Urban Farming as a Path to Sustainability with Greg Peterson

Episode Transcript
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Parker Condit (00:00):
Hey everyone, welcome to Exploring Health
Macro to Micro.
I'm your host, parker Condit.
In this show, I interviewhealth and wellness experts
around topics like sleep,exercise, nutrition, mental
health, stress management andmuch more.
So by the end of each episode,you'll have concrete, tangible
advice that you can startimplementing today to start
living a healthier life, eitherfor yourself or for your loved

(00:21):
ones.
And that's the micro side ofthe show.
The macro side of the show isdiscussing larger systemic
issues that contribute to healthoutcomes.
An example of that is the factthat most major cities only have
a three-day supply of food atany given time, which is an
incredibly vulnerable positionto be in societally.
So, for a variety of reasons, ashift towards regenerative

(00:41):
farming, urban farming andindividuals growing their own
food is a solution that providesresilience with much better
long-term sustainability.
This, along with soil quality,are two topics that I've become
much more interested in over thepast few months.
We all know that eatingnutritious food is very
important, but with dwindlingsoil quality, our food is
becoming less and lessnutritious, not to mention the

(01:03):
environmental impact of factoryfarming.
So here to discuss all of thattoday with me is Greg Peterson,
and when it comes to anythingaround urban farming.
Greg is kind of a legend in thespace, so I'm very thankful to
have him on.
In 2003, he foundedUrbanFarmcom, which is an online
portal for urban farmingeducation, and in 2015, he
created the UrbanFarm podcast.

(01:23):
His vision with the podcast isto help spread awareness and
education about growing your ownfood.
In this episode we go over howfragile our current food
environment is, why soil qualityis such a driving factor for
nutritional quality in our food.
How you can start your ownurban farm even if you have
limited space.
Like a porch, like me and whatharvesting rainwater is and how

(01:44):
you can use that for your gardenand what my surprise use that.
The UrbanFarm that Greg startedall those years ago was only on
a third of an acre, so not ahuge plot of land, and it was
here in Phoenix, which is whereI live, and also an area that I
would have thought would be verychallenging to kind of grow
anything.
But, as you'll see throughoutthis conversation, it's very
possible as long as you work inalignment with the environment.

(02:06):
So, without further delay,please enjoy my conversation
with Greg Peterson.
Greg, really excited to haveyou on here.
We're going to be talking a lotabout urban farming,
sustainability, and I think theeasiest place to start is just
getting a brief introductioninto what exactly urban farming

(02:27):
is, and then we'll get into someof the wider implications
around the food system, climatechange and things like that.
But if you could just start usoff with how you define urban
farming, I think they'd be agreat start for us.

Greg Peterson (02:39):
So I'm going to step back and tell you that I
have spent my life.
I'm 61 years old.
I've spent my life in the foodscene, in the local food scene
and figuring out local foodsystems, and I discovered early
on in my life that we have afood system problem and I have

(03:05):
addressed it by building outsystems so people can farm in
the city, because I believe thatthe place that we solve our
food insecurity problems is inthe city.
So urban farming is where it'sat for me, and it can be as

(03:28):
small as some pots on your frontporch to acres in an urban area
.
Bob McClellan out in WestPhoenix has many acres that he
farms.

So can you define food insecurity, so people have
context around what exactlythat means.

Well, when I spoke that I almost paused
myself.
But food insecurity is peoplenot having enough food to supply
their daily needs, and there isa significant amount of people
in this country that are foodinsecure.
They're not getting three mealsa day, and so that's one piece

(04:12):
of it.
And, interestingly, about 20years ago I was watching the
Today Show and they had thissegment on where the family
three generations were living inthis small house in some
southern town and they didn'thave enough food.

(04:34):
And I looked at that segmentand they had all this dirt
around their house.
It's like, man, you need to begrowing your own food.
You could grow enough food inthat the amount of property that
you have to feed your family.
So there's that piece.
That's food insecurity part.
And then there's our foodsystem challenges, which we saw

(04:57):
really clearly when COVID hitespecially.
You know things missing out ofthe grocery store, like I know
obviously it's not food, buttoilet paper.
You know it's a food.
Those are food system issuesthere.
Cb.

Yeah, I think what you're alluding to is how
vulnerable our system is andthat kind of got exposed in 2020
.
Can you explain?
Let me see we don't have.
Is there enough food in thecountry for everyone?
That's not the problem, is it?

AC.
That's a really good questionand it really depends on how you
define food.
Is there enough nourishment?
From the perspective of goodfood for people, probably not.
Is there enough manufacturedfood?
Maybe, but people still aren'tgetting it, and when I say

(05:52):
manufactured is when they takecorn and they make corn chips or
all of the boxed things thatyou find at the grocery store.

Cb, yeah, so I've always, when thinking about
this problem, it's like youcan't just always think about
food quality.
It's like when people arestruggling to not even know
where their next meal's comingfrom, you need to first think
about quantity, Like can youjust get them food?
And then, once there's aconsistent level of food
available, then we can starttrying to optimize for quality.

(06:23):
Ac, yeah, CB, and, as I'veunderstood it, there is enough
food in this country.
It's just a lot of it.
I forget the actual terms.
I don't know the supply chainterms, but once it's in our
homes, that's where most of itgets wasted.
Ac.

Yeah, there is a lot of food waste and I suspect
that people that are foodinsecure have less food waste.
You know, they're probably moreconscious about what they eat
and what they throw away.
Ac yeah, I'm sure?

So let's go back to the idea of urban farming.
We're going to kind of keepweaving in and out of a handful
of these topics.
You lived in Phoenix for a longtime.

AC.
That's the five years AC.

Right.
So I live in Scottsdale, so Ikind of wanted to base this
conversation around what a lotof people probably think of as
like a very tough climate forfarming, where it's very hot and
it's very dry here.
But you've shown it's possible.
So can you just walk through anexample of like what you had at

(07:28):
your property and then we cankind of I want to end up digging
into examples very selfishly ofwhat I can do in a condo with
two patios, one sun-facing one,not Just so people have like
concrete examples of like whatwe're talking about here, ac.

Yeah, so the property that I lived on for 32
years was a third of an acre,approximately 80 feet wide by
160 feet deep, and I built overthat 32-year period a what I
called a old growth food forestand basically what that means is

(08:03):
that there's always food to eatthere.
In fact, I've been gone comingup on two years now and I
visited it, visited the propertylast month, and they're still
maintaining it, and the oldgrowth food forest part means
that there's always just food toeat.
You walk out into your frontand backyard and there were

(08:25):
citrus to eat or lettuce growingwild in the yard, so there were
dozens of things that wouldjust come back year after year
after year AC.

So how did you start that?
Was there already fruit treesthere when you started?
Or how did you startfacilitating this old growth
food forest?

