Fixing Our Dirt

We talk soil cultivation, ecology, and food systems with help from Andy of The Poor Prole Almanac.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hmm, it's soil Tom. Hello, welcome to it could happen
here we're talking about we're talking about dirt today, big big,
big dirt fans here. We love we love dirt, we
love soil. Um. And to help us talk about soil, dirt, ecology, growing,

(00:24):
for forging all of this kind of stuff, we have
Andy from the Poor Pearl's Almanac podcast about you know
what to do after you know, stuff kind of crumbles
away slowly, kind of kind of like kind of like
our podcast. Um. And we're not like our soil hopefully.
Well I got some bad news for you there. Some

(00:47):
of us are not great at cultivating soil, which is
what we are talking about today is how to avoid
getting a lot of void, Like, how can we help
help against our soil just blowing away? Um? Yeah, that
is that is that is our discussion. I I wrapped
up like a week of research on California's specific climate

(01:07):
and drought and what all the farmers are doing. Um,
and a lot of their soil is blowing away and
so far their solution to that is just spray more
water on it, which the problem is there's not tons
of water. Um. So let's talk about dirt. Let's talk
about soil. I will hand it over to the residents.
Soy boy, the soil expert here, because I don't know

(01:30):
what I'm talking about with dirt. My puns are getting famous,
I know I have. That was that was just that
I was just ripping, ripping off of a title of
one of his episodes. So that's not original. Blame him
for the pond. Sorry, I do that a lot. So
in terms of building soil, there's it's really a basic

(01:52):
idea of how to do it, and it generally comes
down to understanding what a soil needs and how to
let the soil build through rest. And generally speaking, when
we plant our annual crops, what happens is you put
your tomato plants in the ground, whatever it might be.
You've got a great harvest, you let them die, clear
them out, and then the next year, maybe you throw

(02:14):
some more compost on it, or maybe you're like, I
just don't want time, I won't do it, and you'll
grow and you might have a pretty decent crop again,
and then usually by like the third year, you start
to notice that your plants just aren't doing as well,
Like all the nutrients and the minerals have started to
get taken out of the soil, so you can either
continuously add new material to it which comes from somewhere.

(02:35):
Doesn't seem very sustainable. Yeah, it's absolutely not sustainable. And
the alternative is to think about how can I build
up that soil without doing that, And there's a couple
of different ways we can do that. The soil can
get built from things like cover crops, so we can
add cover crops generally things like nitrogen fixing plants, clovers,

(02:57):
hairy vetch, and a number of others that we can
used to help fix nitrogen into the soil, or we
can add other things to add biomass. So certain grasses
and things like that can be planted and they'll mind
deep into the soil to pull up nutrients when they
die off, or you can cut them down they start
breaking down, they return those nutrients back, but they're on

(03:17):
the top soil now, So that's another way we can
do it. Alternatively, if we're talking about a little bit
more land, you can take advantage of using animals so chickens, rabbits,
cheap cows, whatever it might be, reintroduce nutrients back into
the soil through things like rotational grazing, and there's a

(03:37):
you know that that's a whole other subject of you know,
how different methods are better or worse for fixing nitrogen
and all the other nutrients back into the soil. And um,
we can talk about it. I don't know if you
want to spend an hour talking about it. I assume
that that definitely depends on the scale of your operation.
I would assume absolutely. And you can do that on

(03:58):
a smaller scale, not necessarily cows, but like chickens. Chickens
can be run through chicken tractors, which can be as
small as you know, three ft by six ft. And
we were making yeah, we were making some fertilizer a
few months ago and basically we raked up well I did.
I I watched as people did this because I was lazy.

