May 5, 2022 • 34 mins
An important step in healing ourselves is taking care of our planet. When we protect our home, we nurture our communities, our loved ones, and our fellow living beings. But where do we start? In this episode, Alicia is joined by Dr. Zach Bush, a triple board-certified physician and founder of the nonprofit Farmer’s Footprint, and Ed Begley Jr., a 7-time Emmy nominated actor and lifelong environmental activist. Zach explains why it is urgent and vital that we restore our soil while Ed and Alicia share some simple steps you can take to live a more eco-conscious life. They emphasize that if we work together, we can begin to heal our planet.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
What is it really gonna take to heal ourselves, our communities,
and our planet. I'm Alicia Silverstone and this is the
real heal. Every one of us has the power to
heal our planet. When we work together and make eco
(00:26):
conscious choices, we can make a big difference. But where
do we start? What steps can we take to begin
caring for our planet our home? In this episode, I
sit down with Dr Zach Bush, a Triple Board certified
physician and founder of the nonprofit Farmer's Footprint, and At
(00:49):
Begley Jr. A seven time Emmy nominated actor and lifelong
environmental activist. We talk about actionable changes we can all
make in our everyday lives to heal our environment, our families,
and ourselves. So, without further ado, let's get in to
(01:11):
the real hell. Hi you guys. Um. I'm so excited
to have this conversation with both of you. Ed, You've
always been my eco mentor and I'm just love being
(01:33):
able to ask you so many questions over the years.
I have so much respect for what you do, So
thank you for coming, Ed, thank you for having me
Alicia and Zach. I discovered you two years ago or something,
and I'm so impressed by you. I want everyone to
go to your website and read up about everything that
(01:55):
you're doing, how you talk about health, the planet, everything.
You are so inspiring, the way you live your life.
Both of you are such inspiring people, and I just think, Zach,
that you are doing tremendous work through the through the web,
and I'm so grateful. So thank you for coming and
having this conversation with us. Glad to be with you all,
(02:17):
Glad to be living with Ed for a moment. Yeah,
thank you, Zach. So I know Ed that you have
talked about that when you first started your journey, you
didn't have a lot of money. You were not because
I think a lot of people think that making eco
choices is about being rich or having enough means to
do so. And I really want to focus in today
(02:40):
on what we can all do and how it's not
about what you have, And can you talk about that? Yeah.
I was a broken, struggling actor when I started this
environmental path back in My dad had just died and
he was he was my meal ticket, you know, he
paid a lot of my bills, what have you. I
was starting to take over those bills as I worked
a bit as an actor and a lot as a
camera assistant back then. But then Earth Day came along,
(03:03):
and I wanted to do something because my dad died
within a few days of the first Earth Day, and
he was a conservative that liked to conserve. He turn
off the lights and turn off the water. He was
the son of Irish immigrants. He lived through the Great Depression,
so I got a lot of that inspiration from him.
You know, I couldn't afford to do much. And people
come up to me today and they say, I can't
afford nine kilo watch a solo like you or a
fancy electric car like you. I go, I understand, neither
(03:26):
could I when I started. Can you afford to get
a bus pass if you could ride public transportation if
it's available near you. Can you afford to ride a bicycle?
And can you afford to change one light bulb? Many
utilities give them away? Can you afford to use baking soda,
vinegar and water instead of harsh cleansers? You know? And
on and on. I list those that incredible list that's
available today of cheap and easy stuff, picking that low
(03:47):
hanging fruit, And then I promise you, as I sit
here before you both you're going to save money and
then you can do some more, do some medium ticket items,
and one day, god willing as I got lucky and
did some big ticket items. After the team to twenty
years of saving money on the cheap stuff. That's so great.
And what would you say was the reason that you
were compelled aside from your dad being conservative? Why did
(04:11):
it matter to you to do these things? Why did
you care about changing the light bulb? Yeah, my dad
was a good influence. Boy, Scouts was a good influence.
I got to see nature up close and personal thought,
you know, it was worth preserving. But the negative, if
you will, was living in smoggy l A. We have
four times of cars in l A from nineteen seventy,
millions more people, but we have a fraction of the smog.
(04:32):
We've done a very good job of cleaning it up
and we can do that. Then the Santa Barbara oil spill,
the Cuyahoga River catching fire, but especially living in smoggy
air in l A, that was a big one. That's awesome.
And Zach, what about you? I mean, I know that
you are a doctor and you care so much about
the earth and people's health and how it's all connected.
(04:54):
How did this start for you? Why did you make
this journey? I think that you also went vegan at
some point, but I don't know if that has partly
to do with your journey or what my journey began
in unexpected places. I guess in designing chemotherapy at the
University of Virginia back in two thousand five two thousand ten,
that was a lot of my research. I was an
(05:15):
internal medicine than endochronology and metabolism. And the word metabolism
really refers to the capacity of the human body to
make energy. And as you look deeper into the topic
of energy in biologic systems, you find some fascinating microcosms
of what we see Ed talking about. Now that he
sees the pollution and dysfunction going on on the planet,
(05:37):
it turns out the same thing is happening at the
serior level. To give us epidemics of cancer, epidemics of
autoimmune disease, epidemics of metabolic disorders like diabetes, obesity, heart disease,
and the like. And so what we are learning in
the last thirty years is we've really started to untangle
metabolism and genomics. Is that We are what we breathe,
(05:58):
what we eat, what we see, what we touch. We
we are a contiguous biology with the planet. And so
when we see air pollution, yeah, you have that same
phenomenon happening at the cellular level. And it's been very obvious, perhaps,
but I think a fascinating journey for me over the
last fifteen years as I've started to realize that you
(06:18):
cannot choose to make people healthy. I I can sit
there all day in my clinic and make decisions, you know,
for one patient of time, but there's it is absolutely
possible for me to prevent or else my cure disease
if I don't start to work on the planet. But
that's how I found myself into this pathway of leaving
the university in two thousand ten and setting out with
(06:38):
a desire to really discover the opportunity to find a
science and an education platform and start to innovate in
areas of energy technologies and the like, so that we
can start to understand how not only can we clean
up the planet, we actually have the science right now
and the technolo actually opted to make the most abundant
life on the planet because we now understand carbon sydeals,
(07:00):
and so instead of demonizing c O two and all
of this, we need to understand how that is actually
the literal fuel for life on Earth, and we need
to reconnect the carbon cycle for life to reoccur. Really,
we have the opportunity to push beyond some previous thing
and do what Mother Nature does best, which is innovate.
Every time life always comes back more intelligent, more abundant,
(07:21):
more by diverse. That's going to happen again or in
a couple hundred years. We could be the co creators
with that Mother Earth as we connect those doughts. M h.
Those are such big things, and I want to get
into all of that, and I thought perhaps we could
start by saying the most simple things that we think
of that people can do to make these changes in
(07:41):
their daily lives, because and then we can get into
the we can go bigger and bigger and bigger. You know,
when I think about what are the things that affect
us that lead us to the path that you just
said that are leading us to this destruction, what are
the most critical things that we do in our daily
lives that do that? And for me, I think it's food.
I think it's the clothes that we purchase, where you
(08:03):
can make easy choices to go to your thrift store
instead of buying new clothing and instead of getting your
or go to the real reel if you want something fancy.