AC there was.
So the property that I ownedwhen I was in Phoenix was on an
old citrus orchard from the1920s.
So when I arrived there therewere about a half a dozen citrus
trees and that was it.
And I bought it because it hadflood irrigation and that
basically means that the waterjust shows up and 26 times a

(09:11):
year you get six inches of waterin your yard and I purposely
bought it for that and havingthat kind of water supply that
helped a lot.
And then what I did over timeis I just planted fruit trees.
I love planting fruit treesthat because you plant at once

(09:35):
and you get food for decades.
There were two citrus trees atthe urban farm that had been
producing fruit for 100 yearswhen I left AC.
That's amazing what kind offruit, was it?

AC it was.

Arizona sweet oranges, so on any given year I
was getting peaches, apricots,plums, jujubes, citrus about a
dozen different kinds of citrusapples.
There was nine months a year.
There was food to eat out ofthe property and what I've

(10:12):
noticed is so.
I now live in Asheville, northCarolina, so we have a winter
and as we're recording this,it's middle of December and
there's not much growing outside.
In fact, it was 18 degrees outthis morning and this is kind of
reminiscent for me of a growingseason like we had in Phoenix,

(10:35):
but it's opposite.
So the growing season that Ihave here is March through
November.
The growing season that we havein Phoenix is October through
end of June.
So we're still taking two tothree months off.
It's just a different time ofyear and it's actually going

(10:56):
back to your question.
It's actually quite easy togrow things in Arizona if you
just pay attention to theseasons and when you're growing.
In fact, bob McClendon Imentioned him earlier about 15
years ago he just came out andsaid I just don't grow in July,
august and September.
It's just not worth it CB.

That makes sense.
So I don't necessarily have agreen thumb.
I've been able to, over thepast few years, keep some
houseplants alive, which I'mvery proud of.
So how much harder is itgrowing something fruit?
I just got a fig tree, a littlefig tree, ac and a pot CB.

Yep, ac yeah.
So how much harder is itgrowing these things in the
desert?
Ac yeah, CB.
Well, I'm just now experiencinggrowing things in not the
desert and it seems a lot harderfor me here than it did in
Phoenix.
Ac, interesting.

It seems very counterintuitive.
This just seems like it wouldbe a hard place to grow or keep
anything alive.
Cb.

Well and, interestingly for me, I actually
started my first garden inPhoenix in 1975.
And I moved here.
So I'd been growing for about45 or 46 years.
I'd been growing gardens inPhoenix and I moved here and I
was talking with Zach Brooksfrom Arizona Worm Farm he's in

(12:23):
West Phoenix and he said hereminded me because my garden
the first year I arrived herewas bad.
It wasn't anything.
I would have expected to be bad, wise because hell, I've been
growing for over 40 years, I'vehad over 40 seasons of gardens
in my life, and he reminded me.

(12:44):
He said, greg, don't forget,your first garden is your worst
garden.
So I'm having to relearn how togrow things here because of the
different climate.
But you know I had 40 plusgardens and garden seasons in
Phoenix and so it's just, it'ssimple, and the big thing is is
paying attention to the seasons.
You know, make sure we have ourplanting calendar that we give

(13:07):
away for free atplantingcalendarorg, and it's a
planting calendar specificallyfor the low desert and you
cannot count on big box storesand nurseries to sell you a
plant that is in the correctseason.
So planting a broccoli in March, forget it.

(13:29):
Planting a watermelon inSeptember, forget it.
They're just not going to work.
So once you get those piecesfigured out, it makes it a whole
lot easier.

That can imagine All right.
So there is a fair amount ofresearch that's going to have to
go into this first.
I can't just start buyingplants and hoping they produce
food in the way that I'd wantthem to.

Well, we do have our growing food the basics
course online and it takes youthrough seven lessons on how to
do that.
It takes you through wateringand garden placement and you
know all that stuff, so thatresource is available.

I'll definitely go through that and I will
definitely link to that in theshow notes for this as well.
All right, so if you could getmore people involved in urban
farming, what sort of problemsdo you think you start to solve
at the local food economy level?

What problems do we solve?
Yeah Well, so at any givenmoment there was a let me
sidestep here a little bit About15, 18 years ago, there was
some research done out of the UKthat determined that any urban

(14:43):
area on the planet has about athree-day supply of food.

I've heard that before and I'm like that's scary
.
That can't be true, but itprobably is.

It is because we have an absolutely beautiful
food delivery system in thiscountry.
It delivers enough food to getpeople fed mostly, but it only
has about a three-day supply.
It's basically it's ajust-in-time system, so it has

(15:17):
just what we have in the grocerystores.
So if there's a trucker strike,if there's a storm, if there's
COVID, it disrupts that andthat's the big issue that we
have to deal with and that's thepiece that urban farming
growing in our fronts andbackyards that solves it.

Yeah, so it sounds like it just creates a
little bit more resiliency inthe system.

A little bit or a lot.
Cuba for many years grew a lotof their own food right in the
city when the whole thinghappened in the late 60s, and
they just started growing foodright in the cities.
So you asked me a question alittle while ago.
I want to kind of tease itapart a little bit more.
What is an urban farmer?

(16:07):
And my description of an urbanfarmer is you grow food, you
share it, that's it Okay.
So you grow food for yourfamily and you're sharing it
with your family.
You can call yourself an urbanfarmer, and then the third piece
of that is name your farm.

Okay, so pretty easy, or maybe not easy, but
simple, three-step process,exactly.

And the reason you want to name your farm.
I named my farm 20-plus yearsat 25 years ago, called it the
Urban Farm, and it's known.
In Phoenix.
The Urban Farm is a known placeand I encouraged people that
went on tours to the Urban Farmto name their farms as well,
Because what it does I was at atour one day and I was like how
many people have named theirfarms?

(16:57):
And I get five or 10 peoplethat say and it's like Jack's
Beanstalk, it's like two fatcats' apartment gardens.
What it's doing is it'sbringing some levity to it and
notoriety.
Oh, you're a farmer, You'regrowing food and it can be
really super simple and the nextstep is grow food in your front

(17:19):
and backyard.
And this is a great smallbusiness for stay-at-home moms
or dads, high school students,where you're growing food in
your front and backyard and thentaking it to a farmer's market.
Or one of the things that I didthis year is we grew way, way,
way too many tomatoes.
We were harvesting five to 10pounds of tomatoes every other

(17:43):
day out of my new orchard that Iplanted this year and I just
put a sign down on the streetand I said free, organic
tomatoes.
And the people on the streetloved me for it.
I can imagine, yeah, and theother piece of it is that I've
said this for years the onlyplace that lack lives is between

(18:06):
our ears, Because when you lookat the sheer abundance that
comes from fruit trees or tomatoplants or cucumbers or the, you
know it makes so much abundanceand we just need to be
revisiting that in our front andbackyard.
When I was in Croatian in 2014,I went there on a food systems

(18:30):
project with Arizona StateUniversity and every single
front yard had food growing init.
I did, I did, Everybody wasgrowing food in it, and that was
like all right, well, there'ssomething to learn here.
That's like a big wow.

