Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Author Anne Biklé in Conversation With Zach Bush, MD - Groundswell 2023
Regenerate Soil, Regenerate Health: Author, Anne Biklé in Conversation With Zach Bush, MD - Conversation recorded live at Groundswell 2023.
Hosted by Koen van Seijen
This eye-opening moderated session explores the interconnections between our health and our environment and how this translates into wellbeing for people and communities alike. Anne and Zach share their thoughts and experiences on the role of regenerative agriculture, farmers, and consumers in transitioning from a system that feeds degenerative disease to one that promotes health and vitality.
Anne Biklé is a science writer and biologist with a soft spot for the botanical world, mulches, and microbes. Her research and writing focus on the linkages between soil, agriculture, microbiomes, and health. Her latest book is What Your Food Ate, and previously, The Hidden Half of Nature. Zach Bush, MD is a renowned multidisciplinary physician of internal medicine, endocrinology, hospice care, and an internationally recognized educator on the microbiome as it relates to health, human health, soil health, food systems, and a regenerative future.
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Thank you all for coming here on the afternoon, the second afternoon, which feels a bit slower. We're going to dive into some deep soil, unintended topics here connected to health. I'm Kun van Sey. I'm going to be your host and moderator of these two amazing human beings on stage. We run a podcast on investing in regenerative agriculture and food, focused on the role of finance in this space, and we had the pleasure to interview both separately on the podcast. I'm very happy. We've been focusing a lot on the nutrient density, the connection to soil health and all of that on the podcast, and to be able to do this live is just amazing. So, first of all, welcome. Take a seat still some seats in the back. I think.
Speaker 1:We have a very full program short time, so it's going to be snippets. There's going to be some interruptions, which I'm going to do because both of these human beings can talk for three, four hours straight, I think, on their specific topic. So I'm going to apologize in advance. I already did in the pre-call that I'm going to interrupt and keep it moving, otherwise we have to be out. This then I heard at 4.30 for the next one, so we're going to keep it on time and with that, I would love to ask both of you, because for sure many have heard one or two, maybe even both. Maybe I've seen your keynote and yesterday, but just for anybody that doesn't, just to set the stage, a brief introduction and what brings you here, and then we're going to dive into our session.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, for those who came to my talk yesterday, hello again. I haven't changed much overnight. I don't believe, and yeah, let's see. So I'm the kind of person as you might have gathered from the talk, or even if you didn't see it I'm endlessly fascinated by connections between ourselves and nature and agriculture. Oddly enough, you'd think, for a biologist like me, I 'd much rather maybe be out looking at plants and birds and so on.
Speaker 2:But it was in writing the hidden half of nature that by the end of that book, for a birds and beagle like me to suddenly find that the microbial world went just far beyond my imagination in terms of what they were capable of and everything that they do in and on our bodies and in and on the bodies of every other organism. It just it was a real turning point for me and it really hasn't let up. And so there's this kind of sense of awe and wonder in agriculture, because microbiomes are so profoundly important to the health of the soil, crops, animals and ourselves, so that that is what keeps me going. I guess you know in just a few words, I'm kind of a free-range biologist who thinks about a lot of things.
Speaker 1:Relationships and connections are sort of central to all of that and just to add to that, I wrote probably, I would say, the most important book on the connection between healthy soils, healthy produce, animals, people and ecosystems. What's your food aid? If anybody didn't read it, get it. It's at the book stand actually. There's some sign copies.
Speaker 2:Actually I am afraid to say sniffle. They ran out of books. But you all buy books and so go out and get that. Wherever it is, you shop for them. It's still available out there in the landscape.
Speaker 1:And if you have read it, just give it to other people. It's a good gift. Anybody interested in health should read that book or egg for that matter, For the two-mile life. I'm so happy to have you here on stage straight out of a flight from Heathrow. Welcome, You've had a bit of to hear on the farm.
Speaker 3:How do you feel? It's very exciting to be here, glad to see all of you. This is symptomatic of an inevitable movement that is happening around the world, in every country I visit, and it's exciting that it's inevitable and yet it's there's a sadness or a broken hardness as to why it's inevitable, because we didn't choose to do this until we were collapsing. So in classic human behavior we don't change until we are hitting the wall, and that's where human health has really led this charge of regeneration in some ways, and you've seen the growth of this event over the last three years, I think largely because of the pandemic, and so there was a huge sea change in awareness of food vulnerability, food sovereignty and that movement going on.
Speaker 3:And then, under the surface is a really cool biology story the microbiome that I've got a background in my research and development in the medical world as a medical doctor was in chemotherapy and I was developing chemotherapy from vitamin A compounds that are nutrients obviously within much of the food we eat. It's actually the most common nutrient in the entire food system and it's the most abundant receptor in the entire body is the vitamin A receptors and every single cell is more abundant than any other signaling system within the body. So that's what I was studying from a chemotherapy cancer research standpoint and then realized that nature had really engineered a biology that never needed chemotherapy and so it kind of took a hard left turn into food as an alternative to the pharmaceutical model and as I got into that realized the food was no longer working for my patients to reverse the chronic diseases we had supposed it would. And that got me into studying well what happened to the food between 1970s and current day, and that was my debut into not only the collapse of nutrients and the metabolism within soil and plants but also this debut of so many chemicals that now are carried in our food system. So for the last 13 years I've been running a biotech company and laboratory. That's right in the space of understanding the intersection between herbicides, pesticides, the human microbiome and the genomics of the cell, as well as the metabolism, which is the mitochondria that live inside our cells, small little microbes that live inside the cells to generate energy within the human system.
Speaker 3:So I'm here at that intersection of human health and planetary health, witnessing on one side the collapse of human biology and witnessing on the other side the rise of consciousness that we are connected to nature and we are nature, and so that's why we're all here, I think, is ultimately to be part of this revolution, and I honor the UK for having such a vibrant event that is honoring all of us on every part of our journey, because obviously, you don't wake up one day and become a regenerative agricultural expert, and there's a long journey to becoming a healthy soil system that we all have to be a part of.