And if you're gonna buy new things, there are organic
and natural materials and good eco companies out there who
are doing really responsible things. So fast fashion and all
that has got to go. And if you're going to
(08:25):
use products in your home that you haven't made, there
are good responsible ones out there. I was on a
hike with my son the other day and there was
I was very disturbed because it's a beautiful hike, but
everyone had a plastic bottle in their hand, and I
was just like, what is going on? You're on a
hike in Los Angeles in nature, walking to a waterfall
(08:47):
with plastic bottles and Cheetos, Like, what's going on? And
and really hurt my heart. And so anyway, what would
you say, other than the things that I've mentioned are
the things that people can do right now that are
so easy. One of the things that you guys think
are the most important things that I haven't mentioned from
my perspective, the phenomenon of energy and health for the
(09:08):
planet is really going to come back to the energetics
of our behavior, and so the little things that we
can do is start to change our mindset from being
a consumer to being a co creator, to be in
receipt of Nature's bounty and co create with her. If
we just do the little things and don't start to
change the big thing, which is our our mindset of
(09:30):
who we are and how we collaborate with the Earth,
will still fall short of the massive transformation that we
need to make as a species. So that little switch,
how can you stop being a consumer and start being
a co creator? That's beautiful. That reminds me of the
idea that because a lot of people sort of want
the government to take care of all of this or
(09:52):
corporations to take care of this, and it's not wrong
to want that, we all need to work together. But
I think if you don't take care of it yourself
first and do what you said, have a reshift the
act of refilling your water bottle, For I'm sure for
Ed and I and you. When you're filling your bottle,
there's just such a sense of connection that you're doing
(10:13):
something responsible and kind and thoughtful and not unconsciously. And
I think that that all of those choices that we make,
all of those little choices that we make that are
conscious and good for the earth, are us being awake
and present to what this life is. And each person
has to do this on their own. They have to
(10:35):
make these choices on their own, for the sake of
their children, for the sake of the future, for the
sake of now, for good air, for good water, for
good food, or even just for their health. Yeah, I'm
so glad you're both of you remembering to talk about diet.
It's so important. That's one of the best things you
can do. Is even if you're a meat eat and
(10:55):
I'm I'm not. I've became a vegetarian back in with
the First Earth Day, I stopped eating meat, and that
I later became a vegan. I went further and enjoy that.
But that's one of the best things you can do.
But even if you're a person that likes their meat,
try one day a week is most people would suggest.
Most doctors a m a kind of typical doctors would
(11:16):
say eat more plant foods, eat your broccoli, you know,
try it just one day a week. Having a vegan
diet one day a week and if you like it,
do it to do it three and maybe one day
all seven and uh, it's one of the best things
you can do for the environment. And I like what
Zach said about the overall theme of doing this. It's fine.
And so the theme beneath what we're talking about, all
(11:37):
of us to talk about not just saving money, this
and that. The theme is being part of something extraordinary,
you know, to be an integral part of it, which
we are. We can deny that we are, but we are,
like it or not. And to move us in a
direction away from the destruction that we've been. We seem
to be on that path for so long now and
move towards the kind of change that we need to
be and we need to see, so that nature has
(12:00):
a chance to you know, revive and do well again
in spite of all that we've done. We've done a
lot of damage, but look at the way things bounce back.
We've cleaned up a lot of these horrible, horrible messages,
and we can do even more. So let's get on
that path and have that common theme for our well being.
It's not just save the spot of owls and the
snow leper to hope. We do that, but we're also
(12:22):
saving ourselves, so we're being an integral, important part of nature.
(12:42):
This brings me to the conversation of hope, which you're
both talking about. You have a quote I found, Zach, Well,
this is maybe it's not a quote, it's just about
what you guys are doing. You have a coalition of farmers, educators, doctors, scientists,
and business leaders aiming to expose the human environmental impacts
of chemical coal farming and offer a path forward through
(13:03):
regenitive agriculture practices. And that is what you founded, and
you said that you believe that we can heal. I
don't think it's too late for us to turn our
microbiome around, but we have to do it very, very quickly.
We have to do it together. I love that we're
all talking about hope, that while there are these devastating
(13:23):
things happening, there is so much hope and we can
turn it around. And this other quote I have from you.
As pharmaceutical chemicals and drugs are now the main ingredient
in our foods, it's time for the American consumer to
empower our farmers to take back our food and our
right to the health that the food should bring us
and our children. And your nonprofit is creating avenues for
(13:48):
collaborative action for all stakeholders in our global community, for
our genitive future of health for the planet and our children. Yeah, so,
regenerative agriculture is a description of a a potential. It's
not prescriptive, as you would find um with a lot
of systems like organic. If you go to the USDA
(14:09):
Organic thing, it's basically a list of thirty things you
can't do and to get that u s d A
organic certification. It doesn't actually mention anything about soil, microbiome, nutrients,
anything that's actually vital to the consumer. And so when
we start to shift towards these prescriptive regulatory environment beliefs
about food systems, we end up saying a bunch of
(14:29):
nose and we become anti and anti is a very
weak position. Ever, you don't want to be anti anything,
you want to be pro something, and so EDS pro planet,
eds practices as lifestyle is showing us a pathway towards
pro vitality. Really, and so this is what we need
(14:51):
to start to think of in the farming world, where
we need our farmers to have a whole host of
resources at their and practices at their fingertips that would
allow them to wake up every morning to think about
two things. How do I increase the amount of energy
in my soil systems and how do I increase the
amount of biodiversity within those soil systems to allow them
to produce as much as possible and to be as
(15:13):
as vital for the planet as possible. And so when
you talk about regenerative systems, it's really how much of
that carbon can get cycling from air back into soil,
back into the plant back in there. So regenerative practices
start with disturbed though soil less and maximize the amount
of respiration or breath that the soil can take. And
to do that, stopping plowing is a critical piece, which
(15:35):
is interesting because the plow is often credited with the
beginning of Western civilization. If you pick up pick up
a Western cit of book, it says it starts with
the invention of the plow. And so in the end,
we destroyed civilization with that plow by not understanding our
relationship to soil microbial life. And then we accelerated that
massively when we created herbicides and pesticides, so you stop
(15:55):
plowing and you stop spraying them the antimicrobials or the herbicides,
and very importantly, you keep the soil covered covered. Soil
always has earthworms bear. Soil bakes the earthworms out of it.
And you can do this just in a simple temperature
test in middle of Ohio ninety degree day in the summertime.
If you stick a thermometer in the soil of a
(16:16):
conventional farm that keeps all of its soil bear except
for that one row of corn that shoots for ten
thousand acres, that soil can reach a hundred degrees next
door at a regenitive farm where they don't remove all
of the organic material and instead they use a roller
crimper where they use livestock to crush down the cover
crops and they keep that armor of organic mass on
(16:38):
top of the soil. The soil temperatres always seventy two
seventy three degrees, even if it's a hundred degrees outside.
If you need an economic model for why we need
to do this, top soil remains a good one. Right
now in the United States, we're losing about two tons
of top soil per acre of farm land per year.
