of changing land use, which can be hard on them if some, you know, life circumstances change in any way.
I see.
So because of how they're using their land, that is then affecting the carbon in the soil.
So they're trying to control the carbon in the soil and allow you to build up that savings account of carbon.
So it's using the carbon when you grow the crops, basically, right?
There's different practices that will change what are qualified and not qualified for carbon credits.
And if they do change the land use case, that would then change whether or not they are qualified.
There is also a lot of complications, as we've talked about in this space before.
Costs going into getting verified for carbon credits isn't exactly cheap.
So when you're talking about low, you know, small farms, you know, family owned farms, even most family farms, couple hundred acres, we're still couldn't afford these kind of programs that are traditionally we know about, like Vera and stuff like that.
So it is also where as you like pay up front to this farmer who is troublemaking it from year to year, a huge sum of money for this program that is also going to remove your options of how you can use your own land just sounds terrible from the farmer's perspective.
Got you.
So, Ed, how do you see the ideal scenario if all these things are to be fixed so that the land use will not be controlled through these?
So this is through the MRV solutions that are doing this, like the Veras of the world.
How do you see, because there are other, you know, smaller scale ones like Shamba, for example, that are helping small scale regenerative farmers in Kenya.
I don't know to what extent they're controlling land usage, but it paints an ideal utopia for us.
Like what is the best case scenario for regenerative agriculture in the future?
Well, the biggest money demand is in the transition, because, again, as I said earlier, once you transition, you're not bound by all those input costs.
You know, if you have a little bit of a bad year or something, you know, you don't have all those expenses, you know, going out.
And you can save a little bit over years and you can market better, too, because you're not just growing commodity crops.
You know, you're growing.
You can start instead of just selling to your local commodity corn, you know, you can produce something that's like inorganic, you know, that's better.
And and you can sell that with, again, all those good things that you're adding to it, like and that's data collection, which means, you know, we can measure now what the nutrient density of what we produce is and that it can be two, three, four, five, ten times more than something grown conventionally.
So that should have value to it, you know, for infiltrating water and we're not we're not and we're resilient from droughts, you know, that that should have value to it.
And so if the farmer creates the data for that, then they can really tell the story of what they're doing.
And that value should be on what they produce.
I mean, if you can buy a tomato that has five times the nutrition in it, dense and spectrum and density is another tomato.
It's grown on property that is resilient.
It's infiltrating water.
So it's not taking water out of the aquifer that needs to go to for drinking water for the public.
You know, it's it's sequestering carbon, you know, or in building it back up.
It's reversing desertification.
It's not our soils aren't eroding.
All those should have values to them that are what we're saying tied to two things, the steward and and what the steward then produces and puts into the market.
But like with nutrient density and spectrum, we're working on a project to develop.
It's in a meter.
It's in a meter form.
So you're going to be able to go to the supermarket or a market and you're going to be able to flash it on.
We're collecting the data for comparisons and stuff on two different carrots, you know, that came from who knows where.
And it's going to be able to give you an idea which one has more nutrient density to it.
And by what kind of a degree of that density?
And that's that's a huge advantage for the public.
You know, it's I mean, with organic, what we knew was, well, it probably doesn't have some of the batter pesticides.
So we pay a little more for it, you know, and we understand that because we're concerned about the health.
Of course, even with organic, even some of the pesticides they're allowed to use are not necessarily safe.
Or safe for the environment.
But, you know, so you try to get more details.
But it needs to be more than just organic is, you know, it got I have a friend that was on the board of that developing that whole program.
And it was quite of an experience for her because they were trying to make it much more, you know, eco sensitive.
It's your about your soil quality and your environmental quality and how clean is the water and is it infiltrating or is it running into the rivers and all those sort of things.
But all that got put out of it because, you know, big, big industries said, you know, we got to keep it limited, you know.
So that's where we're, you know, it's just a completely different mindset of where support needs to go and in what amount of money and value.
And that is really utilitarian, really, you know, it says, well, this isn't just about putting carbon in the thing so that we're going to lower the CO2.
This is the health of my family.
It's the health of the nation.
This is our water supply.
This is our temperatures.
This is all these things.
So that's where we're trying to head.
And it's hard.
I mean, it's been hard for us, too.
I mean, it's hard to think that tillage, it was something that's talked about in the Bible and people have been doing.
And it was the number one practice when I was young.
The better tiller you were, the better you were a farmer.
And now we realize why the hell were we tilling, you know, how much damage that did.
And so and that was really, you know, and then to tell people in academia, you know, tillage is bad.
You know how they looked at us?
Are you crazy?
You know, and now they're learning.
So it's a paradigm shift.
As I said in the beginning, paradigm shifts are hard.
They're hard to do in society.
They're hard to do in your head, you know, to how we have to think differently now about things.
And the good thing is we the good thing about regenerative agriculture is it's realized that nature is really cool and it's really complex.
And we can look at almost just about any technology we've ever created and realizing we can actually find that and find that actually better done in nature.
I mean, our Internet, that's the fungal network, you know, that's our communication system, you know, diversity.
That's the way it works in nature.
Why are we all why did we think nature was competitive and why did that make us competitive?
When maybe we're actually collaborative.
Maybe we're not invasive plants on this invasive species on this earth.