Speaker 3:Every stakeholder in a society has to get engaged if this is going to become real, because a farmer can't do it alone. There's a whole huge supply system between them and the consumer and marketplace that has to solve at the same time. So every stakeholders engaged and I'm excited how many farm speakers you guys have here. It's a very impressive compared to other parts of the world. So lots of farmers speaking, lots of farmers engaged, and every tent that I stopped at on my way in here, stick my head in, and almost every farmer was saying this is extremely difficult and many of us are going to go out of business over the next 10 years, and so they're optimistic. They feel the thing, but they're seeing the challenge and that's why all of you, in whatever role you play as a stakeholder within a complex food system has to be part of this conversation.
Speaker 1:So honored to be part of it with you and speaking of another stakeholder, the medical world, which of course you have one foot in the farmers world, farmers footprint, one foot definitely in a medical world. You're going later to a medical conference. What do you bring there? What do you see there? Do you see the same grass root excitement that is happening here? I mean this festival. Now it's not even a conference anymore. Festival grew to 6,000 people over the last six, seven years. What's happening in a medical world? What should we know as farmers, as people working on the regenerative ag food side should, what should we know about the medical space? What's what's exciting or not exciting? What do you bring from that realm?
Speaker 3:yeah, I would say that it's becoming more polarized, and just as we see our politics and everything else becoming polarized. But you have an entrenched group that I was raised within, saying the pharmaceutical drugs are only path out of here and food has nothing to do with why you have disease. You would think that group would have given up by now, knowing what you guys know in this room.
Speaker 3:But it's gotten more extreme, if anything, and you saw digging themselves into there digging their heels in and really insisting that you know food doesn't have anything to do with it. And the reason for that isn't idiocy, it's it's because the education system is what it is. And even as far back as the 1990s, when I started into the medical career, I was told that it takes about 25 years for a breakthrough in the basic science space to actually become relevant in the clinical environment. So that's one generation. 25 years takes a full generation of people practicing old science that's not relevant or not right anymore. Before there's a little bit of a ripple is as a weight, we should be doing something else. And then it takes another generation before it comes mainstream. So that's a 50 year gap in science. And so we don't have that time. We just don't have that time. And it's ironic because that's really the only area of science that's that slow. If you think about your cell phone, I think doubles its speed every two years and people would be disappointed if it wasn't changing that fast all the time. So for some reason, medicine is this sluggish, titanic thing that is very slow to move, and to give you a sense of the scale of it is important because I think that gives you a little bit of grace towards the doctors that are stuck in the system.
Speaker 3:The US medical system alone not global is a four and a half trillion dollar a year engine right now, and so that pharmaceutical industry that's now over four trillion dollars. Compare that to our military, which historically was our biggest you know industry in many ways historically for any empire it's kind of your main driver and our military and homeland defense biggest military in the world history is only about 800 billion a year. So we're five times bigger, six times bigger in the pharmaceutical industry than we are in the entire military. And so we're doing war, but we're no longer killing humans. We're trying to kill everything around humans, inside of humans and everything else. This pharmaceutical thing has become the best business model ever. Globally we're at about nine trillion dollars. But if you look at the US, that four and a half trillion dollars is almost 25% and some years 30% of our entire GDP. And so if your nation is now fully reliant on a pharmaceutical mom that is disease management rather than disease prevention you realize you're stuck in a really violent trap.
Speaker 3:That is the end of the American Empire as it stands is really the cost of health care. It's driving our economy, but it's driving down our productivity, and so the US doesn't produce anything anymore, unfortunately, in large amounts. We're we're really depend on the rest of the world to produce food. All of our built world is imported from outside. You saw the pandemic happen. Within three weeks we couldn't get a mask on any nurse in our country, because we don't make masks, you know. And so it's just. It's this insidious problem where you build an economy out of disease management and you ultimately fail. So we're on the brink in the United States and we're gonna drag most the developed world with us.
Speaker 1:I think, as we go down the tubes here and this is the solution, this is the counter-revolution to that that epic adventure and as you, because I think for a long time we in the space and I'm using the very general we always said of course it's the, of course the food from healthy, so it is different. And then you got the response yeah, but just show me the data or show me the proof. And you decided to go down that path, read a thousand papers, which I'm very happy somebody did and not me, because they're mostly unreadable. But a lot of these things, as I read the book, seem to be. We've known many of these things for a long time. Maybe nobody has put the pearls of the chain together to understand, but a lot of these things have been observed, have been shown.
Speaker 1:You've done a peer review paper Since the book came out. There's a question coming Since the book came out, have you seen, like, from the places you've been invited I mean, this is an obvious one, but from the medical world, for instance like, have you been surprised at the invitation from where you and David, your partner, were invited to speak, to share what you've seen or what you've learned or what you have researched? Or has it been relatively the standard region and conferences, et cetera?
Speaker 2:I suppose it's been kind of a little bit of both, all farming. I guess farming is not a monolithic, monocultural thing at all, and the more that David and I have spoken at conferences and with farmers, you begin to see sort of some common ground. I mean, some of the things that Zach was saying about why groups like this and organizations like Groundswell have come about is it's because the mainstream stuff isn't working anymore. And so, even though I may go to an organic conference or a conventional farming conference, it's interesting to me to hear that both farming systems are saying the way we're doing it just it's not working.
Speaker 2:The organic people are not happy with at least in the US, with the way that standards are implemented. I mean, the government board that's in charge of that stuff has become very problematic. And then on the conventional side, they're really tired. Farmers are really tired of paying an inordinate amount of the money that they bring in. It just turns right over to be purchasing more inputs for next year. And so there is there definitely is a hunger and a hunger for change in both medicine and agriculture for us, for people, for things that work and that actually do improve the quality of our lives, which we are seeing increasingly connected to the quality of our environment and so it. And so I'm not sure I exactly answered your question, but it's groups like this where it's new thinking, new ideas. I wanna learn more, because the way things are working now, oh, they're not really working for humanity in affluent countries or in poorer countries.
Speaker 2:So some things gotta give and some things gotta change, and that's the space. Where is medicine food, or is food medicine, or is medicine not medicine? I mean, we're having these conversations because things are not working out and when I think about, of course, we've all seen, food is medicine, okay, okay. And then I ask myself I thought food was sitting down with family and friends and having these great meals, and to me that's always been kind of food and I'm like wait a minute, if food is medicine, then am I sick? Oh, I don't know, maybe at some level. So I don't know if I like this.
Speaker 1:Framing is important, yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I like food can be medicine when you are sick. There is no doubt everybody here has been healed or in some, at some level or another with food or with meals, but I kinda always unpack that in my mind when we use that term.