Yeah, you mentioned abundance and since I
first got in touch with youabout coming on the show, I've
been looking up more about theurban farm and I saw that you
did have many orange trees onthere and recently I started
squeezing my own orange juicehere.

Oh nice.

Yeah, but now that I saw like I think it was
your orange trees that you werereferencing, that you've had for
or that have been growing fruitfor 100 years, yeah, so a
single tree just needs water andsunlight, right?
So just knowing that in my headnow I'm like I hate buying
oranges, like it feels, and it'slike the amount of energy that
probably went into wherever theywere grown maybe Florida to get

(19:33):
them here seems insane.
And when you start breaking itdown for, like, that's just
oranges, like how much energygoes into how far all of our
food has to travel along thatvery incredible supply chain
that you were mentioning, thatsort of stocks our food or our
food system for only three daysat a time.

There's a name for this.
It's called food miles.
Yeah, okay, do you have anyidea?
So food miles is the amount ofmiles that food travels from
where it was grown to where itwas consumed.
Okay, any idea what the averagefood miles in the United States
is?

It's probably a disgustingly high number 1500.

Yep, it's in half the country, 1500 miles, yeah.
And so there is that piece.
But there's also another piecethat's really important that
people need to know about, andthat's the oranges that you're
eating from the grocery store.
The peaches that you're eatingfrom the grocery store aren't as
nutritious as the ones thatyou're picking off of your own

(20:35):
trees.
Here's why because what happensis they have to pick those
fruit early and the moment theypick that fruit it starts
degrading nutritionally.
But the other side of the coinis that when they pick that
fruit, they're picking it early,so it's not as nutritionally

(20:56):
dense or sweet as it could be.
So three or four years ago Ihanded my friend Tony a bag of
cara cara navels from my frontyard.
They got picked off of the treewhen they were ripe and she
took them home and called meback 15 minutes later and she

(21:18):
said oh my gosh, greg, what arethese?
They're incredible.
I said they're cara cara navelsand she said but they don't
taste like anything in the store.
I bet they don't.
That's why they got picked attheir peak of ripeness and she
took them home and was eatingthem 15 minutes later.
And that's also a nutritionalissue as well, they're not as

(21:41):
nutrient dense, so we're notgetting the level of nutrition
that we deserve out of our foodeither.
So by growing your own food,harvesting it when it's ripe,
the amount of nutrition thatyou're getting is better.
Plus, if you're growing it theway I like to grow things, it's

(22:01):
organic, so you're not gettingany of those eucchie chemicals.

Yeah, so just for anyone listening who doesn't
necessarily know my backgroundbecause I don't know by the time
it's there is how much I wouldhave shared but I grew up in New
Jersey in like the farmlandportion of New Jersey, so we
always had fresh corn, big cornseason, a lot of tomatoes and
for years that you just grow uparound it.
Also, my parents owned acatering company, so I was just

(22:27):
exposed to a lot of food and alot of fresh food and that's
just kind of what you grow upknowing and not necessarily
appreciating.
And then I sort of swung in theother direction.
Once I got out of my own I waslike I've done enough healthy
eating and now I'm like and alsonot necessarily caring about
where my food came from, notshopping at farmer's markets,
not necessarily caring aboutsustainability, and now I'm sort

(22:47):
of swinging back in the otherdirection.
So anyone who's listening islike I don't even know where to
begin.
I'm very much on a journey oftrying to just make better
decisions around where my food'scoming from and making better
decisions around what's going toaffect the planet.
And I'm definitely nowhere nearbeing good Like.
I still drive an SUV, I stillmake a lot of bad decisions, but

(23:09):
I am trying to make take thesteps that are moving in the
right direction.
So I do want people who arelistening, who are not
necessarily very proactive aboutthis, to know that, like you
can make small steps and you cantake small steps, you don't
need to necessarily start anurban farm.
One of the things that I'vedone now, which I'm feeling much
better about when you referencefood miles, is that probably

(23:31):
50% of my food that we'reconsuming is coming from a
farmer's market.
Oh, good for you, becausethere's, like great farmer's
markets here throughout most ofthe years.
So you know, like I love knowingthat my eggs are coming from a
farm 30 miles north of here,right, and same thing with the
chicken and where the where mylettuce is coming from.
So it's great reducing thosefood miles and then also hoping

(23:55):
that these local farmers it'sthe food quality, like you're
saying, or the nutritional valueis slightly higher as well.
Yeah, so I want to start doingmore things here, but I live in
a condo.
Do you know what, like whatwould be something that's
reasonable?
For?

(24:16):
We have a porch in the front, aporch in the back.
The porch in the front righthere, great sunlight, but fully
exposed to sun throughout theday.
Porch in the back, a little bitmore protected.

When you're standing on your porch in the
front and looking out, whatdirection are you looking?
It's north and south.
North and south, all right, sonorth is going to be pretty much
.
Forget about it.
South would be a great place togrow.
Have you ever heard ofsomething called a tower garden?

Yeah, Now that I've been like I was prepping
for this interview and lookingat more things like this,
Facebook is just feeding me withtons of tons of ads for that.

I've been growing food in the ground since 1975.
I was 15 years old and in 2010,I discovered someone on my
friends on Facebook sent me alink of a video of this thing
called the tower garden, and atower garden is a hydroponic.
It's essentially a hydroponicgrowing system that is six feet

(25:24):
tall and when it's completelyfilled up with food, you know,
it holds 25 or 30 plants.
When it's completely filled upwith food growing, it looks like
a Christmas tree and there's a20 gallon basin in the bottom
and the water, once an hour for10 minutes, pumps up and

(25:47):
hydrates the roots.
And I bought one.
I pretty much bought one siteunseen because I was so excited
about it and we use.
We haven't broken it out hereyet because we're still getting
our feet grounded here but from2010, when I bought it, to 2022,

(26:07):
when we left, we used it everyseason and it's great for
growing greens.
You know we grew a lot of oursalad greens on it, so you know
it costs a little bit of moneyto get in, but the nice thing is
is once you've paid for it,it's paid for itself and you

(26:28):
know it just keeps going, and sothat's one way to do it.
Another way is to small pots.
I lived at the urban farm for 32years and back in 2012, for a
myriad of reasons, I decided Iwas going to move out.
For a year I rented it to afriend of mine and I ended up in

(26:52):
a little condo out in Peoriafor about 10 months and I put
together some raised beds.
It was just the back patio waseight by 10, 80 square feet and
I ran my tower garden in thereand I ran a couple of raised
beds and, you know, grew a fairamount of our food.