That's the equivalent of eleven percent of our g D
(16:59):
p our gross domestic product in this country, around seventeen
trillion dollars of that somewhere on one point nine trillion
dollars of assets of top soil being washed off of
our farms every year now. And so, if you want
an economic model of loss of energy of a of
a country, welcome to farming today. We have to fundamentally
(17:20):
change our relationship and by doing so, we will store
a future and economic future for the generations to come.
By washing that top soil recover and we can rebuild
top soil. There's a fallacy that that takes a hundred
years to build a centimeter of top soil, that we
can do that at ten x even twenty x that
kind of rate when we go to regenerative practices. Yeah,
one of the most important parts of me buying my
(17:41):
first home in nine I had two very young children,
and I wanted them to know where food came from,
that it didn't come from the Ralph's tree of the
safe Way bush, that it came from healthy soil, water, sunshine.
That's definitely the way to go, and it's very important
that people connect for their food, for their own sanity.
There's nothing more powerful than young kids that I brought
(18:04):
to my many different houses to give an eco tour,
and they get their hands in the dirt you have
them pick up and that's crawling with worms. You go,
that's healthy soil. And I've always had that because of
the practices you know, done the thousands of years with
people around the world. It's beautiful. Yeah, I love growing
my own food. And I remember coming to your house
and wandering through your beautiful garden and seeing all your
(18:25):
fruit trees, and but growing your own food and picking
it is the like you said, when children do that.
There's so many people that their kids they don't eat vegetables,
but once they start touching them and eating them off
the vine, they're just like, oh my god. It's a
powerful connection for a young person, very important. So how
are we gonna build our armies to do this? Like,
(18:46):
how does one who's going I want to only support
this kind of farming, looking for biodynamic farming, how do
I make sure that that's what's happening? And then on
a bigger scale, how are you teaching or how are
you educating or inspiring these farmers to do it differently,
because there's a study from the Sentience Institute that says
(19:07):
nine percent of all animal products in the US come
from factory farms. Like we argue over how much a
chicken can raise its wings, for God's sakes, billion dollar companies,
these huge corporations, they just fight over the stupidest little
thing because of a penny. What are you doing about this? Well,
(19:31):
we're all in it together. What can we all do?
We're all in it together. So there's a lot of
things we can do. So you know, if you start
with your backyard like Ed did, it's a very powerful tool.
The fourth largest crop that we grow in the United States,
you've got corn, soybean, wheat number four is lawn. We
grow millions and millions of acres of grass in our
(19:52):
backyards across this country, which has very little biodiversity. And
actually landowners, homeowners use more herbicide per acre than any
farmer in the world does. And so your practices in
your backyard are going to set the tone for this recovery.
And so you may not think of yourself of a farmer,
but if you have a yard, you are a steward
(20:13):
of land and the way in which you steward that
land has a huge effect on where we're at as
a planet. And so like ed, did you stop using
all the herbicized best size in your mp K, chemical
fertilizers like your your miracle grown as mentioned things like that,
and you start composting and you start using your own
carbon cycle again. So all your food waste, your lawn waste,
(20:34):
all those things start going back into a compost. You're
really looking at keeping biologic systems moving, and you want
biodiversity in there. And if you keep trying to create
a monoculture of a lawn with no weeds in an
i e. You know, dandeliance and if you let weeds
do their work, they actually don't come back the following years.
And so whenever you hear crisper or gene editing or GMO,
(20:57):
which you're really talking about, is humans starting to put
in to play products there the crop level as a
sea level, just so that we can sell more chemical product.
It doesn't do anything for the biology the planet. Doesn't
make the plant more vital, it doesn't have more nutrients,
it doesn't produce more etcetera, etcetera. And so there's a
fallacy that GMO somehow is necessary to feed the world.
(21:20):
And so we're in this very interesting race against biology
right now, where we think of ourselves as separate from
and we think of ourselves in competition with nature. And
so when you move from that consumer mechanism of I'm
a homeowner and therefore I have a lawn, and therefore
I need to buy some stuff to keep the lawn
alive to a co creator where suddenly you've got a
backyard garden and you've got your compost, and doing this
(21:42):
you are starting to participate in a cycle of life
that's so beautiful. Ed, do you want to say anything
or should I start asking you more questions? Yeah, I'd
just like to say that cycle of life is so important,
and I certainly do feel it's very very important. Zach
does do something about that there soil that's out there
(22:02):
cooking in the sun. And I agree with that that
has to be that organic matter. But I also do
respectfully disagree. I think there's a lot of CEO two
that's dangerous coming from power plants and uh, you know,
cars and what have you. So I think we need
to do both. I need to think we need to
have less bare soil and to cut back on the
excess c O two that we're putting out in such
great numbers. And we do that through not engaging in
(22:26):
these commercial agriculture practices, right absolutely. And the other stuff
we've been talking about on the show and elsewhere, you know,
riding a bike of weather and fitness permitted, taking public
transportation if it's available near you, all that, buying energy
saving thermostats that turn the thermostat down in the winter
and up in the summer. Stuff like that, because now
(22:46):
that there's so many people on the planet, we just
need to behave differently than we did even just a
hundred years ago. Yeah, and I will provide people with
links on my website for all of the books that
view that you have written about these things that make
it's so easy for you to make these changes. Um,
because there's so much that we can do, and it's
really exciting. Two things that you just said that made
(23:24):
me really excited, but also just like, what do we do? Um?
You know, I want to get you in a room
with Bill Gates? How do we do that? I Mean?
Bill Gates seems like a smart dude, so why does
he not understand this? Is it purely profit driven. He's
just like a madman trying to make trillions and trillions
of dollars or I don't think so. Has he not
(23:46):
sat down with you guys and understand what is necessary.
I've met Bill Gates and I don't think he's that
guy at all. And there Bill and Melinda Gates are
trying to give a lot of money away to causes
they feel are very important for the planet. I think
he's very well intentioned. But people just have this delusion
they deal with in a comical way, but wonderfully in
(24:07):
that movie, don't look up. They think they're gonna fix
this thing with the asteroid coming to Earth. With all this,
we can do this, and you know there isn't always
a magic technological fix. They think all these things are
gonna be wonderful. There are made by nature, entirely created
by God, things like cood zoo and hydrilla and all
these things that are natural, not GMOs, that have escaped
(24:30):
on the planet from in places zebra muscles, and we
have a hell of a time controlling them. Now you're
gonna make something in a lab that you hope you're
going to control once it's out there. You can't control
the stuff like hydrilla and kood zoo and zebra muscles
that are native to the Earth. You know, they come
from another planet and they're in the wrong place, there's
no predators for them, and things go wild. There's just
(24:51):
so much dangerous. Like I have a lot of friends
people I'm very close to, good environmentals who really believe
that nuclear power is the answer. I'm not one of them.
I say no to GMOs for the the same reason.
The downside is so down If people want to with
tight controls look at things in the lab, okay, fine
by me. But to put it out there on corn
and all that, there's so much danger involved. I'm not
(25:11):
willing to take that risk, and I hope others don't
want to take the risk to I literally think they're
doing it because they believe it's good. The amount of
farmland that he's bought and does not turn it into
bio diverse farms, keeps it running, is complete commercial farming.
He owns more farmland than anyone in our entire country.