(04:20):
I watched people just rake up tons of sheep shit um,
because there we have there's a little sheep set up. Um.
And they were just raking up all the ship and
putting into a pile of dirt. And now it's been
like a it's been like a month or two, and
we should have some okay fertilizer by now, which we

(04:40):
can you know, use however we see fit. But chickens, chickens,
chickens as well not not everyone probably has sheep or
access to sheep um, but chickens are surprisingly easy to get. Yeah,
and depending on the city or in h you can
live in pretty dense places and still legally have chickens.
You might have to get comfortable with the idea of

(05:01):
slaughtering a rooster, but other than that, you know, there's
it's funny because what you'll see is like in the
early spring, everyone gets chickens and then by like July
u on on Craigslist or Facebook or Instagram, everyone's like,
free rooster to good home because they can't slaughter themselves. Yeah,

(05:23):
I've had I've had to watch a few roosters get
the get the old old acts. There was there was
this one rooster that would always wake up as we
were all going to bed. We would have like we
have like a movie night um, and we're like going
to bed at four am, and that's when the rooster starts.
We're like no, we're trying to sleep, and we're like

(05:43):
we need to kill that rooster. It's only time one
bad day to be like I cannot listen to that
sound again at least at least it went to some
good use. Yeah. Anyway back to dirt. Yeah, let's see
where were were talking talking about reintroducing stuff via you know,
chemical means I mean, or or just using animals and stuff,

(06:06):
or or rotating plants. Yeah. So there's a bunch of
different ways you can do it, and obviously it's all
defined by what your site needs. You know, the way
we're talking at this point has been mostly about like,
you already have a garden and that soil needs to
be amended to improve it. But if you're working with,
say a site that has almost no top soil. So

(06:27):
for example, a friend of mine out in California lives
near a highway and they had scraped all the top
soil around the highway to build up the highway. So
now there's no top soil, it's just garbage. So how
do you build that soil up? And there's a bunch
of different ways we can do that, whether it's through
taking advantage of free resources like um mulch. Like if

(06:49):
you see a tree getting cut down and they chip
it all up, those guys have to pay to get
rid of it most of the time, or they get
paid just enough to cover their gas. So if you
see it down the street and say, hey, you want
to drop it off in my house, they'll happily do it. Yeah.
We we just found out there is this business in
Portland that you can email them to do a chip
drop where they take all of their mulchion wood chips

(07:11):
and drop them off in your driveway and it's completely
free you you you you don't need to pay for it.
You can just schedule them to drop it off anywhere.
And a short aside, we also found out that they
don't require address verification, so you can do this as
a prank. Um. You can find out where the mayor lives.
Um or where I don't know a particularly bad person lives.

(07:32):
Let's say he wears armor and he brutalizes people and
threatens them with guns while having a badge. You can
find out if you know where it lives, you can
just deliver tons of wood chips right right on this driveway. Um.
And and they have a rule on their website is
once a delivery has been initiated, it's like once the
truck leaves you know, their office, it cannot be stopped.

(07:52):
There's no way, there's no way preventing it, And they
don't contact the house beforehand, no way preventing it. Just
a random, random wood chip drop anywhere in any driveway.
It's a magical system. But you can also just use
this for you know, getting wood chips to help grow things. Yeah,
and we'll just such an underrated medium. It's like really
good for like water retention and helping soil not dry

(08:13):
out too fast. It's it's not just like aesthetically nice
looking and accessible. It's also like really good for the plants.
So I'll add two caveats to that, And the first
is that it's really important to know what species you're
dealing with that are the woodchips, because certain species have
chemicals on them that will reduce growth or stop it completely.

(08:34):
So like black walnuts are really well known on the
East Coast as having what's called juglone, And there's a
bunch of different species that again are probably unique to
where you live that you should just be aware of.
And the second one is that mulch and wood chips
are fantastic for your garden. However, the one drawback is
that for the wood chips to break down, they actually

(08:57):
utilize a lot of the nitrogen in the soil. So
that's just so you may have a bit of a
nitrogen problem or some kind of nitrogen fixing, So it
would be more important to think about cover crops and
either adding fresh compost or whatever it might be help
offset some of that nitrogen absorption. So so it's not
it's a great resource. It's just not perfect. You just

(09:18):
have to be aware of the limitations. I would like
to touch on why we're in a bit of a pickle,
like what what what what have we done agriculturally to

(09:41):
kind of make our soil so unfragile? Like what what
did we do wrong? Um on? Like even on like
a larger scale, and how how might someone like me
who just has a small set up, you know, not
make the same mistakes in my own personal garden. Sure,
so the beginning of the food system becoming what it