(27:15):
Now, obviously not.
You know, when I say a fairamount, I mean like 10 to 30%,
because a bulk of our food isn'tfresh vegetables.
You know we got to have grainsand that kind of stuff and so,
but we were growing a lot ofthings there.
On this, you know this 80square foot back patio that

(27:35):
faced south, yeah, Okay, so yeah.
Look at that the big thing is isto make sure you're planting
the right thing for the rightseason.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to use that
reference that you have on theirwebsite.
But, yeah, no.
So I'm really glad youmentioned the tower garden,
because I've been seeing thatand we're, like you, never
really know, especially for theamount of investment like it's
fairly expensive, but to havesomebody who's actually used one
to know that it's worthwhile,like that's a big help Big time.
Okay, yeah, well, I appreciatethat.

(28:07):
I mean this call alone might beworth it, just for to get that
piece of information.
So one of the other thing thatis interesting to me and I think
requires more conversation isbecause this show is largely
based around health andhealthcare.
One of the big things is socialdeterminants of health, and

(28:30):
these are things that, likepeople can't really influence
themselves.
A big one of them is like fooddeserts, where I was talking
before about the access problemwith food.
So it's like, yeah, you can saythat organic, freshly grown
food is better for people'shealth, but it's like where, if
they don't even have access toit, that's not going to be a

(28:52):
viable option, Right?
So Do you see a movement in thefuture where this type of
farming or this type of foodsourcing is going to help
alleviate some of those socialdeterminants of health, if
people choose it.

I have this theory that I developed a couple
decades ago.
I call it my 99.13.
99% of the time people changebecause they get hit by a
metaphorical Mack truck and 1%of the time they change because
they choose to change.
Now, covid was that Mack truck.

(29:33):
We sold more fruit trees thatyear and, as COVID was hitting,
we decided as a team to do afree class on the Internet every
weekday and we did that forlike 60 days.

(29:54):
Just on gardening.
We were teaching people how togarden and make bread and
whatever it took.
We were doing that.
We had over 26,000 people toour email list.
Wow, that's remarkable.
Yeah, and it was that Macktruck moment.

(30:14):
And so we need to wake up andchoose and I hope it's a lot
more than 1% of the time we werechoosing to actually grow our
own food.
But we have some significantfood system issues coming down
the pike that either going toMack truck us or we're going to

(30:38):
work our way through it bygrowing our own food.
So my message with the UrbanFarm podcast is hey, it's easy
to grow your own food.
You can grow it in pots on yourfront porch or you can buy four
acres in North Carolina andgrow your own food.
So I don't know if I answeredyour question.

I kind of went on a tangent there, but yeah you
did and I appreciate sharingyour theory and I think that
theory is correct as well.
You can always kind of fudgethe numbers a few points in one
direction or the other, but thepoint remains the same.
You mentioned there's a fewissues coming down the pike from

(31:20):
a food system standpoint.
Can you share what some ofthose are?

Well, the infrastructure that gets our
food to where it's at is gettingold the roadways, the trucks,
the systems that are in placeand that's a smaller issue.
The bigger issue is the healthof the food that we're eating.

(31:47):
The majority of the processedfoods aren't good for us.
They're impacting our health.
The food's just not good for us.
I've seen a lot more posts onFacebook about foods containing

(32:12):
GMOs and that kind of stuff,which we really don't know what
that's about and what that'sgoing to do for our health long
term.
There's the incidence of celiacdisease skyrocketed in the
early 2000s and that's whenRoundup Ready corn came on the

(32:35):
market, and between the Roundupand the BT that they bio add to
the corn, it's affecting ourhealth.
So a lot of the and I'll callthem manufactured foods a lot of
the manufactured foods, justaren't good for our health, and

(32:56):
so we have all kinds of healthissues.
And another theory I have my mompassed away when she was 85.
There was a couple of years agoand she spent 85 years living
here and probably spent 20% ofher life in a really polluted
world.
I've spent half of my life in areally polluted world and I'm

(33:18):
starting to see the effects ofthat pollution on my health
already, Because at the age of62, I'm starting to experience
some of the same kinds of thingsthat my mom was experiencing at
85, 25 years earlier.
And then there's our kids, ourgrandkids, you know.

(33:41):
Anybody in their 20s and 30shas spent their entire life in a
really polluted world and thehealth issues that we're seeing
with them are dramatic.
My friend of mine's, son, endedup with celiac disease in 2002,
2003.
And you know it took quite abit to figure out what was

(34:06):
happening and how to get itfixed.
And it doesn't necessarily justhave to do with the wheat
itself, because they're findingthat the ancient grains people
eating the ancient grains areless impacted by the gluten in
the wheat than people that areeating processed food.

(34:27):
So I think a big part of theissue is the processed food
piece.

Yeah, I think that can't be understated.
I was just listening tosomething with a Gabor Maté.
If you know any of his work.
He speaks a lot about the ideawhere a lot of people are
talking about disease states ormental health conditions and
they're saying these areabnormal conditions.
But he sort of looks at theenvironment that we're living in

(34:56):
and he posits that this isactually a very normal
physiologic response to theenvironment that we're currently
living in.
He goes largely against thedisease state medical model but
I think he's largely correct.
Obviously it's a very nuanced,large conversation but it makes

(35:16):
sense and I'm largely on boardwith that line of thinking I
would be curious to go on to.
I want to hear more about whyyou ended up going to Nashville.
Did you want to get out of thepollution of a major city and
just get more land?

That was a piece of it.
The pollution was a piece of it.
About 20, 25 years ago I hadconversations, started having
conversations with my friendsthat when my parents passed away
I wanted to go someplace quiet.
So I lived in Phoenix for 55years and Phoenix is a
metropolitan area of about 4.7million people.

(35:55):
It's loud, it's polluted, andso I was really interested in
finding a quiet place to go, notjust audibly quiet, but
energetically quiet.
So that was a big piece of it.
And another big piece of it wasthat I wanted to go someplace

(36:18):
that I could actually grow asignificant amount of my own
food and the food growing scenehere is a bit mind blowing.
And I'll specifically say thefood growing scene, the food

(36:39):
scene, restaurants.
This place is amazing for that.
But there is an actual nonprofitcalled ASAP.
It stands for AppalachianSomething and they started up 22
years ago when the tobaccoindustry was kind of closing,
downsizing let me say downsizing.

(37:00):
So ASAP started to supportlocal farmers to transition to
other food farms, to take theirfarms into food growing, and I
went to their shortly after Iarrived here.
I went to their 20thanniversary party and there were

(37:22):
hundreds of people thererepresenting hundreds of farms,
small farms that people are justgrowing their own food.
In fact, when I was herevetting the house that we
ultimately bought in December of21, I saw two different sets of

(37:43):
billboards that kind of blew meaway.
One of them said get your local.
On a billboard it said get yourlocal compost from us, and I
saw multiple billboards for thatand for me that was a clue.
And the other billboard that Isaw was download such and such
app.
It's a local farm app.