Why I didn't know that, But he does own about acres,
(25:38):
But that's a drop in the bucket compared to our
total farming acreage. So he's gotten a lot of headlines
for that, but it's not at all a frightening number
to me or the farmers. I think we recognize that
the vast majority of farmland is controlled by farmers or
you know, unfortunately less and less farmers in more and
more large multinational companies that are buying up that farm
(26:00):
and the y is because it's a great buffer against inflation.
And so we just printed four trillion dollars in the
United States for quantitative easing during the pandemic, and that
forces a global uh push towards inflation. And the best
thing to invest in at that point when you've got
billions of dollars as a pension fund or you know
a country or a large multinational fund, is to buy
(26:23):
up farm land. So everybody's on a farm land rush
right now. And this is a crisis, I think, because
when you go to land that's now being managed by
farmers that don't own the land, they have no incentive
to do the right thing for the soil because the
landowner can make that disappear immediately. It takes about five
years for regenera practices really start to radically change the
(26:45):
bottom line for farmers, and it's exciting that it does.
You can see five x and ten x improvements in
the bottom line for farmers by going regenerative, and the
vast majority of those savings is by saving them the
inputs to the soil. The soil becomes its own source
as it regained vitality for the critical building blocks for
nutrition for the plants and beyond. And so the farmer
(27:06):
to make those right decisions has to put in some
effort and a change in psychology in those first few years.
But if they don't own the land, there's a crisis.
So I don't see it as predatory necessarily. I do
see it as an opportunity for him to witness an
economic success. If he wants his two undern eight thousand
acres to be as profitable as possible, he'll go to
a regenerative practice management and five x and ten x
(27:28):
the bottom line on that farmland. Unfortunately, that might not
be his incentive or his money makers incentives, because most
of the farmland bought by wealthy people in the United
States is actually used as a tax right off because
they expected to lose money and then suddenly five years
in the farmers making money and that's a crisis for
the landowners. So they go and sell that land out
from under the farmer because they can't have a tax
(27:50):
right off anymore. And so these are the bizarre phenomenon
that happened when we start to use farmland as something
other than food production, As we start to use as
tax shelters, or we use it as hedge on inflation,
we don't think of it. And this is again moving
back to that extractive mindset versus the co creative mindset.
So I get that all of these things are extremely nuanced,
(28:10):
but the very type of a part of myself wants
to fix this right now. And I know that's not
I know you all feel the same way, but I
just feel like, if all these really well intentioned people
who believe that GMOs are good, let's say we're going
to take out the fact that it might be because
they want to make money. Let's just give them the
(28:30):
benefit of the doubt. It's not nefarious. They truly genuinely
care about feeding people and this earth. Then how can
we all get them together in a room to discuss
these issues so that we can all collectively decide to
kick this thing in the butt and fix it. I
think the answer is economic models, you know, and so
(28:51):
that's how we're getting people to the table. At our
Farmer's Footprint. We just launched our Australia Armed Farmer's Footprint
dot org dot a UM as well as the U
S one which is Farmers Footprint dot US and we're
bringing all the stakeholders to tables because we're presenting a
really you know, pretty convincing economic incentive to say, hey,
everybody can participate in this future of food. In the
(29:14):
United States, our food systems around two trillion dollars two
trillion dollar industry is going to pivot over the next
ten twenty years. We have our farm land on life
support right now. That's where we're at with chemical farming,
and so no matter how aggressively they try to innovate technology,
and they are trying to be aggressive in the e P,
A is complicit in this. E P has now approved
three chemical and now this year five chemical GMO seeds,
(29:38):
which means a single seed can be sprayed with round
up to four DA diecambra, you know, go down the list.
And so we have to we're creating these toxic stues
to spray the land because there's so much GMO round
up resistant weeds that have sprung up as the genetics
are shared across biology. And so the ep has approved
(29:59):
three drugs and it is in the process of improving
five chemical seats. And so the complicitness of this is
because you know, there's an economic incentives that are artificially
boosted by taxpayer dollars through the Farm bill and through
the U s d A Crop insurance program. If for
you to get USDA crop insurance, you have to be
growing a commodity that they consider safe, and so you're
(30:24):
you'll get paid to go buy your your inputs for
your year as a farmer. If you promised to do
chemical farming. If you say I'm going to do regendaive farming,
they won't give you the loan. The bank won't give
you the loan because the U. S d A won't
ensure your crop if it's not under conventional or U
s d Organic management. And so this is where I
get excited about biom capital and and thinking about how
(30:46):
can we get capital to actually work for the farmer
as we can bypass these artificial stop points and we
can start to show investors that there's a huge opportunity.
If you can five x or ten x the bottom
line for farmers in five years, that is a huge,
huge economic opportunity for investors to become part of the
solution with the farmers. And in the same way, Nestley
(31:07):
is at the table because they see consumers changing, consumers
want to become part of the solution. I take my
hat off to Mark Schneider. He's the new CEO in
the last five years or so for Nestle, and Mark
is really out to to beat the band on this.
He publicly stated a few months ago that ninety percent
of the food that Nestle produces is bad for your health.
(31:28):
Nobody's ever said that in the food industry, and so
to ce CEOs of huge, multinational, multi billion dollar corporations
saying we are the problem and we are doing something
to change it. He made the pledge that by they'd
have something like fourteen million tons of regenitive supply chain
ingredients in their Nestle food products. We are all in
(31:51):
this together, and we're all going to have to have
a high amount of grace towards one another. And ultimately,
I think that we need to boil back to the
fact that your hell is your number one way in
which to vote for a healthy planet. Ed, would you
like to say anything else before we sort of wrap up. No,
I'd just like to say this has been a wonderful discussion,
(32:13):
learning a lot of things here, and Uh, I certainly
appreciate you and all that you've done for the environment
for years. I'm so happy to meet you, Zack and
hear about your wonderful work. I'm just proud to be
a friend of yours, Alicia and Uh to talk about
these things are They're important to us, you know. I mean,
there's ways that we can make the world a better
place from what we were given, and I certainly want
(32:34):
to do that for my children and grandchildren. I have both,
So I'm just proud to know you both and to
work with you these many years. Alicia, and just all
of us try to live simply so that others can
simply live. I love you so much, Ed, You're amazing,
total hero. I'm so glad people get to have you
(32:54):
in this world. Right back at you, zach Um, thank
you for being here, both of you. Thank you just
for sharing so much knowledge. And this was such an
exciting conversation for me, so inspiring and I want to
make sure that my veggy garden isn't killing the worms.
I think they're fine. I think they're fine. I see
(33:16):
them there, but I'm gonna figure that out. So this
has just been wonderful. Thank you both so much for
all your knowledge. We will provide resources for people because
you have both have so much to share and have
done so much good in this world. So I will
always be on your team fighting for you guys. Thank you,
so so, so so much, from the bottom of my heart.
(33:36):
Thank you, thanks for having us on. Thank you. To
dig deeper into this episode's topic and resources, visit the
kind life dot com. The Real Hell is an I
Heart Radio production made in partnership with Frequency Media. I'm
(33:58):
your host Alicia Silverstone from I Heart Radio. Are managing
producer is Lindsay Hoffman from Frequency Media. Michelle Corey is
our executive producer, Jordan's Rizzieri is our producer, and Moani
Leonard and Laura Boyman are our associate producers. Sydney Evans
is our dialogue editor, and Claire Bite Gary Curtis is
(34:20):
our mixer and sound designer. This podcast is available on
the I Heart Radio app, Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts,
and wherever podcasts are found.