(10:01):
is today really started with oil. Access to things like
petrochemicals allowed us to start rethinking about how we grew
food and forgetting about traditional methods pummarily things like using
the newer I mean you think about it, You eat,
all the nutrients go out the sewer and then they

(10:23):
never go back into the soil. And we're constantly taking
from the same soils year after year, and the only
way we continue to produce is because we're dumping chemicals
and forcing the soil, which is just a medium at
this point, just dirt. It's not soil, and we're just
making it grow food because we're adding the chemicals the
plants need. But we've destroyed things like the bacterial community,

(10:44):
the fungag community, all these different things that are so
crucial for our food systems to be resilient in terms
of how can we move forward. Building that soil is
super important and understanding these cycles of where our food
comes from. The biggest challenge really is that we're trying
to create ethical food systems under an inethical economic model. Sure, so,

(11:08):
like you'll see, like perma culture is like a really
big thing today and for a lot of good reasons
because it challenges that methodology. However, because of things like capitalism,
we can't really have an honest conversation about the fact
that a lot of people will tell you can make
money doing perma culture, and you some people do, but

(11:28):
it's not it's not really what people think, Like there's
no way to ethically grow food and not have the
problems of yeah, you're you're facing or competing with somebody
that doesn't have any ethical guidelines or framework that you
have to compete with. And I mean there's plenty of
things we can say that there are problems with perman culture,

(11:50):
and if you want, we can talk about that further.
But this is the primary reason why we can't really
fundamentally rethink our food system until things either fall apart
or capitalism no longer exists, or there are major subsidies
for these alternatives, whatever it might be. Yeah, let's see,
Like is even something like would you even say, just

(12:13):
like someone buying pre made fertilizers should be avoided in
that case, Like would you would you rather you know,
someone trying to make it ourselves? And like what's cheaper
you know, like is just buying fertilizer or cheaper than
I would to actually make it yourself. There's another kind
of problem with these types of things that it turns out,
you know, the way to make things better might cost
some people more money, you know than people who don't

(12:33):
really have as many resources, you know, just like a
regular person who's trying to do this, you know, they
don't have as much money, and would would just buying
pre made chemicals be you know, easier and cheaper than
doing work to kind of build it up more like
ute unquote naturally, I mean obviously, I think under capitalism,
anything that's efficient in terms of time and um, taking

(12:55):
advantage of things like scalability, which you know, mining nutrients
is always going to be more efficient when you're doing
it on a massive global scale, Like you really can't
compete dollar for dollar. And that's at least with what
I do with the poor pros almanac. We don't really
focus on that and instead say this is how things
should be, and how do we do that and when

(13:18):
do we need to start doing that if we know
that what exists today isn't sustainable and that ultimately this
is gonna fall apart in some capacity. Yeah, you talked
more about like trees specifically, and I would love to
love to hear more about that, you know, outside of
just you know, making your own like edible garden, doing
doing other kind of ecology related related work. Sure, so

(13:42):
trees have you know, so many benefits outside of the
fact that they can produce food. Um, we could look
at things like how they can manage a landscape and
reduce temperature extremes the way they can maintain soil quality
because of UM reducing things like runoff from major storms,
which are happening more and more frequently. Further, like I said,

(14:05):
they do produce food, and they sometimes they produce food
for us, sometimes they produce food for our livestock. Um. Additionally,
there's a process called silvil pasture, which is essentially when
you think of a farm, you think of a cow
walking around in a field. Instead that cows walking around
and a managed forest and the forest floor gets enough

(14:27):
sunlight to grow grass, so you're getting the benefits of
the grass as well as the trees. And you can
either be using those trees for lumber or for food
crops or whatever it might be, and you're getting the
best of both worlds. And in a lot of ways,
the civil pasture system more accurately represents the way the
landscape had been managed, especially here in the northeast and