(38:04):
They have a local farm app forthe Asheville area and it's like
wow.

You must love being in that kind of community.
I do, I do.

However, I went from being a you know the urban
farm and the work that I did inPhoenix was pretty well known.
I went from being a really bigfish and a really big pond to a
really small fish and do amedium sized pond.
So I'm having to relearn a lot.
The other thing is is thatthere's this thing in growing

(38:36):
food called disease pressure.
It's the pressure of bugs, offungus, of you know, just things
that negatively impact yourplants, and what I've come to
find is that the diseasepressure in Phoenix is
non-existent to the diseasepressure here, just because it's

(38:57):
you know, we get seven inchesof rain in Phoenix.
We get three to five inches ofrain a month here.
So it's just again.
It's a new learning curve.
So I'm, you know, ultimately Iwanted to go someplace quiet
where I could grow a lot of myown food and start a farm, and
that's what we're doing here.

(39:17):
We got four acres and we've gotour barn that's getting
finished up this weekend and weput our first greenhouse in
about six, eight weeks ago, ohwell.
And this summer I planted 160fruit tree and berry bushes.
Wow, that was a project, yeah.

It sounds like it that was a project.
Yeah, that's what I was goingto ask you.
So you're on a third of an acrehere in Phoenix.
You have four acres now, so alot of fruit trees and bushes.
You've got a greenhouse.
What are you growing in thegreenhouse, or what's?

going to be grown there.
It'll be for plant starts inJanuary and February.
Right now I'm storing my fourcitrus trees in there, okay,
because I brought citrus treeswith me because I love citrus
and it gets too cold for them,and so it's a place to hold
stuff over the winter.
It's just a teeny one.

(40:12):
We got it from Costco.
It's a seven and a half byeight feet.
Okay, so it's just a teeny one.

It was like putting tinker toys together
when we assembled it, sure, andyeah, do you want to expand at
some point in the future, or areyou just going to kind of grow
out that space and see what youcan make of it?

Yeah, we're just going to grow out this space and
so on my podcast, it's theUrban Farm Podcast I interviewed
a year ago.
I interviewed a young ladynamed Samara Price and she's got
an elderberry product business.
So she buys elderberries andprocesses them into drinks and

(40:56):
savs and that kind of stuff.
And I said so where do you getyour elderberries at?
And she said oh, I get themhere and there, but most of them
come out of Europe.
That was my response.
And my next thing I said waswell, I can grow elderberries
for you.
I didn't have a clue how togrow elderberries at that moment
, but I said I can growelderberries for you.

(41:17):
So this was December and Januaryand February I did some
research.
I bought a hundred elderberrybranches.
They didn't have any roots,they didn't have any leaves,
they didn't have any stem, theywere just eight inch long sticks
and I was told to stick them inthe ground.
Well, I'm going to do a littlebetter than that.
I'd put them in four by four,by nine pots, and of those

(41:41):
hundred sticks, 98 of themturned into plants and by June,
when I was planting them, theywere two feet tall and by August
, through the summer, they werethree and a half feet tall.
So I am in the elderberrygrowing business and I currently
have about a hundred elderberryplants in the ground, and if I

(42:02):
decide to expand the elderberrybusiness I have another three
acres that I can plant on.

So that was part of the summer planting.
Yeah, exactly, I can imagine.

So you know I'm an entrepreneur.
I've had over 30 businesses inmy life.
Some of them lasted a sneeze,other others of them.
You know I have two of themthat were well.
The fruit tree program is 24years old and I had a software
company that I ran for 20 years,and that's just what I am.
You know, I'll be running myown business until I take my

(42:41):
last breath, so who knows wherethat'll lead?
But right now I'm going intothe elderberry business.

That's great.
It offers you a lot offlexibility and freedom.
Yep, a lot of work, but you getthe flip side of it, which is,
I'm sure, very rewarding.
Yeah, I'm really happy you havehad this conversation, just
because, like when I, when yousaid I got a bunch of elderberry
sticks, like I would look atthat and be like these are going
to work.
But to get a 98% success rateand now they're two feet tall,

(43:11):
I'm like, okay, I just need tohave a bit more confidence that
growing things is going to work.
I would just stick and be likeI would think nothing of it and
you saw that as an opportunityto grow.
What's going to become 100elderberry bushes?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.
So I really encourage you andeverybody you're going to kill
plants, I promise you I havekilled more plants than you have
.
Yeah, that's true.
I've killed more plants thanbecause I've been growing for
over, you know, almost 50 yearsnow I've been.
You know I've killed moreplants than anybody listening
out there, I guess.

(43:48):
And when that happens, that's alearning lesson, it's not a
stop.

Yep, yeah, it's a great point.

Oh okay, I won't do that again, yeah.

That's a great point, and we'll hopefully help
shift my mindset around thesethings Well plus plants are so
resilient they are.

Plants are incredibly resilient and
productive.
I had a guy that came to theurban farm maybe four or five
years ago and I had four ouncesof carrot seeds.
Four ounces of carrot seeds is100,000 seeds.
Oh okay, lots of seeds, yeah.
And I asked him if he knew howto plant carrots.
He said oh yeah, he said I gotit covered, and you know what

(44:32):
that means is you put in tworows with maybe you know 300
seeds.
He planted the entire bag ofcarrots in my front yard and
when I so, we harvested carrots,but then we also harvested
carrot seeds and I ended up witha five gallon bucket of carrot

(44:54):
seeds after I processed them.

Five gallon bucket, and you know that's like
wow, yeah, a few million seeds,that's how productive nature is
.
Yeah, despite our best effortsometimes Right, exactly, can
you talk about harvestingrainwater and what gray water
harvesting is?
I'd love to learn more aboutthis.
I know that harvestingrainwater in some states is

(45:19):
illegal.
We can probably get into that,but just starting off, with what
exactly it is, how you do it,how you store it, things like
that.

Yeah, so, for starters, it's actually legal to
harvest rainwater in everystate.
I had a young lady on my podcastsometime this year and she had
done the research on that andthere are different levels of
legality of harvesting rainwater, so you have to check with your
state, but it is legal toharvest rainwater in every state

(45:48):
.
Harvesting rainwater is reallypaying attention to where the
water is on your property whenthe rain falls and directing it
Whether you're directing it intotanks or into your landscape,
and I am a big, big proponent ofdirecting that water in your

(46:09):
landscape and then planting thelandscape around where you plant
the water.
So when I get the question inArizona, I got the question well
, we only get seven inches ofrain a year.
Is it worth harvesting therainwater?
Well, yeah, because you onlyget seven inches of rain.
There's that huge resourcethere that is invaluable in the

(46:35):
desert.
Of course, you want to directit in your landscape.
In fact, back in 2014, I hadone rain event.
I think it was September 14th2014.
I had one rain event where wegot 29,000 gallons of water that
fell on my third of an acre.

It sounds like an inconceivable number.