What is it really gonna take to heal ourselves, our communities,
and our planet. I'm Alicia Silverstone and this is the
real heal. Every one of us has the power to
heal our planet. When we work together and make eco
(00:26):
conscious choices, we can make a big difference. But where
do we start? What steps can we take to begin
caring for our planet our home? In this episode, I
sit down with Dr Zach Bush, a Triple Board certified
physician and founder of the nonprofit Farmer's Footprint, and At
(00:49):
Begley Jr. A seven time Emmy nominated actor and lifelong
environmental activist. We talk about actionable changes we can all
make in our everyday lives to heal our environment, our families,
and ourselves. So, without further ado, let's get in to
(01:11):
the real hell. Hi you guys. Um. I'm so excited
to have this conversation with both of you. Ed, You've
always been my eco mentor and I'm just love being
(01:33):
able to ask you so many questions over the years.
I have so much respect for what you do, So
thank you for coming, Ed, thank you for having me
Alicia and Zach. I discovered you two years ago or something,
and I'm so impressed by you. I want everyone to
go to your website and read up about everything that
(01:55):
you're doing, how you talk about health, the planet, everything.
You are so inspiring, the way you live your life.
Both of you are such inspiring people, and I just think, Zach,
that you are doing tremendous work through the through the web,
and I'm so grateful. So thank you for coming and
having this conversation with us. Glad to be with you all,
(02:17):
Glad to be living with Ed for a moment. Yeah,
thank you, Zach. So I know Ed that you have
talked about that when you first started your journey, you
didn't have a lot of money. You were not because
I think a lot of people think that making eco
choices is about being rich or having enough means to
do so. And I really want to focus in today
(02:40):
on what we can all do and how it's not
about what you have, And can you talk about that? Yeah.
I was a broken, struggling actor when I started this
environmental path back in My dad had just died and
he was he was my meal ticket, you know, he
paid a lot of my bills, what have you. I
was starting to take over those bills as I worked
a bit as an actor and a lot as a
camera assistant back then. But then Earth Day came along,
(03:03):
and I wanted to do something because my dad died
within a few days of the first Earth Day, and
he was a conservative that liked to conserve. He turn
off the lights and turn off the water. He was
the son of Irish immigrants. He lived through the Great Depression,
so I got a lot of that inspiration from him.
You know, I couldn't afford to do much. And people
come up to me today and they say, I can't
afford nine kilo watch a solo like you or a
fancy electric car like you. I go, I understand, neither
(03:26):
could I when I started. Can you afford to get
a bus pass if you could ride public transportation if
it's available near you. Can you afford to ride a bicycle?
And can you afford to change one light bulb? Many
utilities give them away? Can you afford to use baking soda,
vinegar and water instead of harsh cleansers? You know? And
on and on. I list those that incredible list that's
available today of cheap and easy stuff, picking that low
(03:47):
hanging fruit, And then I promise you, as I sit
here before you both you're going to save money and
then you can do some more, do some medium ticket items,
and one day, god willing as I got lucky and
did some big ticket items. After the team to twenty
years of saving money on the cheap stuff. That's so great.
And what would you say was the reason that you
were compelled aside from your dad being conservative? Why did
(04:11):
it matter to you to do these things? Why did
you care about changing the light bulb? Yeah, my dad
was a good influence. Boy, Scouts was a good influence.
I got to see nature up close and personal thought,
you know, it was worth preserving. But the negative, if
you will, was living in smoggy l A. We have
four times of cars in l A from nineteen seventy,
millions more people, but we have a fraction of the smog.
(04:32):
We've done a very good job of cleaning it up
and we can do that. Then the Santa Barbara oil spill,
the Cuyahoga River catching fire, but especially living in smoggy
air in l A, that was a big one. That's awesome.
And Zach, what about you? I mean, I know that
you are a doctor and you care so much about
the earth and people's health and how it's all connected.
(04:54):
How did this start for you? Why did you make
this journey? I think that you also went vegan at
some point, but I don't know if that has partly
to do with your journey or what my journey began
in unexpected places. I guess in designing chemotherapy at the
University of Virginia back in two thousand five two thousand ten,
that was a lot of my research. I was an
(05:15):
internal medicine than endochronology and metabolism. And the word metabolism
really refers to the capacity of the human body to
make energy. And as you look deeper into the topic
of energy in biologic systems, you find some fascinating microcosms
of what we see Ed talking about. Now that he
sees the pollution and dysfunction going on on the planet,
(05:37):
it turns out the same thing is happening at the
serior level. To give us epidemics of cancer, epidemics of
autoimmune disease, epidemics of metabolic disorders like diabetes, obesity, heart disease,
and the like. And so what we are learning in
the last thirty years is we've really started to untangle
metabolism and genomics. Is that We are what we breathe,
(05:58):
what we eat, what we see, what we touch. We
we are a contiguous biology with the planet. And so
when we see air pollution, yeah, you have that same
phenomenon happening at the cellular level. And it's been very obvious, perhaps,
but I think a fascinating journey for me over the
last fifteen years as I've started to realize that you
(06:18):
cannot choose to make people healthy. I I can sit
there all day in my clinic and make decisions, you know,
for one patient of time, but there's it is absolutely
possible for me to prevent or else my cure disease
if I don't start to work on the planet. But
that's how I found myself into this pathway of leaving
the university in two thousand ten and setting out with
(06:38):
a desire to really discover the opportunity to find a
science and an education platform and start to innovate in
areas of energy technologies and the like, so that we
can start to understand how not only can we clean
up the planet, we actually have the science right now
and the technolo actually opted to make the most abundant
life on the planet because we now understand carbon sydeals,
(07:00):
and so instead of demonizing c O two and all
of this, we need to understand how that is actually
the literal fuel for life on Earth, and we need
to reconnect the carbon cycle for life to reoccur. Really,
we have the opportunity to push beyond some previous thing
and do what Mother Nature does best, which is innovate.
Every time life always comes back more intelligent, more abundant,
(07:21):
more by diverse. That's going to happen again or in
a couple hundred years. We could be the co creators
with that Mother Earth as we connect those doughts. M h.
Those are such big things, and I want to get
into all of that, and I thought perhaps we could
start by saying the most simple things that we think
of that people can do to make these changes in
(07:41):
their daily lives, because and then we can get into
the we can go bigger and bigger and bigger. You know,
when I think about what are the things that affect
us that lead us to the path that you just
said that are leading us to this destruction, what are
the most critical things that we do in our daily
lives that do that? And for me, I think it's food.
I think it's the clothes that we purchase, where you
(08:03):
can make easy choices to go to your thrift store
instead of buying new clothing and instead of getting your
or go to the real reel if you want something fancy.