Speaker 1:And what does it do to you, zach, when somebody says, yeah, but food is medicine? What triggers it in your mind?
Speaker 3:Yeah, historically it was exciting because I felt like that was my area of expertise was to figure out the medicine within the food. But I think a similar journey as you would describe there is realizing that no matter how much nutrient we could put into a carrot, it doesn't actually turn into health in the individual. If they're sitting there stressed and lonely, it's really. The isolation of the human is as damaging as the isolation of chemical agriculture on a carrot and how does it work in terms of nutrients?
Speaker 1:Does it literally block us from absorbing it? It does, yeah.
Speaker 3:So the stress of the human adrenal system, for example. So cortisol being the dominant adrenaline hormone, as that goes up in the bloodstream it feeds back on the neural system of the gut and it decreases the biodiversity within the intestinal environment and therefore making that nutrient less bio-available to the individual and it down regulates the production of serotonin and dopamine at the gut lining, which should be the result of that nutrient dense food interacting with the microbiome. The microbiome is responsible for making the neurotransmitters that will ultimately get to the brain, our peripheral nervous system, and we produce about 90% of the serotonin in our whole body and the gut lining about 50% of the dopamine. The other 40% of the dopamine is produced in the kidney tubules, not the brain. So 90% of your serotonin, dopamine not made in the brain. And there's this necessary relationship to specific microbes in the gut lining that interact with the enteric endocrine cells that would produce those.
Speaker 3:And we're now realizing that stress of the human being breaks that relationship to the microbiome directly. And so what we did in the pandemic put everybody in isolation, put them on processed food because they can't get outside, do this whole thing. So we basically did the biggest nutrient depravation experiment in history over a two-year period and we were seeing catastrophic results across the board. We've never seen a faster explosion of cancer, cardiovascular events, blood clots, the whole thing all the way to mood disorders, suicide rates. All of it exploded. And so we have proved over and over again that it's not just the nutritional stress, the stress on the farm field, that's going to destroy that nutrient result or the metabolism of a species, it's also the health of that individual's landscape as well.
Speaker 1:That was a rabbit hole you probably didn't expect. Take a deep breath. And then how do we? I would say, like almost when the science and the medical world says OK, show me the papers, the peer-reviewed papers. How would you test this? How would you if you had a magic wand and could design of course maybe without a control group, because that would be cruel but design a research to show almost full diet coming from super healthy soil farms, but also the stress piece, how would you approach that if you had complete freedom?
Speaker 3:Yeah, in some ways it's already been done really eloquently with the blue zone experiments. And so the blue zones are the areas around the planet in which people tend to live over a hundred years of age, with commonality, and In those spaces we tried to go and find oh, it must be the food. And so we like, we read, and what we found is all those blue zones differ radically in their food systems. You know some?
Speaker 1:everybody found something in the presently they like and they were like oh, but it's must be that yeah.
Speaker 3:And so the only conclusion you make about food and living to a hundred years is there's absolutely no correlation. It's just like that, doesn't seem to be it.
Speaker 1:And then there was a lot of discussion of counting years and I think, ages I mean we're generally older, but many of those places in the proper records of age as well.
Speaker 3:They're there, there. So you're, icaria greases, an interesting one that really taught me this, this whole Question that you're getting out there, or the answer to it. Icaria, one of the Grecian Islands. They have an extraordinary rate of centurions there, often living to a hundred five hundred ten years of age, and what you can say about the food in general is that it's real food. So none of the blue zones have a primary diet of processed food, but what types of food and how they eat it, whether it's raw or fermented or whatever, all that's radically different.
Speaker 3:But I was trying to make some conclusions with this group out of Icaria, you know, about the microbiome and the nutrient density and all this. And I gave this eloquent monologue and I was crying. It was so beautiful, it was just like this is Really poetry in motion, if you ask me. So I gave this incredible monologue and this, and the elder from Icaria says that's very interesting, doctor, but you're completely wrong. And how did you feel?
Speaker 3:I Actually chuckled because it had been quite a while and not since academia that somebody had told me that I was completely wrong, which is what academia tells you every day.
Speaker 3:But but I chuckled and I was like us, like back back in in the halls of the big University and so I asked what is it I don't think even waiting for me to ask. He said that the reason why we live long in Icaria is not because of what we eat, but it's because we always said an extra chair at the dinner table, hoping that somebody we don't know shows up to share a meal with us. And in Icaria we never asked each other what did you eat last night, but we always ask every morning who did you eat with last night? And that was a big shift for me of realizing that Food is in fact the focus of fellowship and it's not really medicine in the end, unless it's shared. And that's a very intriguing thought and Really plays out well in your American demographics, in that 35% of meals in the United States is now eaten alone behind a steering wheel, and so we're not a part.
Speaker 1:We're alone at a computer and not a screen on the table yeah but specifically behind a steering wheel as that change, like that meeting, monologue and Epiphany, let's say right country to do that as well as a change. You're eating Habits and patterns like, are you?
Speaker 3:Radically, yeah, and I think it just keeps changing every every year that I live now. But we do an a week course called a journey of intrinsic health, and the whole first month is around nutrition and we not once in that Journey do we explain to people what they should be eating. Instead, it's changing the relationship to the food and ultimately, your relationship to the growing of the food and all that that becomes relevant, and so that's that's what we've found really changes your, your course of cancer or whatever we're trying to treat is what is your fundamental relationship at that psycho, spiritual level To your environment, namely your food and all this. But it's that relationship, rather than the nutrients, that is critical. And in the end, it's kind of obvious.
Speaker 3:Like Y'all are Subject to dating. You go out there and if dating was like okay, you just need like lots of calcium in this person, like check their teeth and make sure that's good and make sure their bowel movements are regular, and you know, like you just had your checklist of like, yeah, good hair quality, you know whatever it is. And then you're like why isn't this relationship working like this? This is a stressful thing. You know like well, you didn't actually have a conversation with the person and you just started the relationship because they had good teeth.