It does.
That's like two Olympic-sizedpools kind of things fall all at
once.
The city of Phoenix wasflooding and people were having
problems with it, but myproperty acted like a great big
sponge and just sponged it up.
And the big thing you want todo is, in rainwater harvesting

(47:19):
is you want to direct the waterwhere you want it in your
landscape, and especially in thedesert.
You direct it where you want itand then you add lots and lots
and lots of woody mulch, becausethe woody mulch acts like a
sponge and it sponges up andholds that water.
And then graywater harvesting.
You have to check with eachindividual state.

(47:41):
In the state of Arizona it islegal to harvest graywater.
Graywater is any water thatgoes down any drain of your
house except your kitchen sinkand your toilets, and it is
perfectly legal to redirect thatgraywater out into your
landscape.
It's a little bit morecomplicated than what I just

(48:03):
made it sound, because you needto figure out how to get the
water from inside the house tooutside the house, and you can
do that with plumbing or you cando what I did and I moved a
shower outdoor.
So I had an outdoor shower atthe Urban Farm and an outdoor
kitchen sink, so we rinsed ourvegetables in it and basically

(48:24):
had a nice sink on the backpatio.
So that's possible.

Yeah, okay, yeah.
Yeah, I appreciate explainingthose distinctions and it's good
to know that there's some levelof legality in every state.
I think I looked up Californiaand that's where it seemed a
little bit iffy.

Colorado is the most stringent state of the mall
for rainwater harvesting, forgraywater harvesting.
I don't know where the otherstates are out on that.
Okay, all right.

Well, everyone listening, do your own research
on that one.
Can you describe where youthink the trajectory of our food
systems are going to be maybe adecade or two from now?
Just getting an understandingof the level of urgency required
, maybe.

Well, I think that with where we're at right
now, we'll get some peoplegrowing food and other people
not, and I think that if theMack truck arrives, then we'll
get a lot more people growingfood.
My hope is that we can get ourneighborhoods growing food.

(49:31):
In the case of a major shutdown, if I'm the only one growing
food on my street, then I becomea target.
People are going to come andsay hi and want to buy food from
me or want to take food from me.
But if I can get my neighborsand friends, just like when I

(49:58):
was in Croatia if we can geteveryone growing food in their
yards, then we're in a lotbetter shape.

Do you have hope for regenerative farming?
It seems maybe it's justbecause I'm becoming more
interested in it and I'm lookingup more of these things online,
so I'm getting more of apositive feedback loop of what's
being shown to me on socialmedia and through search engines
.
It seems like I'm seeing moreabout regenerative farming and
that seems like a hopeful avenue, but I'm curious to hear what

(50:28):
your thoughts are on that from asustainability standpoint.

It's the only place we can go.
The corporate food system istenuous at best at this moment
just because of everything goingon it and it's using up the
soil.

I did want to talk about soil.

Yeah, and we'll talk about healthy soil hectare
in a minute.
But regenerative farming isreally about building healthy
soil.
That's the key line of it isbuilding healthy soil, because
healthy soil has lots of organicmatter in it and lots of life

(51:18):
in it and that makes the foodmore nutrient dense.
It makes our plants grow better.
If I can pontificate a littlebit here, there's five
components to healthy soil.
Yeah, sorry about it.
Yeah, and in order.
When we have healthy soil, theplants are going to grow better.

(51:39):
The food's going to behealthier.
For us, the five components areairspace, water, dirt and in
the desert what we haveprimarily is dirt.
Dirt is broken down, rock, andif all you have is dirt in your
backyard, it's highly compacted,the water can't get in and it's
lacking organic matter.
So what makes healthy soil iswater, airspace, dirt, organic

(52:11):
matter and everything that'salive in the soil, the
microorganisms and the bugs andthat kind of stuff.
And so when they talk aboutgood, healthy soil to grow food
in, you've got a good balance ofthose five components.
The easy thing is, and the coolthing is, is that to fix dirt

(52:32):
or unhealthy soil you just addlots of organic matter.
You can add it as compost.
You can add it as woody mulch.
That eventually breaks downinto really healthy soil.
And I put together a series ofvideos and stuff called Healthy
Soil Hacked and you can findthat at healthysoilhackedcom.

(52:55):
It's a free series.
It goes deeper into the fivecomponents of healthy soil.
I got a video on that.
I did a process in permaculture.
Permaculture I like to call theart and science of working with
nature and in permaculture theydo something called sheet

(53:17):
mulching.
There's actually a book on themarket called Lasagna Gardening.
That kind of gives you an ideaof what it is.
You're laying down a layer ofbrowns and then you put a little
bit of manure on top of thatand then more browns and you can
make this 24 or 36 inches thickand over the course of six
months it'll break down to twoor three inches of healthy soil.

(53:37):
It's a quick way to get reallyhealthy soil growing.
And then also thehealthysoilhackedcom also
includes a video of me puttingin a garden for less than a
hundred bucks a raised bedgarden in the desert.
So great.

We're definitely going to link to that in the
show notes as well.
I'm also going to check thatout.
I wanted to know about soilbecause I know monocropping is
largely it's just extracting.
So much and it's just like it'ssuch a large swaths of land
that are just becoming.
The soil is just not goodanymore, and that's coming

(54:17):
through in our food system aswell.
So, whatever's being grown thereis just not as nutritious
because the soil is not as good.
Do you know anything about thecarbon capture related to
healthy soil versus whatmonocropped soil is?
I heard something on a podcastyears ago and it was like the
difference a lot of climatechange maybe not a lot, but a

(54:38):
significant portion of climatechange, or at least the carbon
issue, can be solved if we juststart regenerating our soil.

Yes, yeah, so I'm very happy to have a little tax
on this.
I know that Maria Rodale fromthe Rodale Institute wrote a
book on it a few years ago and Iknow she's on a book tour right
now so maybe you can get her onyour podcast.
I will look her up.
Yeah, maria Rodale.
Organic Manifesto that was thebook and she actually did the

(55:08):
numbers to address how muchcarbon gets captured when you're
growing healthy soil.
So I know it's significant.
I just don't know the numberson it.

Yeah, I remember it being when I heard it, and
this was before I really waspaying attention to climate
change or anything like that itseemed like oh, this seems like
a very viable solution, but thatwas five or six years ago.
I just haven't looked into itsince, but I know, generally
speaking, healthy soil is a goodthing for our planet.
Oh, big time it's a good time.

(55:46):
Are there going to be enoughregenerative farms?
Can we get away, as a country,regenerative farming?
Can we produce enough food thatway?