And if you're gonna buy new things, there are organic
and natural materials and good eco companies out there who
are doing really responsible things. So fast fashion and all
that has got to go. And if you're going to
(08:25):
use products in your home that you haven't made, there
are good responsible ones out there. I was on a
hike with my son the other day and there was
I was very disturbed because it's a beautiful hike, but
everyone had a plastic bottle in their hand, and I
was just like, what is going on? You're on a
hike in Los Angeles in nature, walking to a waterfall
(08:47):
with plastic bottles and Cheetos, Like, what's going on? And
and really hurt my heart. And so anyway, what would
you say, other than the things that I've mentioned are
the things that people can do right now that are
so easy. One of the things that you guys think
are the most important things that I haven't mentioned from
my perspective, the phenomenon of energy and health for the
(09:08):
planet is really going to come back to the energetics
of our behavior, and so the little things that we
can do is start to change our mindset from being
a consumer to being a co creator, to be in
receipt of Nature's bounty and co create with her. If
we just do the little things and don't start to
change the big thing, which is our our mindset of
(09:30):
who we are and how we collaborate with the Earth,
will still fall short of the massive transformation that we
need to make as a species. So that little switch,
how can you stop being a consumer and start being
a co creator? That's beautiful. That reminds me of the
idea that because a lot of people sort of want
the government to take care of all of this or
(09:52):
corporations to take care of this, and it's not wrong
to want that, we all need to work together. But
I think if you don't take care of it yourself
first and do what you said, have a reshift the
act of refilling your water bottle, For I'm sure for
Ed and I and you. When you're filling your bottle,
there's just such a sense of connection that you're doing
(10:13):
something responsible and kind and thoughtful and not unconsciously. And
I think that that all of those choices that we make,
all of those little choices that we make that are
conscious and good for the earth, are us being awake
and present to what this life is. And each person
has to do this on their own. They have to
(10:35):
make these choices on their own, for the sake of
their children, for the sake of the future, for the
sake of now, for good air, for good water, for
good food, or even just for their health. Yeah, I'm
so glad you're both of you remembering to talk about diet.
It's so important. That's one of the best things you
can do. Is even if you're a meat eat and
(10:55):
I'm I'm not. I've became a vegetarian back in with
the First Earth Day, I stopped eating meat, and that
I later became a vegan. I went further and enjoy that.
But that's one of the best things you can do.
But even if you're a person that likes their meat,
try one day a week is most people would suggest.
Most doctors a m a kind of typical doctors would
(11:16):
say eat more plant foods, eat your broccoli, you know,
try it just one day a week. Having a vegan
diet one day a week and if you like it,
do it to do it three and maybe one day
all seven and uh, it's one of the best things
you can do for the environment. And I like what
Zach said about the overall theme of doing this. It's fine.
And so the theme beneath what we're talking about, all
(11:37):
of us to talk about not just saving money, this
and that. The theme is being part of something extraordinary,
you know, to be an integral part of it, which
we are. We can deny that we are, but we are,
like it or not. And to move us in a
direction away from the destruction that we've been. We seem
to be on that path for so long now and
move towards the kind of change that we need to
be and we need to see, so that nature has
(12:00):
a chance to you know, revive and do well again
in spite of all that we've done. We've done a
lot of damage, but look at the way things bounce back.
We've cleaned up a lot of these horrible, horrible messages,
and we can do even more. So let's get on
that path and have that common theme for our well being.
It's not just save the spot of owls and the
snow leper to hope. We do that, but we're also
(12:22):
saving ourselves, so we're being an integral, important part of nature.
(12:42):
This brings me to the conversation of hope, which you're
both talking about. You have a quote I found, Zach, Well,
this is maybe it's not a quote, it's just about
what you guys are doing. You have a coalition of farmers, educators, doctors, scientists,
and business leaders aiming to expose the human environmental impacts
of chemical coal farming and offer a path forward through
(13:03):
regenitive agriculture practices. And that is what you founded, and
you said that you believe that we can heal. I
don't think it's too late for us to turn our
microbiome around, but we have to do it very, very quickly.
We have to do it together. I love that we're
all talking about hope, that while there are these devastating
(13:23):
things happening, there is so much hope and we can
turn it around. And this other quote I have from you.
As pharmaceutical chemicals and drugs are now the main ingredient
in our foods, it's time for the American consumer to
empower our farmers to take back our food and our
right to the health that the food should bring us
and our children. And your nonprofit is creating avenues for
(13:48):
collaborative action for all stakeholders in our global community, for
our genitive future of health for the planet and our children. Yeah, so,
regenerative agriculture is a description of a a potential. It's
not prescriptive, as you would find um with a lot
of systems like organic. If you go to the USDA
(14:09):
Organic thing, it's basically a list of thirty things you
can't do and to get that u s d A
organic certification. It doesn't actually mention anything about soil, microbiome, nutrients,
anything that's actually vital to the consumer. And so when
we start to shift towards these prescriptive regulatory environment beliefs
about food systems, we end up saying a bunch of
(14:29):
nose and we become anti and anti is a very
weak position. Ever, you don't want to be anti anything,
you want to be pro something, and so EDS pro planet,
eds practices as lifestyle is showing us a pathway towards
pro vitality. Really, and so this is what we need
(14:51):
to start to think of in the farming world, where
we need our farmers to have a whole host of
resources at their and practices at their fingertips that would
allow them to wake up every morning to think about
two things. How do I increase the amount of energy
in my soil systems and how do I increase the
amount of biodiversity within those soil systems to allow them
to produce as much as possible and to be as
(15:13):
as vital for the planet as possible. And so when
you talk about regenerative systems, it's really how much of
that carbon can get cycling from air back into soil,
back into the plant back in there. So regenerative practices
start with disturbed though soil less and maximize the amount
of respiration or breath that the soil can take. And
to do that, stopping plowing is a critical piece, which
(15:35):
is interesting because the plow is often credited with the
beginning of Western civilization. If you pick up pick up
a Western cit of book, it says it starts with
the invention of the plow. And so in the end,
we destroyed civilization with that plow by not understanding our
relationship to soil microbial life. And then we accelerated that
massively when we created herbicides and pesticides, so you stop
(15:55):
plowing and you stop spraying them the antimicrobials or the herbicides,
and very importantly, you keep the soil covered covered. Soil
always has earthworms bear. Soil bakes the earthworms out of it.
And you can do this just in a simple temperature
test in middle of Ohio ninety degree day in the summertime.
If you stick a thermometer in the soil of a
(16:16):
conventional farm that keeps all of its soil bear except
for that one row of corn that shoots for ten
thousand acres, that soil can reach a hundred degrees next
door at a regenitive farm where they don't remove all
of the organic material and instead they use a roller
crimper where they use livestock to crush down the cover
crops and they keep that armor of organic mass on
(16:38):
top of the soil. The soil temperatres always seventy two
seventy three degrees, even if it's a hundred degrees outside.
If you need an economic model for why we need
to do this, top soil remains a good one. Right
now in the United States, we're losing about two tons
of top soil per acre of farm land per year.
That's the equivalent of eleven percent of our g D
(16:59):
p our gross domestic product in this country, around seventeen
trillion dollars of that somewhere on one point nine trillion
dollars of assets of top soil being washed off of
our farms every year now. And so, if you want
an economic model of loss of energy of a of
a country, welcome to farming today. We have to fundamentally
(17:20):
change our relationship and by doing so, we will store
a future and economic future for the generations to come.