Speaker 3:That's basically what we're doing with food right now, as we've decided, like good food is high calcium, love blood, and we've been so reductionist that we aren't even tasting, smelling, moving into a state of gratitude over that which we're putting in our bodies, and so, for me, is just every day that I study the microbiome in my laboratory. It moves me back to this sense of awe and reverence for the relationship we have to this environment, and it becomes less and less prescriptive every day and more and more curious as to what have I missed being alive for that first half a century? What am I gonna do differently for the next half of my century? As I move to that centurion that I want to be, I'm gonna be much more focused on the relationship rather than the constituents of of that which I'm moving into relationship with.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna ask you about dating life, because we need David on stage as well, but what has this journey I think I asked a little podcast as well Changed in your eating and in your? With whom do you put extra chairs? Like what has this? Four books now that to you were very much part of in the other two for sure as well, because not one person in in the house of rights a book in the other one doesn't get all the manuscripts, I think. How is that shaped your, your eating practice and relationships?
Speaker 2:I Think I've always been a person Certainly from my 20s on Interested in food, and that that may have been. I mean, there were some early seeds of that, a little bit anyway. So I was a. I was a person who grew up in the 1970s outside of Denver both working parents and and my father cooked which was a little, a little bit unusual and he used to. In the morning He'd put all these things in the crock pot. He chopped up the kerosene onions, beef, potatoes, and then it would be ready, and I I always like to watch him cook and put the things in the crock pot and then I Would come and kind of I don't think you're really supposed to do this with a crock pot, but I'd open up the lid and what's happening in here Is it done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a pressure cooker.
Speaker 2:Right, it was not a pressure cooker was an electric thing, so I was, stuff was not exploding around the kitchen. But so I just became very interested in food. And I don't think as a kid I thought I had two brothers and I didn't particularly like them, I wanted sisters. So I'm not sure I really appreciated sitting around eating the beef stew with my brothers, but anyway we did, because that's when dinner was served. We were not like if you don't like beef stew here, I'll make you something else. No, beef stew is what we're all having, you too. And so I. That was kind of the initial, just observations of food. I don't think I thought of it too much about About whom I was eating it with.
Speaker 2:And then I had to college and I had a really interesting experience I my second year. I needed housing. The end of the first year of college You're supposed to figure out where you're supposed to live the next year and I'm like, because they don't let you live in the Dorms for two years, I'm like, oh shit, where am I gonna live next year? So I, I, so there was this thing called pad People's Alternative dwellings and I'm like, oh, that sounds kind of cool. What is that?
Speaker 2:I went to the meeting and it turned out this, this group on campus this was at the University of California, at Santa Cruz. They had commandeered part of a dorm and they were turning it into pad and you could cook your own food. And I thought, hey, that's pretty neat, like I could do beef stew and I could do this and that. And it was my first experience with like cooking for a large group of people. And one of the best things about pad was A part of the dorm floor got turned into.
Speaker 2:We had to eat somewhere and you know it wasn't gonna be in your bed, so maybe for some it was, but we had this communal eating space and we all had to cook. I can't remember at least one meal a week, maybe, maybe more, and it was really a lot of fun and I think there was a whole social aspect to it that we hadn't anticipated. As students and and your discussion about you know who are we eating with and what are we getting out of it. I think that's a big part of whether we enjoy food or not, and Perhaps, in a way we don't completely understand, when you're happy, the serotonin is flowing and and and everything is grooving and moving like it's supposed to Maybe your cells and your cell receptors are just literally a little more receptive to the nutrients and the microbial Metabolites and the fab. For that I talked about yesterday.
Speaker 2:Maybe our receptors- are just for whoever the fab for our micronutrients, phytochemicals, fat balance in our animal foods and this whole new world of microbial metabolites. So these are all these things and food that don't necessarily Necessarily fuel our growth or energy. They're not, with the exception of fats, they're not caloric, but they're doing lots of things biochemically in our body. And if our body is happy happy and the receptors are functioning and and and open, maybe we are taking in more of these things in our meal as we're sitting around with our friends and with our strangers and being a human being, like, hey, let's join the be in of the human being. That that is something that I Mean.
Speaker 2:What if we just sat for a moment before meals I bet Zach does this and thought a little bit about where's this food coming from? What does it really mean? How do we, how do we celebrate this and Benefit from it? Right, that has always been the great promise of agriculture. It's not just the calorie part of it, it's that these calories are A really fundamental part of our health, and I would say calories plus the fab four, so I don't know. Just kind of a freeform answer there for you.
Speaker 1:Because the other ones were super clear and concrete. Now that's the whole point of this conversation. But did the last book like when you went through Food is not food, is tomato from healthy soil? Like not looking at who you're eating with but literally what's in the food and going through all that research and all those years? Because I remember Interviewing David and then he already mentioned we're working on a book on nutrients and the density and we're, and that was five years later. The book came because it was a was a and a Big lift and a lot of work. Did the last book change your Eating at all or was it more? We already noticed what it's nice to put it in a super accessible not easy, but accessible form.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what it made me think about there's the the difficult parts of writing a book. It lasts a lot longer than the fun parts.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you that but this is a fun part, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, but the fun parts, that they're small but they're. They're the sort of like Epiphany. Epiphany like moments where you go, oh my god, that's what it's all about. And so For me it kind of it kind of came down to Zach's comment about you know, is it, is it really the nutrients in the food that are doing us good, or is it this, this social thing? And I think the answer is in part. Everything about our health and well-being is Multiple factors coming together in optimal ways Social stuff, nutrients stuff, things we may not even completely understand.
Speaker 2:And so with this book, with what your food ate, it dawned on me, especially when you dig into the research in this stuff, and especially the biomedical research, you're wondering, like you know, in your little scientific but you know logical mind, you're like, damn it, they couldn't replicate that. Or what is with all these human trials? None of none of this stuff is like really like cut and dried, black and white. How come? What's going on? This is frustrating. And then you realize, lo and behold, there is a lot of biological diversity out there among people, plants, animals and all of that. And so my epiphany was this is the power and strength of omnivory. This, in part, is why an omnivorous diet is so important for people, because, depending on where we are in our life stage and gender and stress situations, our body wisdom can kind of direct us to the things that can help, I think, keep our bodies on the right track. So it was kind of an epiphany to me that, oh, variability is really our strength, but we have to be able to listen to it and interpret it and then act on it.