I say yes Again.
I don't have the facts on it.
It's amazing the amount.
So remember I called the UrbanFarm an old growth food forest
earlier in the call.
It's amazing to me the amountof abundance that can grow just
wild in this space.
In many cases the landscape thatI had at the Urban Farm in

(56:21):
Phoenix was a foraging space.
It was all stuff that I'dplanted over the prior 20 or 30
years but I would just go foragein the yard.
So if we stop this obsessionwith lawns and I have a rule in

(56:42):
my world that I don't plantthings that don't make food if
you're going to have a landscapeyou might as well plant
landscape plants that make foodfor you.
That's what I did in Phoenix,even if you want to go with a
desert landscape.
In Phoenix there is a textbooksize book on edibles of the

(57:04):
Sonoran Southwest.
There's cactuses in.
You know we in Phoenix everyyear we since about 2006, we do
a Mesquite bean pod millingwhere we do education to teach

(57:24):
people about harvesting Mesquitebeans and then they can bring
their beans that they'veharvested and get them milled
from us and it's a highlynutritious, dense flour that
comes from them.
That's, that's sweet.
My partner, heidi uses Mesquiteflour instead of sweeteners in

(57:48):
some of her.
Yeah, it's that sweetInteresting.
I did see that.

I saw that video of yours on.

I think it was on .

YouTube.
So for for people listening,I'm very new to like trying to
live more sustainably and I'madmittedly not doing as well as
I want to, but I'm trying to bekind with myself and just say
we're making steps in the rightdirection.
Yeah, there you go.
So that's what, that's all youcan do, right, cause, like
everyone's busy, it's so hard toadd new habits to your life,

(58:19):
and I understand that.
I totally get it.
I just I try a bunch of thingsand then six months later I'm
like, well, these eight didn'tstick, but at least I'm still
doing these two, so we're tryingto be happy about that.
So for people who aren'tnecessarily ready to make
drastic changes and maybe starturban farming, do you have any
tips or can you just run throughthings that you do to try to
make a positive impact from asustainability or from a climate

(58:41):
change standpoint, Notnecessarily as advice, but just
throwing ideas out there thatpeople can possibly latch on to
be like, oh, I could maybe trydoing that.
Anything like that would Ithink it'd be very helpful.

Yeah.
So number one find your localfarmers market.
Go hang out at your localfarmers market.
It's fun to hang out at it.
Buy things from the localfarmers market.
Buy things that are grownlocally.
That you know.
That's the easiest thing to do.
Just figure out who your farmeris and then the next step is

(59:15):
you know, get a pot.
You can put a pot on a frontporch and you know, grow some
lettuce.
How do you use to my partner,how do you use to grow lettuce
in a pot on the front porch ofthe urban farm?
You know, and just, and thecool thing about lettuce and
spinach and those kinds ofthings it grows in a method

(59:35):
called cut and come again.
And so you know, as the lettuceplant is growing up, you're
harvesting this, the leaves onthe outside, and it keeps
growing up and you harvest moreleaves, and so it's an ongoing
harvest.
So you know, just jumping inwith a pot or two on your front

(59:55):
or back porch is super simple aswell.

Parker Condit (01:00:00):
One of the things I started doing was just trying
to be more conscious of theamount of waste or food waste I
was producing in a given week.
Like it's so embarrassing tosay, especially like you know,
I'd be fine saying this in likea conversation to one person,
but you put this out there tothe internet, where for so many
years I would just take stuff tothe dumpster or the trash can

(01:00:21):
and truly, I thought that, asfar as my consciousness went,
I'm like that's where it ended,right.
I'm like it's just out of myhand, out of sight.
I'm like that's just where itends.
And it's so silly to think thatat 34, I was like, oh, this
really goes somewhere afterwards, right, Like I knew that
intellectually, but it didn'tlike not in a conscious way,
where I'm like I should dosomething about it.

(01:00:43):
So that's one of the things Ihave to pay attention to.
I'm like, oh, all of this hasto go somewhere.
And I try very hard now stillnot perfect, but of any food
that we buy, really try to useit.
Get creative with meals, eatthings that don't necessarily
make sense together, but if it'sif I think I could end up
throwing it out try to eat it.

Greg Peterson (01:01:06):
And so there is no way you know that's something
I learned from Brad Lancaster20 plus years ago there's no way
you know when you throwsomething away it didn't, yeah.
And another thing on the foodwaste.
So one of the things that I dois we're prepping meals here.

(01:01:27):
If there's ends of carrots andcelery and onions and just
leftover parts that you wouldnormally throw away, first of
all I compost them.
But secondly, what I do is I'lltake the stuff that's still
good and I'll stick it in thegallon jar and stick it in the
freezer.
And when I get enough of thatstuff then I pull it all out of

(01:01:52):
the freezer and I stick it inthe pot and boil it and get my
own vegetable broth.
You know, because you're goingto, if you make soup you use
vegetable broth in the soup andyou know you can buy it in boxes
at the store.
You can make your own.
So there's creative things thatyou can do with that food waste
.
And so from the regenerativeperspective, let's just cover

(01:02:16):
that real quick.
Regenerative is a circular.

Yep, right, yeah, it's probably great.
If anyone listening doesn'tknow it is, can you quickly
describe what like aregenerative farm looks like?

Yeah, so great.
So I had at the Urban Farm aregenerative composting system
set up and I was actuallyharvesting 10 buckets of food
waste pre-consumer food waste sothey'd make their salads and
there would be leftover stuffand it would go in buckets and I
was harvesting 10, five gallonbuckets a week from this

(01:02:49):
restaurant.
First of all, I got a lot offood grade buckets and secondly,
I got all this food waste andthat food waste came up the
driveway of my house along withthe food waste, any food waste
that was left over in thekitchen at the Urban Farm, and
it went multiple places in myyard.
So, first of all, the chickensloved the food waste.

(01:03:13):
In fact, if you have a backyard, you should have chickens, have
three or four hens.
They give you eggs, they aregreat diggers, they give you a
fertilizer for your garden andthey eat your food waste.
And yeah, and if you're reallybold and want to jump in this,

(01:03:33):
and I've done this before Iraised meat birds and butchered
my own chickens about 15 yearsago at the Urban Farm just to
see what's that process like.
So now I am comfortableprocessing my own chickens.
So the food waste comes up thedriveway, it goes to the
chickens for food.

(01:03:54):
I was doing worm composting aswell at the Urban Farm and
that's the kind of composting Ido here, and worm compost is the
best.
They call it gardeners goldworm castings.
It's some of the best stuff youcan get for your garden, and

(01:04:15):
then anything that I had leftover went into the compost bins.
So back to regenerative part.
I have this food waste comingin, either from our kitchen or
leftover stuff in the yard orthe stuff from the restaurant,
and I'm turning it into chickeneggs and chicken poop, worm poop
, which is great fertilizer forthe garden, or compost, and that

(01:04:39):
was all going into our gardenbeds to make healthier soil to
grow healthier food.
That we were then harvestingand had some pieces left over on
it which then went back intothe system.
So that's the circular part ofregenerative and that is my

(01:05:00):
regenerative composting system.
Regenerative farming is a bitmore complicated and there's
lots written on it, but in bigpart it's just about working
with natural systems to growfood.