By washing that top soil recover and we can rebuild
top soil. There's a fallacy that that takes a hundred
years to build a centimeter of top soil, that we
can do that at ten x even twenty x that
kind of rate when we go to regenerative practices. Yeah,
one of the most important parts of me buying my
(17:41):
first home in nine I had two very young children,
and I wanted them to know where food came from,
that it didn't come from the Ralph's tree of the
safe Way bush, that it came from healthy soil, water, sunshine.
That's definitely the way to go, and it's very important
that people connect for their food, for their own sanity.
There's nothing more powerful than young kids that I brought
(18:04):
to my many different houses to give an eco tour,
and they get their hands in the dirt you have
them pick up and that's crawling with worms. You go,
that's healthy soil. And I've always had that because of
the practices you know, done the thousands of years with
people around the world. It's beautiful. Yeah, I love growing
my own food. And I remember coming to your house
and wandering through your beautiful garden and seeing all your
(18:25):
fruit trees, and but growing your own food and picking
it is the like you said, when children do that.
There's so many people that their kids they don't eat vegetables,
but once they start touching them and eating them off
the vine, they're just like, oh my god. It's a
powerful connection for a young person, very important. So how
are we gonna build our armies to do this? Like,
(18:46):
how does one who's going I want to only support
this kind of farming, looking for biodynamic farming, how do
I make sure that that's what's happening? And then on
a bigger scale, how are you teaching or how are
you educating or inspiring these farmers to do it differently,
because there's a study from the Sentience Institute that says
(19:07):
nine percent of all animal products in the US come
from factory farms. Like we argue over how much a
chicken can raise its wings, for God's sakes, billion dollar companies,
these huge corporations, they just fight over the stupidest little
thing because of a penny. What are you doing about this? Well,
(19:31):
we're all in it together. What can we all do?
We're all in it together. So there's a lot of
things we can do. So you know, if you start
with your backyard like Ed did, it's a very powerful tool.
The fourth largest crop that we grow in the United States,
you've got corn, soybean, wheat number four is lawn. We
grow millions and millions of acres of grass in our
(19:52):
backyards across this country, which has very little biodiversity. And
actually landowners, homeowners use more herbicide per acre than any
farmer in the world does. And so your practices in
your backyard are going to set the tone for this recovery.
And so you may not think of yourself of a farmer,
but if you have a yard, you are a steward
(20:13):
of land and the way in which you steward that
land has a huge effect on where we're at as
a planet. And so like ed, did you stop using
all the herbicized best size in your mp K, chemical
fertilizers like your your miracle grown as mentioned things like that,
and you start composting and you start using your own
carbon cycle again. So all your food waste, your lawn waste,
(20:34):
all those things start going back into a compost. You're
really looking at keeping biologic systems moving, and you want
biodiversity in there. And if you keep trying to create
a monoculture of a lawn with no weeds in an
i e. You know, dandeliance and if you let weeds
do their work, they actually don't come back the following years.
And so whenever you hear crisper or gene editing or GMO,
(20:57):
which you're really talking about, is humans starting to put
in to play products there the crop level as a
sea level, just so that we can sell more chemical product.
It doesn't do anything for the biology the planet. Doesn't
make the plant more vital, it doesn't have more nutrients,
it doesn't produce more etcetera, etcetera. And so there's a
fallacy that GMO somehow is necessary to feed the world.
(21:20):
And so we're in this very interesting race against biology
right now, where we think of ourselves as separate from
and we think of ourselves in competition with nature. And
so when you move from that consumer mechanism of I'm
a homeowner and therefore I have a lawn, and therefore
I need to buy some stuff to keep the lawn
alive to a co creator where suddenly you've got a
backyard garden and you've got your compost, and doing this
(21:42):
you are starting to participate in a cycle of life
that's so beautiful. Ed, do you want to say anything
or should I start asking you more questions? Yeah, I'd
just like to say that cycle of life is so important,
and I certainly do feel it's very very important. Zach
does do something about that there soil that's out there
(22:02):
cooking in the sun. And I agree with that that
has to be that organic matter. But I also do
respectfully disagree. I think there's a lot of CEO two
that's dangerous coming from power plants and uh, you know,
cars and what have you. So I think we need
to do both. I need to think we need to
have less bare soil and to cut back on the
excess c O two that we're putting out in such
great numbers. And we do that through not engaging in
(22:26):
these commercial agriculture practices, right absolutely. And the other stuff
we've been talking about on the show and elsewhere, you know,
riding a bike of weather and fitness permitted, taking public
transportation if it's available near you, all that, buying energy
saving thermostats that turn the thermostat down in the winter
and up in the summer. Stuff like that, because now
(22:46):
that there's so many people on the planet, we just
need to behave differently than we did even just a
hundred years ago. Yeah, and I will provide people with
links on my website for all of the books that
view that you have written about these things that make
it's so easy for you to make these changes. Um,
because there's so much that we can do, and it's
really exciting. Two things that you just said that made
(23:24):
me really excited, but also just like, what do we do? Um?
You know, I want to get you in a room
with Bill Gates? How do we do that? I Mean?
Bill Gates seems like a smart dude, so why does
he not understand this? Is it purely profit driven. He's
just like a madman trying to make trillions and trillions
of dollars or I don't think so. Has he not
(23:46):
sat down with you guys and understand what is necessary.
I've met Bill Gates and I don't think he's that
guy at all. And there Bill and Melinda Gates are
trying to give a lot of money away to causes
they feel are very important for the planet. I think
he's very well intentioned. But people just have this delusion
they deal with in a comical way, but wonderfully in
(24:07):
that movie, don't look up. They think they're gonna fix
this thing with the asteroid coming to Earth. With all this,
we can do this, and you know there isn't always
a magic technological fix. They think all these things are
gonna be wonderful. There are made by nature, entirely created
by God, things like cood zoo and hydrilla and all
these things that are natural, not GMOs, that have escaped
(24:30):
on the planet from in places zebra muscles, and we
have a hell of a time controlling them. Now you're
gonna make something in a lab that you hope you're
going to control once it's out there. You can't control
the stuff like hydrilla and kood zoo and zebra muscles
that are native to the Earth. You know, they come
from another planet and they're in the wrong place, there's
no predators for them, and things go wild. There's just
(24:51):
so much dangerous. Like I have a lot of friends
people I'm very close to, good environmentals who really believe
that nuclear power is the answer. I'm not one of them.
I say no to GMOs for the the same reason.
The downside is so down If people want to with
tight controls look at things in the lab, okay, fine
by me. But to put it out there on corn
and all that, there's so much danger involved. I'm not
(25:11):
willing to take that risk, and I hope others don't
want to take the risk to I literally think they're
doing it because they believe it's good. The amount of
farmland that he's bought and does not turn it into
bio diverse farms, keeps it running, is complete commercial farming.
He owns more farmland than anyone in our entire country.
Why I didn't know that, But he does own about acres,
(25:38):
But that's a drop in the bucket compared to our
total farming acreage. So he's gotten a lot of headlines
for that, but it's not at all a frightening number
to me or the farmers. I think we recognize that
the vast majority of farmland is controlled by farmers or
you know, unfortunately less and less farmers in more and
more large multinational companies that are buying up that farm
(26:00):
and the y is because it's a great buffer against inflation.