Speaker 2:And in some ways I really do wish I was a ruminant out there in a beautiful pasture, because nobody's harping at me about what to frickin' eat, right, I've got my body wisdom, I've got the botanical world, I've got the sunshine, I've got my mates, I've got water. You know, it's just, it's all there. And it's hard as a human being because modernity has just irrevocably kind of changed our environment and we're bombarded in the grocery store with the boxes and the bags and things like that. So as much as possible, colin, I try and remember I'm a human being and like, could you please get in touch with your inner ruminant and just go with that?
Speaker 2:So, and I'm really appreciating variability and what that can mean, and it is sort of like a load off of my shoulders when I get irritated with oh, the results of that study aren't replicatable. Yeah, because human beings are variable. Even those little rodents in the laboratories, even they're variable. And you can only do so much with all that variability. But then you're back to body wisdom and ape biology and what we can learn every day about who we are and how we function and what we need.
Speaker 1:It almost feels like very advanced farmers on a regentive journey that can sense and feel hopefully also their body, but definitely their fields. Therefore, is there what is needed? I know some stories of people walking in the field and sense what is really needed and connect that and that might sound out there for some, but it's definitely in the field for many and there's no sense that I can help with that. What do you learn from that, zach, in terms of I think you compared the high intensive chemical farm with an ICU at some point Like what do you take from the sensing, what is needed in a field like that or what is needed in a herd like that? What do you bring, for instance, to the medical conference you go to in a couple of days? What message or what lessons learned or views?
Speaker 3:Yeah, for a medical audience, or for a food consumer audience or food growers, whatever we are, it's a very interesting almost reverse dichotomy there with cost versus health. So the cost of the individual goes up radically as their health goes down. And so in an ICU it's pretty easy for me to spend $25,000 a day on one patient, versus their healthy counterpart might cost me $25 to take care of them, so a thousandfold difference in cost of keeping that person in what would be considered a livable state. And so that is the same thing in a farm field. That's driving this regenerative movement is that the cost of that farm goes up every year.
Speaker 3:If you're in that ICU mentality, if I need to kill everything to make my corn grow, or I need to kill everything so that my soybean is the only thing growing, and so in that same way I need to kill everything around the human so that they can not have any competition for nutrients or calories. This is the mentality of the ICU environment. And so if you wake up every morning wondering what to kill so that you can survive, you end up with a very high cost life. If you wake up wondering what you can help to make live around you, each day your cost goes down, and for a society that is so extractive for every bit of wealth that we achieve, we will simply do less damage on the planet when we are not doing an ICU approach to life. And so we have to make that decision quite quickly now, because, as we know, in the ICU you can only really stay alive in ICU for a couple of weeks and then the fatalities go through the roof. You are at 80, 90% mortality if you are in an ICU for a month or something like that. So if you are going to touch an ICU, you have to get out of there quick if you are going to survive.
Speaker 3:And so we have now got a whole planet on ICU care and we have got to get out of there quickly if we are going to truncate this six extinction that is rolling on us right now.
Speaker 3:So we have precious few decades right now to reverse out of our ICU experience and shift into this low cost of care of human life, and fortunately we all have it within us. We have that code written in us as to how to live that way. We are all indigenous and endogenous to this planet, and so we have an indigenous culture and memory of our relationship to food, our relationship to soil, our relationship to the seasons, our relationship to the cycles of the moon, our relationships to any element of nature that is still baked down into our genetics. We still remember how to do all of that, and so that is what is starting to emerge, I think, from what you guys are all a part of right now. There is an emergent future that is happening, that is really coming from the past, and so the regenerative agricultural movement is really a remembering of who we are and a remembering of our relationships to nature, food and the like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely Amen, there, brother. So, on that note, I think that it was realizing that we are indigenous and endogenous at the same time and that much of what maybe is happening here is something is triggering our gene expression to remember who we are and where we came from. And I don't know what it is, but it is really important because we have these ancient traditions take cover cropping or fermentation, what have you. And maybe way back when we didn't understand everything that was happening with cover cropping and fermentation, all we knew was that, hey, we like these outcomes, we like soil fertility after we cover crop, we like being able to eat dairy without it going off because it has been fermented, or sauerkraut or something like that.
Speaker 2:So, as much as we might think that what we call regenerative is new, a lot of this is really old and we have just forgotten it. And so it is kind of like reaching back into our ancestry, wherever that ancestry may have been, and pulling it back forward and saying this is what we have today. And how are we going to marry this with the best science to get ourselves out of the ICU? Because that is kind of all we got at this point. You know the agrochemicals and the pharmaceuticals. They only take you so far. That stuff is good if you have gotten acute, like one time problem, but in the long run, to keep using that stuff over and over and over and over the long run to compensate for body wisdom, for aruminants in a biology human in a biology it doesn't. It's not. We're not gonna get there in the long run and have much of a future Unless we start remembering what we've forgotten and Begin to incorporate it again into farming, into how we eat, what we eat, everything.
Speaker 3:I think it's. I'm getting to this almost frightening part of my career where I'm realizing that science is gonna have no role in our recovery.
Speaker 1:What do you mean about that? And a rabbit hole.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it means that I'm useless is what that means.
Speaker 1:But the reason why you're self. You're fine, you can do nice monotone monologues and I'm going pretty much defaulted now to hugs like that's.
Speaker 3:So I do now, as I give hugs around the world and I feel like I've done something good for humanity. But the science that I bring Can only try to like give you a few brushstrokes as to what happened, but it's not the path forward, and so science is never. Nature has never waited for science to do its thing, and it has done some wondrous things. Over a four billion year period, this planet has gone through massive extinction events. We we can map five of them, but there's probably been many before we yet there was enough life to even recognize when the extinctions were happening. But five massive extinction events were in the sixth now, and Nature did not wait for science to come along to be like boy. We're gonna have to rebuild the genome of this planet. You know we just had this big volcano event. The volcanoes like waiting for the scientists to show up. This has never happened. Where's the benchmark?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's just never happened and and and so science is Really an observational experience and it's not Prospectively showing you where we're gonna go. It can show you what's gonna happen if we continue on our path, but it's not gonna show you the path forward that's gonna heal the planet, and so there's something inside of each of you that is the path forward. And so there's the Steiner Stuff that came out a hundred years back, and all this if you haven't run much on Steiner, assume there's a lot of you in the audience that that's the Bible for you. But there's a whole body of work that came out of that period, not just from Steiner, but many others at the time who were recognizing that the the human body has more than five senses, and that there's probably more like Seven or twelve senses in the body, and the majority of which are sensed below the chest, down in the gut area. And all of this and these senses are include things like sensing life force and these kinds of things. And so right now we're running around with all these hand meters trying to figure out Is that a healthy carrot or not, and you imagine you could be a consumer, you could shine this thing on there, but in reality it's like, well, you actually have twelve senses in your body where you could pick up that carrot in your hand, and you're gonna do far better than some computer thing trying to just find a narrow band of light that's gonna say it's a healthy carrot or not. You've. You are a powerful Quantum computer system that knows life at layers that the scientists can't even begin to imagine yet, and so it's really gonna be instilling in each of you the trust Within you you need to to re-engage your soul. Your soul is some sort of complex energy field that informs biology.