Maybe we're actually here to do good.
Maybe that's our the fact that we can think the way we can and create the way we can is to do good, not to do harm.
But maybe we've just been programmed to think all these things for many different reasons over many different centuries and maybe because now we have the technology to like understand what an amoeba is in the soil or bacteria are and how they work.
And, you know, we have microscopes and all this was just indigenous times.
It was just trial and error and believing in the wonderful spirits in the soil were doing going to do good for us.
And, you know, so these are the changes that are, you know, they're hard and they've been hard for us and they're hard to explain.
And it's going to take a while for everybody to kind of get this stuff.
But that's where the whole thing is education.
It's in experiences and getting the knowledge and looking at things differently.
And then same as refi is doing and crypto is doing.
It's like maybe we need to think about how money is to be differently and currency is differently.
So they all go hand in hand.
And that's why I think the connection between the two, I think they're the two paradigm shifts that are probably the, you know, the core of life.
What is currency?
currency, what it's about, you know, and what is food and what is about.
And if we can straighten out those two things, I think it'll just, it'll solve many problems.
It'll just put us in a different mindset.
Well, it's definitely, all right, friends, it is time for our final segment.
And that is words of wisdom.
This is where you can each share one core message, one concise message that you maybe want to share with us today.
So feel free to come up here if you've got some nuggets of knowledge that you want to bestow upon us.
And let's get into the final segment.
We'll end on you, Ed.
Let's, we haven't heard from Fighters Gang yet.
So let's do Fighters Gang.
And then we'll go to James and then we'll end with Ed.
Fighters Gang, hit us with your words of wisdom, brother.
First of all, you know, Ed, it was an amazing space and I've learned a lot of things during this space.
Much love to you.
You know, at first it's always seems impossible until it's done.
So never give up, still grinding, keep grinding, keep developing.
And we're all going to make it, like me, Jimmy.
We're all going to make impact, brother.
Let's grow.
So let's freaking grow.
All right.
Go ahead, James.
Hit us with your words of wisdom.
A lot of what we talked today was soil health.
I'm always telling people do what you can with what you have.
Composting.
If you're eating and you're pooping, you can probably start composting.
Help build that soil health.
Help sequester that carbon.
Like Ed said, go learn about it.
Do what you can.
There are a number of places.
I shared in the comments, World Agroforestry.
Go read some of their books on how to at least intercrop if you're going to grow something.
Thank you, everybody, for being here.
Thank you, James.
Always sharing very practical advice.
And, yeah, I loved hearing from all the different things you were mentioning today and sharing with us.
And now I think great information.
I think you may have linked stuff in the comments as well.
So, great stuff.
Yeah, agroforestry books you're recommending.
You're a fountain of knowledge as well, James.
Always a pleasure having you up here.
All right, friends.
We're going to end here on a tune.
We're all going to try to imagine.
Before we get to that, obviously, we have to get to Ed.
But, everybody, please make sure that you follow everyone in the space.
Make sure that you DM people who you want to share something with.
It looks like Ed's gotten a little bit rugged here.
Okay, he's requesting to speak.
You're already a co-host.
I may have to remove you from co-host and then bring you back up.
Let's see here.
All right.
Accept a speaker.
Okay, Marco wants to come up here as well and share some things.
Okay, let's see here.
Are you with us, Ed?
Yeah, I got rugged.
Okay.
It happens.
It happens.
All right, no worries.
Okay.
Well, you normally would end.
Okay, yeah.
This other person wasn't able to join us.
Okay, hit us with your words of wisdom, Ed.
Take it away.
Well, I guess I'll just say what Jimmy says.
You know, let's grow.
So let's really grow in every way we can think about growing.
You know, it's not just what we grow.
It's growing and evolving.
And let's do it with nature.
You know, nature is beautiful.
But let's really get to know her.
And let's really get to understand and really become the stewards, I think, that nature intended us to be.
So I'll leave it at that.
So beautiful.
Be the stewards that nature intended us to be.
Let's grow, Ed.
I love it.
Thank you for coming through, sir.
It's always a pleasure having you here with us on this space.
All right.
We're going to end.
Someone said in a tweet today, who is the greatest musician of all time?
My reply was, okay, objectively, the Beatles were the biggest band in history.
And then subjectively, within the Beatles, I think John Lennon.
Personally, obviously, that's a very subjective question.
But we're going to end on some imaginations.
Imagine a solo punk future.
Make sure you follow everyone in this space.
Make sure you read their bios and DM them and network with the people in this space.
Because there are some really great people in here.
I have a lot of love for all the people in this space.
Really, some people doing incredible things.
So make sure you all connect with each other.
As Fighters Gang said, wag me.
We're all going to make impact, ladies and gentlemen.
Let's grow.
No hell below us Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people Living for today
Imagine there's no country
Been hard to do
Been hard to do
Coming to kill or die for
I have no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
Imagine all the people
And the world of you are
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or wonder
No need for greed or wonder
Or brotherhood or man
Imagine all the people
The people
sharing
all the world
You may say
I'm a dreamer
But I'm not
the only one
I hope
someday
you'll join
And the world
is this one
Much love, dreamers.
Until next time,
keep doing what you love.
Tree Gens.
Keep spreading love
and making impact.
Peace!