And so we just printed four trillion dollars in the
United States for quantitative easing during the pandemic, and that
forces a global uh push towards inflation. And the best
thing to invest in at that point when you've got
billions of dollars as a pension fund or you know
a country or a large multinational fund, is to buy
(26:23):
up farm land. So everybody's on a farm land rush
right now. And this is a crisis, I think, because
when you go to land that's now being managed by
farmers that don't own the land, they have no incentive
to do the right thing for the soil because the
landowner can make that disappear immediately. It takes about five
years for regenera practices really start to radically change the
(26:45):
bottom line for farmers, and it's exciting that it does.
You can see five x and ten x improvements in
the bottom line for farmers by going regenerative, and the
vast majority of those savings is by saving them the
inputs to the soil. The soil becomes its own source
as it regained vitality for the critical building blocks for
nutrition for the plants and beyond. And so the farmer
(27:06):
to make those right decisions has to put in some
effort and a change in psychology in those first few years.
But if they don't own the land, there's a crisis.
So I don't see it as predatory necessarily. I do
see it as an opportunity for him to witness an
economic success. If he wants his two undern eight thousand
acres to be as profitable as possible, he'll go to
a regenerative practice management and five x and ten x
(27:28):
the bottom line on that farmland. Unfortunately, that might not
be his incentive or his money makers incentives, because most
of the farmland bought by wealthy people in the United
States is actually used as a tax right off because
they expected to lose money and then suddenly five years
in the farmers making money and that's a crisis for
the landowners. So they go and sell that land out
from under the farmer because they can't have a tax
(27:50):
right off anymore. And so these are the bizarre phenomenon
that happened when we start to use farmland as something
other than food production, As we start to use as
tax shelters, or we use it as hedge on inflation,
we don't think of it. And this is again moving
back to that extractive mindset versus the co creative mindset.
So I get that all of these things are extremely nuanced,
(28:10):
but the very type of a part of myself wants
to fix this right now. And I know that's not
I know you all feel the same way, but I
just feel like, if all these really well intentioned people
who believe that GMOs are good, let's say we're going
to take out the fact that it might be because
they want to make money. Let's just give them the
(28:30):
benefit of the doubt. It's not nefarious. They truly genuinely
care about feeding people and this earth. Then how can
we all get them together in a room to discuss
these issues so that we can all collectively decide to
kick this thing in the butt and fix it. I
think the answer is economic models, you know, and so
(28:51):
that's how we're getting people to the table. At our
Farmer's Footprint. We just launched our Australia Armed Farmer's Footprint
dot org dot a UM as well as the U
S one which is Farmers Footprint dot US and we're
bringing all the stakeholders to tables because we're presenting a
really you know, pretty convincing economic incentive to say, hey,
everybody can participate in this future of food. In the
(29:14):
United States, our food systems around two trillion dollars two
trillion dollar industry is going to pivot over the next
ten twenty years. We have our farm land on life
support right now. That's where we're at with chemical farming,
and so no matter how aggressively they try to innovate technology,
and they are trying to be aggressive in the e P,
A is complicit in this. E P has now approved
three chemical and now this year five chemical GMO seeds,
(29:38):
which means a single seed can be sprayed with round
up to four DA diecambra, you know, go down the list.
And so we have to we're creating these toxic stues
to spray the land because there's so much GMO round
up resistant weeds that have sprung up as the genetics
are shared across biology. And so the ep has approved
(29:59):
three drugs and it is in the process of improving
five chemical seats. And so the complicitness of this is
because you know, there's an economic incentives that are artificially
boosted by taxpayer dollars through the Farm bill and through
the U s d A Crop insurance program. If for
you to get USDA crop insurance, you have to be
growing a commodity that they consider safe, and so you're
(30:24):
you'll get paid to go buy your your inputs for
your year as a farmer. If you promised to do
chemical farming. If you say I'm going to do regendaive farming,
they won't give you the loan. The bank won't give
you the loan because the U. S d A won't
ensure your crop if it's not under conventional or U
s d Organic management. And so this is where I
get excited about biom capital and and thinking about how
(30:46):
can we get capital to actually work for the farmer
as we can bypass these artificial stop points and we
can start to show investors that there's a huge opportunity.
If you can five x or ten x the bottom
line for farmers in five years, that is a huge,
huge economic opportunity for investors to become part of the
solution with the farmers. And in the same way, Nestley
(31:07):
is at the table because they see consumers changing, consumers
want to become part of the solution. I take my
hat off to Mark Schneider. He's the new CEO in
the last five years or so for Nestle, and Mark
is really out to to beat the band on this.
He publicly stated a few months ago that ninety percent
of the food that Nestle produces is bad for your health.
(31:28):
Nobody's ever said that in the food industry, and so
to ce CEOs of huge, multinational, multi billion dollar corporations
saying we are the problem and we are doing something
to change it. He made the pledge that by they'd
have something like fourteen million tons of regenitive supply chain
ingredients in their Nestle food products. We are all in
(31:51):
this together, and we're all going to have to have
a high amount of grace towards one another. And ultimately,
I think that we need to boil back to the
fact that your hell is your number one way in
which to vote for a healthy planet. Ed, would you
like to say anything else before we sort of wrap up. No,
I'd just like to say this has been a wonderful discussion,
(32:13):
learning a lot of things here, and Uh, I certainly
appreciate you and all that you've done for the environment
for years. I'm so happy to meet you, Zack and
hear about your wonderful work. I'm just proud to be
a friend of yours, Alicia and Uh to talk about
these things are They're important to us, you know. I mean,
there's ways that we can make the world a better
place from what we were given, and I certainly want
(32:34):
to do that for my children and grandchildren. I have both,
So I'm just proud to know you both and to
work with you these many years. Alicia, and just all
of us try to live simply so that others can
simply live. I love you so much, Ed, You're amazing,
total hero. I'm so glad people get to have you
(32:54):
in this world. Right back at you, zach Um, thank
you for being here, both of you. Thank you just
for sharing so much knowledge. And this was such an
exciting conversation for me, so inspiring and I want to
make sure that my veggy garden isn't killing the worms.
I think they're fine. I think they're fine. I see
(33:16):
them there, but I'm gonna figure that out. So this
has just been wonderful. Thank you both so much for
all your knowledge. We will provide resources for people because
you have both have so much to share and have
done so much good in this world. So I will
always be on your team fighting for you guys. Thank you,
so so, so so much, from the bottom of my heart.
(33:36):
Thank you, thanks for having us on. Thank you. To
dig deeper into this episode's topic and resources, visit the
kind life dot com. The Real Hell is an I
Heart Radio production made in partnership with Frequency Media. I'm
(33:58):
your host Alicia Silverstone from I Heart Radio. Are managing
producer is Lindsay Hoffman from Frequency Media. Michelle Corey is
our executive producer, Jordan's Rizzieri is our producer, and Moani
Leonard and Laura Boyman are our associate producers. Sydney Evans
is our dialogue editor, and Claire Bite Gary Curtis is
(34:20):
our mixer and sound designer. This podcast is available on
the I Heart Radio app, Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts,
and wherever podcasts are found.
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