Speaker 3:How to make one cell turn into seventy trillion cells and then self-organizing your mother's womb into a fetus that then becomes an, an infant that then grows up to an adult, like this is a, this is a miraculous stuff. And so then you start to look at food science and we are like in the dark ages. We're like I don't wonder what calcium is. It's like, well, I don't know, but you self-organized in your mother's womb. That was pretty good. Kick butt on that like ten toes, ten fingers, eight billion of you, amazing. And so just the point is like we got to stop trusting the science. Okay, like it's, we proved what happens when we do that. We got to stop trusting the science to show us the way forward. The science can at best give us a little semblance of understanding how the hell we got here, but it can't show us how to get forward.
Speaker 3:And that's within each of you. Each of you has a deep knowingness of where we have to go as a species if we are to survive, and it's not just survive, its thrive. You know inside of yourself how you become a keystone species on this planet. I've been working a lot in Africa recently. It's just been an absolutely mind-blowing experience to see what happens to nature when you put a keystone species back in it. And I've been working around these lions, the wild lion.
Speaker 3:As a microbiologist, I think a lion is about as far away from microbes in the soil as you could possibly get on some sort of Hierarchical system. And yet when you put one of these lions back in a hundred hectare region, the soil recovers within months. It makes absolutely no sense for some sort of linear understanding of how life works. But the damn same thing happened in the US when we put beavers into the rivers. All this carbon water cycle Kick back in microbes. Well, beavers are at least in the in the water. That kind of made sense. But then they put wolves back in Yellowstone and the soil and water systems improve within a year. We just were out at force of nature in Texas and it's a big bison ranch that put the American bison back into these desert systems where the arroyos, the Seasonal water systems, were all dry and they were told when they bought this piece of land there's no rivers here but there's just the arroyos which run just during the rainy season, one year of those bison bank being back on the land and they have year-round rivers running on that. That those are keystone species.
Speaker 3:The elephants, the beaver, the thing. Those are Animals that have a relationship to their environment that improves everything. It immediately kicks biodiversity into gear. Humans are the opposite and we have some pretty amazing aerial footage of Africa where you allow the L or you allow the lions to be the keystone species and so all the humans coming into that environment Literally go through a spiritual process of reverence to the lions. There's no hunting of the lions. The lions are allowed to be the keystone species in that space and then next door, the other A thousand eight hectares next door, it's trophy hunting.
Speaker 3:Same lions, same game animals, the antelope, the kudu, all exactly the same on both pieces of land and yet, over a 20 year period, they'll under the the reign of lions. It thrives. Under the reign of humans, it is dead. So again, the animals are the same, the vegetation the same, the weather is the same. This is different. The lion, king of the jungle, as this said, understands and reverence the life around it and sees itself as a nurturer to life around it, rather than a destroyer or an extractor. We are not acting as a keystone species on this planet right now. We are acting as a cancer would act upon a large organism, but we have the option to shift, and so what you guys are really doing in their gender movement is becoming a keystone species. When a farmer walks out on his land and the soil improves underneath their feet, it's usually a woman. That is a keystone species. That's a human stepping into our full potential to be a co-creator on this planet.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that. We could do, as I said, another five hours probably, but we're gonna be kicked out of the tent and I want to have time for some Questions. So we're gonna have a mic walking around, not running, because that's dangerous. Maybe running, just raise your hand, we'll figure it out.
Speaker 6:Hi, um, love your podcast, come by the way. Um so, if I Guess the regenerative movement relies on consumers educated consumers, I'm a nutritionist, so how do I help consumers switch on their body wisdom?
Speaker 1:Who wants to take that I?
Speaker 2:Mean. Probably both of us could provide comments on that and I think, first of all, it probably takes a person who Wants to know first of all. So there's this kind of an awareness piece, that Not feeling great, not feeling right, I don't know what's wrong. I'm coming to you, the nutritionist, and I Think part of it is I don't know if I agree entirely with you, zach, on the science part because I think it depends on the kind of scientists and how we use science. And there's sciences, there's a humility part of it and it's very observational and it's kind of standing back and asking questions With regard to what is this? How should this inform our thinking and our actions, as opposed to we're just going to take this and run with it the nuclear bomb, gmos, all this stuff. So I think there's different kinds of scientists and that maybe science hasn't been deployed appropriately For the benefit of humanity in all cases. But that takes a careful scientist that's not your run-of-the-mill Scientist at all maybe who thinks that way, but it makes me think so back.
Speaker 2:So how does that relate to your question? Is is kind of building an awareness, taking some time to kind of probe yourself about what is kind of, you know, sorry, eating at me, eating me up, that I don't understand and what is? Maybe my diet and food have to do with that. So I think there's kind of a sort of basic education where somebody sees some sort of fundamental connections that maybe they hadn't seen before.
Speaker 2:Because it's like that, with everything we don't know everything our whole lives we're always at some kind of very basic learning step and as we begin to sort of you know, I talked yesterday about what your food date was kind of building an onion backup, and so we get these slivers of onion that come around and then we begin to see a bigger picture of things and then we're more capable of maybe tackling the reason that we came to see a nutritionist. So I think I'm a big fan of education, and not so much, like here's facts and knowledge you need to know, but this stimulating your ideas, your own ideas, what's in your own mind, because ultimately you're the one who's in charge of the way you farm, what you do on this planet, what you do with your life, and I think we have to seed that in ways that will lead to solutions. And solutions are different all over because we're all different kind of people when it comes to diet and food and how it affects us.