(14:48):
generally the East coast by indigenous people. Um. You know,
they weren't using cows, they were doing prescribed burns and
things like that. But those environments are actually better for
things like a deer, which like like to exist on
like the margins of forests where they're getting the best
of both worlds. So that was how they managed a
wild Essentially they're wild grazing the native species. Yeah. We

(15:13):
just I'm just trying to think there's like we we
don't really have anything like that on a on a
large scale anymore. We've we've just jumped right into like
the the field and pasture thing. Yeah, I mean, you
think about it, it it makes sense that we haven't because
of the fact that to do that requires individuality. In
terms of how we manage a landscape. You can't run

(15:35):
a machine through you sbo pasture. You can't just make
like a template and apply to every situation. Everything is
much more unique based on their individual environment and ecosystem. Yeah,
and then it becomes less efficient to manage in terms
of how we manage things as a successional thing where
we have you go through the field and you seat
it with a giant machine, because you can do it

(15:56):
faster that way, you can add whatever amendments you need
more quickly. When it's just a flat piece of land
with nothing in the way, so on and so on.
It's just it doesn't It goes right in the face
of how we think of efficiency despite the fact through
it's diversity, it's more resilient to what's coming in terms
of climate change, especially the logs run. Yeah. Um, in

(16:17):
the last episode we talked a bit about grilling gardening.
Can this like intersect with with this idea of like
growing in the forest? Um? Is there? You know? I
assume there's like a decent cross over there. Absolutely. So
generally speaking, a lot of people that are into silvil
pasture are also thinking about things like tree crops. And
one of the things that I really focus on is

(16:38):
thinking about foods that we don't traditionally think of as foods,
or at least not as like staple crops. So like
while people might be familiar with kind of the odd
fruits like per simmons, you might know what a persimmon is.
You might have one or two, or maybe make per
simmon bread. That's not usually a large part of anyone's diet, no,
And that's like, that's the challenge that we really have

(16:59):
is while people like to incorporate these types of things
in permaculture into you know, how they think about their
relationship with the environment, Like nobody's giving up their toast
in the morning and that's you know, a third of
your diet or whatever it might be, and that's where
we need to fundamentally shift how we think about food.
So you're saying that we need to change in order
to address these large systemic issues that have caused many problems.

(17:23):
We need to change the way we extract resources from
the earth and maybe reevaluate how much we do. So yeah,
I mean, you know, it's it's no small feet, is
what I'm saying. I know, I'm just saying, like, you know,
that's the this specific thing around like food and diet
is the same route problem we have with climate change

(17:43):
on a larger scale of like just doing you know,
progress for progress's sake without realizing that this is not
a sustainable way to do things. And infinite growing and
like infinite expansion, maybe it is a bad idea and
maybe it has some consequence. Who has some costs? Who
would have thought that infinite growth on a finite planet

(18:03):
wasn't sustainable? Oops? Yeah, The point that I'm really trying
to drive home is that we really need to rethink
what food looks like and it has to be in

(18:26):
a meaningful way that it can't just be those odds
and ends. And that the thing I think people forget
is that food is a huge component of our culture
and our identity. Absolutely think about food and identity. The
reason why our identity is surrounded around food is because
food is the byproduct of the environment that we live in.
And it's you know, for it's been a couple of generations.

(18:46):
And we went from the reason why Italians eat x
y z s because that's what grows there. Two I
eat this because my family does, but I don't know why.
And that's the way those things relate to one another
is have been completely lost, and we need to figure
out how to do that again. Can you point to
any examples of these things you're talking about of like

(19:08):
you know, of systems existing now or in the past
that of kind of shown these methods of viewing food
and viewing you know, growing and soil cultivation, so like
any indigenous practice. And like we say indigenous, and we
usually mean like North America or South America or Australia.