Speaker 3:I would say that similar maybe that the nutritionist is going to have to forget everything they were taught in nutrition school, first of all because obviously it was a reductionist approach to a very complex science that we have a vague understanding of at best. And so we have to, as any health practitioner, we need to open our hands and surrender the knowing part and start to really trust the feeling part. And so, again, there's 12 senses in here, and that nutritionist sitting down with a patient who really is going to listen to that patient is going to feel something for that patient. That could be a guide in just being that mirror to the individual. But the patient's ultimately going to tell you 90% of the time what they should be eating, and it's not going to come from your own training.
Speaker 3:And so that's the important thing for any practitioner of any sort, whether you're an agronomist or a nutritionist or a doctor. You're going to do your highest work when you sit as a human being and reverence to the being before you and you listen, and then you keep listening, and then you ask some follow-up questions and then you listen to those. When we go into an attitude of I'm going to tell you what to eat. It's going to be a miss 99% of the time because this is a complex being that's in a complex ecosystem that has very little to do with the micro macronutrients and the food they're eating. It has to do with the entire psychospiritual, psychosocial, environmental relationships ultimately, so surrender what you know and move into it A region-act transition.
Speaker 1:It is Question over there.
Speaker 7:Hi, I'm really impressed by your idea of you'd like to be a ruminant and not have to think about what you're eating, because I think the choices we have are all very complicated, but they don't need to be All. Food should be healthy and we'd have to be asking ourselves are we trying to farm better, or should we stop farming badly? Because I think artificial fertilizers are the elephant in the room and if we just stopped using agrochemicals and depending on them for food and depend on nature for food instead, then everything would become well again. That's my feeling.
Speaker 1:You have a question, no question. Okay, statement, which we really like.
Speaker 8:Question and then one here Hi, I'm afraid mine's going to be more of a comment than a question.
Speaker 1:We do two comments in a row, then we want a question.
Speaker 8:Yeah, okay, I have to say it seems sounds as though the second half of your presentation was largely psychobabble, and I have to admit that I'm an intensivist, so I come from a science background. I think it's highly dangerous for you to suggest we don't need science. I thought that actually the science of soil is where the future lies, not in psychobabble.
Speaker 3:I accept that I feel like a psychobabble person most of the days. I came from 17 years in academia and I did very scientific research for a long time, and I still run a science lab every single day. I'm in there running science and so, like I said, it's startling to me to be able to say that too, because it is a journey into realizing what we know in the soil is such a smidgen of what is really in the complexity of life itself. Keep thinking about finding science. We will, but we don't have time. We've been at it for 50 years and we're still sitting here arguing about calcium and magnesium, and we haven't gotten down to mitochondrial metabolism of soil yet as scientists, and so we're way, way far from being able to actually measure the vitality of your soil. We can tell you a few things about it, but what impresses me is how fast farmers know whether their soil is vile or not by looking with their eyes and feeling their experience with that land. That farmer is way better than I am, thank you.
Speaker 1:We're going to keep moving and I will invite you both at the bar late at earthworm bar for a beer too, because we're not going to settle this in two seconds. I have a question here and then I think here in front and then we're going to move to the back.
Speaker 5:I just wanted to say that, because regenerative agriculture is creating an increasing community on regen farms, because there are more people coming on and doing more things, do you think that in itself is part of what makes regenerative farming a more happy experience? Is it because you're actually bringing a community onto a farm which was not populated before it's?
Speaker 1:an interesting question if there is research being done in the mental health of farmers who are on a journey, compared to not.
Speaker 2:I don't know about that question, Cohen, but I think there is something. That would be a very interesting question. What is the mental health of farmers who have embarked on this regenerative journey?
Speaker 2:What I can say about that is that some of the and I like how this question put- we don't want any job, least of all farming, which is so important to our civilization to become an act of drudgery and dreary. I mean, jesus Christ, that's like sitting in a cubicle, right? We definitely don't want that. I have seen on farmers that are on this journey. One of the most thrilling things about it is when farmers get together and they do what are called farm days or farm schools. This is exciting because it's farmers who they publicize in advance. Come onto my farm. I'm going to show you how I have managed to figure out the specific techniques for applying the regenerative principles on my farm.
Speaker 2:The people who farm in Manitoba they really don't want to hear so much from the people out in California. Conditions are completely different. They go to their peer farmers in Manitoba and then they're there learning. It's exciting. It's this sort of it's a co-creation of sorts, where I would never have known this had I not come to this farm school and met you. And now I have this new idea and I'm going to go back to my farm and my community and take it with me.
Speaker 2:I don't think that happens in chemical farming. I'm not even sure I think it happens some in organic farming, but I think because regenerative is a farming system that is taking. I like regenerative even though it's ill-defined and people exploit it and there's some greenwashing going on. I like it because we are taking these pieces of other farming systems and we're figuring out how to build a new system that I hope will become the new mainstream system, where the focus is on soil health and it is using the science that we know is informing us about how can we treat soil better than we have and what does that mean for us. So I think it's very positive and very productive. When you get farmers on the region journey who are joining others, it's just like anything. I mean honestly, you embark on something by yourself and it can be damn scary, and then you run into somebody else and you're like, wow, you had that experience, I want to hear about that. And then pretty soon you get a little movement and then that movement gets bigger.
Speaker 1:And then it becomes mainstream, and then we have 6,000 people here. I want to go forward here for a few more questions, go ahead.
Speaker 10:Thanks so much, guys. That was amazing and, I think, really moving for a lot of us. Something that keeps striking me in a lot of the talks and with this is that we're always talking about this big theme of unlearning, and the need to almost deconstruct medicine and agriculture and our colleges and education system is something that we're working against. So for you guys, what's your vision for the education system, so that we're not just working against the system that is literally shaping our whole culture from day dot?
Speaker 1:Ooh, another rabbit hole for an hour and a half, which let's try to keep it concrete. Thank you.
Speaker 3:I'll do a concrete answer to that that's short, which is we need to move from education systems to engaged learning systems. It's a radically different experience and if you look up the definition of education versus learning, nobody will ever want to do education again. Very straightforward. Oh, thank you.
Speaker 3:It's exciting how simple the shift is. I mean, it already is happening, unfortunately. So what you guys are doing here is experiential learning really, and so you're not walking around being told what to do. You're hearing story of what other people are experiencing when they do this, and so the regenerative movement is not coming out of our education system, it's coming out of our engaged learning system, and so this is an engaged learning system, and so this is already happening. We're seeing the food movement less and less coming out of the university agronomics and more and more out of this grassroots awareness of change and shift that needs to happen for farms to survive and become thriving economic centers again. So that's a big piece of it. On this food and access, we're already doing it.
Speaker 3:But on the child education being a good example, we see this huge movement of homeschooling and everything else starting to happen around the world and I'm thinking, wow, this is really exciting. And then I go to Africa and I'm like they don't need to call it homeschooling else, because they still have engaged learning everywhere, except where Western civilizations, economics are coming into the picture, and they set up all these schools to do education. And I'm meeting all these 18 to 25 year olds in Africa who have two master's degrees in systems engineering and all these fancy terms and are completely unemployed because there's not a systems engineering job within 2,000 miles of them. And so we create great poverty and a sense of hopelessness in a system of education, because education is ultimately teaching abstract concepts, whereas what they really need is the engaged learning that they had done for tens of thousands of years in that environment, which was they knew what was relevant to their environment and that's it. So we don't necessarily have to deconstruct education, we simply just need to shift to this engaged learning process.
Speaker 1:Question in the back.
Speaker 9:Ground soar is quite a unique event and our question is are you aware of any other events in the world that are happening like this?
Speaker 1:You like the dancing yesterday? You want to visit other places?
Speaker 9:Every year it evolves and gets bigger and it seems to answer all the questions you've been asking.
Speaker 1:Other places to go to Any of you.
Speaker 3:I mean I'm impressed. This is my first day here. I missed yesterday, but I've got to say this is about the largest event I've had and I really appreciate that. It's got the spectrum again of an ICU farmer here listening to my cycle babble all the way to all of you that are already in the choir of cycle babble. So that's really exciting to see that spectrum. Because if you don't have that biodiversity of questions and perspectives, you're not going to get to your end point either. So I herald and celebrate that you guys have created a biodiverse environment for this discussion to unfold in. So that's what I see different here than most of the other events I have.
Speaker 3:I see a lot of events that are preaching to the choir and everybody gets to get in and that's not to say it's not a bad thing, because fellowship is a critical. Farming can be a very isolating experience and so to come together with a bunch of people that are like-minded can be a relief for a weekend. But what you guys have done here feels like community where it's a family, because the one thing you bet the family dinner is nobody's going to agree on anything, but you enjoy hanging out and you are enriched by the experience of being together and so keep doing the family thing, keep doing the complex community experience. It'll make you feel friction, it'll make you feel weird, it'll make you feel anxious at moments and that means you're alive and that you're human and you're in a complex environment and it will tune you back into your 12 senses to say where is my resonance in my body when I hear these things and can I trust that deeper? And it'll move you towards that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll just echo. I mean, I think, the cross-section of people who come to an event like Grantswell and I'm sorry I can't answer your question Because I was thinking I don't really You've been going to one a long time ago.
Speaker 1:Here you were, at the first or the second.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was here at the second Grantswell Because we did a preco.
Speaker 1:And then we said, oh, there's going to be a lot of good food. And you said last time there was no food and five farmers in a fire.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And a lot of smoke.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think any time you get a cross-section of people, you then get a diversity of ideas and then you get sort of this quilt of things and so there's going to be a lot to chew on and digest. I hope for all of us here in the days to come and reflect on what we've heard. So I'm sorry, I mean I think this is a strength of Grantswell, because it's like I love it. There's people who eat, there's people who farm, there's people who sell farm products. It's all a part of agriculture and we need all of these voices here, I think.
Speaker 1:So the short answer is no, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be more like this in other parts of the world. I think we have the last question over there.
Speaker 4:How you doing folks. Just a question regarding the food that our animals eat. A lot of it is genetically modified. A lot of it is sprayed with Roundup. So, from an animal perspective, how do we help their health and help to get rid of the or encounter the effects of, say, the Roundup? I know, jack, you talk about it in your podcast, about it being a big problem destroying the microbiome. We see it in horses, we see it in dairy cows, we see it in cattle, I see it in dogs, cats, you know, right across the board. I'm a vet resurgence so I'm frustrated to see every day and I don't have solutions for it.
Speaker 1:Again, try to keep it concise. This is not a rabbit hole.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know, you're absolutely right. The toxicity of animal feed is about 400 times more toxic than human feed, as far as what kind of residues of herbicides and pesticides we allow into those food chains. So it can be very toxic. We can see 1,000 parts per million of glyphosate and cattle feed and things like that, so it can be really startling how much toxicity these animals are seeing. And the answer, of course, is biodiversification again, and so returning those animals into biodiverse environments instead of relying on monoculture feed systems is ultimately the thing.
Speaker 3:And what we saw happen about 100 and 150 years ago is a divide in the farming industry where either you were a cropper or you were a rancher, and so when we split the animals away from the food, that's when things started to go downhill for everything.
Speaker 3:So fortunately, what's happening is a repollination across those subspecialties, and we're seeing a lot of people here within the audience, I'm sure, but within the regenerative movement that are starting to be able to do both. They're growing food in the context of biodiversity in the animals as well, which is allowing them not to buy the agricultural inputs of GMO feed for their animals, and they're grazing on diverse cover crops and the like, and I kind of would welcome the same movement ultimately into domesticated animals, cats and dogs. In the United States we now have 1.6. There's one case of cancer for every 1.6 dogs in our country right now, and so it's nearly 100% of dogs have cancer in the United States now because of that toxicity, that food system, and so I would like to see a rewilding of our domestic animals as well. We need to realize we have a relationship to nature that we don't have to palliate by domesticating animals in our household, and I think that would be a nice movement to see. As much as I love a dog, a wolf would be a good step probably.
Speaker 2:I got a quick answer. So, yeah, how do we do this? Well, so why not put room in its out again on phytochemically diverse pastures with no sprays on all of those plants? That's a way to start removing all of these toxic things that end up in the bodies of the animals that are a part of the human diet. I mean, I don't see any other. It's kind of like you know, I'd really like to stop being drunk every day. Oh well, then maybe you should stop drinking every day, ok, so I know it's not that simple to just flip the switch, so to speak, but honestly, if we stop applying these products, they have no route into the bodies of animals and then into our bodies.
Speaker 1:And with that, I want to ask you all to join me in a round of applause for these two amazing human beings. Thank you.