(19:28):
But even if you look across Europe, you know, before
capitalism kind of got its clause into the rest of
Europe or all of Europe, like there were plenty of
indigenous practices and in some places they continue and the
way that people lived um reflected the needs of their

(19:49):
ecology and how people could relate to that ecology. The
reason why Nordic countries have high amounts of meat in
their diet is because of what grows there and what
how they can utilize what grows there to feed themselves
through animals and things like that. Hmm, yeah, I mean
that is that is generally what we we hear is
you know, look at the various indigenous methods of growing

(20:13):
um and how they how they fed people in their
media area, and thinking like, how can we take those
similar ideas and scale it up? Because I mean, they
weren't growing food for seven billion people. But I know,
like we grow way too much food for what for
many people, maybe not too much food, just we distribute
it in a very unefficient way because we don't do
it for what we need. We do it for profits,

(20:33):
and like we we we throw away so much food
that we grow as you know, globally UM. But I
you know, when I think of these more like older
methods of growing food, it's it's harder for me to
picture that, you know, feeding an entire city, right, And
I don't know what the solution is here. This isn't
really the thing I focus on a lot. But is
there a way to kind of scale up these like

(20:54):
smaller scale things that you know, people can do in
their own yards on any kind of mass level or
is that just kind of rely back on the same thing.
We've need to like re reevaluate how much we consume
and how we consume it. So I think there's a
little bit of both. I think we do need to
reevaluate what we're consuming and the volume that we're consuming,
as well as um, you know, the the waste specifically

(21:15):
in terms of those two things that we tend to
lose a lot of food that otherwise is useful um.
But also there is a lot of opportunity and wild
places like maybe New York City because of the development
around the city, might not there might not be any
way possible to grow food like within the metropolitan or

(21:35):
even the region. We know that, like, and this is
something I probably should have checked before the staff, But
it's something like there's four acres of arable land for
every person on Earth, and four acres is like that's plenty,
that's plenty, That's absolutely plenty. UM. But like, one of
the things that's really important is to start thinking about

(21:58):
how we can decentralize these systems in order to have
those clusters of places where those things are more um
capable of growing and handling the production that's necessary. And
so maybe rethink about what what urbanization really should be
and what it should look like. And you know, in
the future, while things might seem like, well, you can't

(22:19):
ask people to leave New York City as climate change
worsens in our food systems start to fall apart, that
might be a much easier conversation to have, while today
that seems kind of radical. Yeah, and at the very least,
maybe we should maybe we shouldn't make any more New
York cities absolutely. Um, is there any like resources online
that you can point to that talks more about these

(22:41):
types of topics, or like books or like anything in
this general was growing on the growing side of things
and then like the more like ecology side of things.
So Tom Wessels has this really great book called The
Myth of Progress, which talks about complex system science and
essentially what that is is decentralization and um, the benefits
of having diversity within a community and in fact that

(23:03):
any any power that's you know, centered in one specific
place ends up having imbalances and has less resiliency, and
that plays until it's focused around ecology. But I think
it's really helpful, especially if you're an anarchist. I think
you can through the lens. Yeah. Yeah, so that that's
definitely one place to look in terms of like growing food.

(23:25):
I don't know if there's really any books that really
address it from this perspective of climate change and decentralization,
but there's plenty of work online about silver pasture and
you know, food force, any of these types of things.
YouTube has like a vast array of resources, and of
course if you're interested in this kind of stuff, you
can come check us out on our podcast or proslamanac

(23:48):
we Uh, the entire show is pretty much around this
subject matter, So you want to learn more about it
and check it out. Yeah, absolutely definitely. UM if this
specific topic, you have a wonderful catalog of stuff discussing this.
UM and I just want to thank you they and
thank you so much for coming on this show to
kind of talk about these topics. You know, me and

(24:10):
Robert and you know Chris, we more of like a
background and like history and that kind of thing. We
are we are not super avid to plant people like
we're trying to start growing more stuff to our ourselves personally.
But I'm definitely not educated to talk on this, and
I'm very very happy that you were able to when
you're generous with your time and knowledge. So thank you,

(24:30):
thank you so much. Yeah, definitely check out their show
on you know, wherever you get your podcasts, and you
can follow the show Twitter, on Instagram at cool zone
Media and happen here pod um any any any final
final notes? Grow some food? Yeah, grow some food. Grow
some food. That is one if I've I've asked that

(24:53):
question a lot and that answer has come up many times.
Just growth growth food. Okay, you go grow here. It
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For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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(25:15):
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