Yeah, like the way I've understood it, maybe as
a very simple framework foranyone who'd still don't know,
just to think about it is likeif you have grown some sort of
crop on a certain plot of land,that crops can extract a certain
amount of nutrients out of thesoil.
You can maybe do a certainnumber of seasons, but then
you're going to want to rotate.
So if you have livestock, orchickens or pigs, I think are

(01:05:38):
very good at like tearing up thedirt, chickens are good at
scratching and they'll eat a lotof the bugs in there and then
you want to get their wasteproduct to again, as you said,
organic matter, like puttingthat organic matter back into
the soil.
So then you're using and you'rebasically just rotating plots
of land for.
So that's sort of thecircuitous process that you were

(01:06:01):
describing.

Joel Salatin has written, done a lot with
regenerative farming and writtena lot of books about
regenerative farming and, yeah,it's the way to go.
Yeah.

I first got into that by buying.
I wanted to start buying bettersources of meat a few years ago
.
So I just started looking intoregenerative farms that had
cattle, so that's how I got intoit.
So, for people who want to bemore proactive, what are there
any things that you can suggest,because you've clearly been

(01:06:35):
involved with this for a longtime, not only at the individual
level, but you've clearlystarted businesses out of this
community involvement.
What else can people do if theywant to be more proactive than
just starting to take smallsteps, kind of like I'm doing,
to be a little bit moresustainable and help the planet?
If you want to get a littlemore aggressive and you have the
time, what can other people do?

Yeah Well, we already talked about farmers
market.
And then there's growing yourown.
Figure out how to take agardening class.
There's the master gardenerprogram in most cities.
There's our course calledgrowing food the basics, which
it'll teach you everything youneed to know in order to grow

(01:07:17):
your own food and get real clearwhere your food's coming from.
That's a big piece of it.
I've said for years that themost important thing we can be
doing right now is understandingwhere our food comes from and
how to grow our own.

Yeah, that definitely makes sense.
One of the things that I thinkI convinced myself of for a long
time when thinking aboutclimate change and things like
that is like there's going to besome unbelievable technological
breakthrough that'll justfigure this out.
Some sort of technology willjust figure out carbon capture

(01:07:56):
and we'll just solve it that way.
Do you have any hope that thatis going to be the case, or is
it going to be like it's goingto be just people making better
decisions for the planet?

I don't think technology is the capital T
solution.
I think it's part of thesolution.
It's going to require a lot ofall the way across the scale
from technology to just growingfood in your front and back yard
.

That makes sense.
For a long time I think I wasresistant to anything around
sustainability or climate changebecause I was like I'm one
person, how much of a differencecan I really make?
I knew the information on thebiggest carbon producers and
it's some astronomically highnumber of the carbon emissions

(01:08:48):
are produced by the 75 biggestcompanies in the world or
corporations in the world.
Why am I going to bother whenI'm clearly not making it dent?
I've come around tounderstanding that the decisions
you make from a consumerstandpoint are largely going to
be reflective of your mentality.
That's largely.

(01:09:08):
Again, it seems like not enough, but I do think getting more
people to be conscious withtheir purchasing power about
what they're doing, whethermoney is going will make a
difference.
Do you have any other advicearound that, around how to shift
your mindset?
Because it does seem likethere's apathy when it comes to

(01:09:30):
this because it's such a massiveproblem and you're like how
much can one person really do?
So anything you can speak tothat'll help with people's
mindset around feeling like youcan't actually make a difference
.

For me it goes back to my 99.
One theory we have to choose tochange.
I was at a coffee house maybethree or four years ago.
It was early on a morning andI'm always chirpy happy.
It was like 7.30 and there wasthis woman in front of me and

(01:10:10):
she turned around and looked atme and she said why are you so
happy?
I said, well, I have a choiceevery morning when I get up, to
be happy or not, and I choosehappy.
And you know what she said tome Get over it.
And so a big piece of it ischoose.

(01:10:35):
You have a choice.
The power of your thinking ishuge.
Choose.
Choose to be happy, Choose togrow your own food, Choose to.
You know so with my fruit treeprogram in Phoenix, I still do
education every year.

(01:10:55):
We've been doing it for 24years, and then people can get
fruit trees from us out of ourprogram.
And what started happening withmy team about six or seven
years ago was I would saysomething and it would happen,
and so my team started callingme out on it.

(01:11:16):
It's like, oh my gosh, Greg,you said this the other day and
look, this happened.
I don't have any examples offthe top of my head right now,
but just little things.
It's like you know, we need toget rid of all of these
pomegranates.
So let's set an intention toget rid of the pomegranates and
boom, they're gone and yourbrain has an amazing ability to

(01:11:44):
create in the world, and thosecome from your thoughts.
So what are your thoughts?

Yeah, no, it's a great point.
It's one of those things wherefor a long time I kind of
worshipped at the altar of likescience and logic and
mathematics and stuff like that.
But I'm coming around to theidea I'm like there's a lot of
stuff that happens in the worldthat I can't necessarily explain
or quantify or there's not adouble blind RCT proving it.
But, yeah, a lot of yourthoughts and intentions the word

(01:12:15):
manifestation comes up a lotbut a lot of those things where
if you just put these thoughtsand ideas and energy towards a
certain outcome, it certainlyhelps that outcome become
reality.
So I think there is somethingthat you can certainly influence
reality with your intentionsand your thoughts and your

(01:12:36):
energy.

And here's another piece of this what do
you stand for?
In 1991 I did a lot of workaround an organization called
Landmark Education and they havesomething called their advanced
course, and in their advancedcourse they have you create a

(01:12:59):
vision for your life.
What are you up to in the worldNow?
This was 32 years ago that Icreated my vision for my life
and it sounds like this I'm theperson on the planet responsible
for transforming our globalfood system.
You saw how easy that came.

(01:13:19):
It's who I am in the world Now.
Am I going to transform ourglobal food system on my own?
No, but that's the intentionwhich I live by.
It's what gets me up in themorning.
It's what has me plant 100elderberries just out of nowhere
to become an elderberry farmer.
It's what had me start growingin my front and back yard when I

(01:13:45):
went back to Arizona StateUniversity as an undergraduate,
when I was 40.
And so from the time I was 40to the time I was 43, I was
farming my front and back yardand once a week I would go out
and harvest what was growingthere and I would go to the
farmer's market and I would sellit.
So it goes back to your mind haspower.

(01:14:06):
Where are you doing with yourthoughts and what is your intent
?
And if your intent is, that'swhat you're going to get.
And if your intent is, oh mygosh, I sent an intention in
1991 to meet my perfect partnerand it took me from 1991 to 2013

(01:14:30):
, when I met her on Valentine'sDay, by the way, not on purpose
and we've been together now forcoming up on 11 years and it's
amazing, but it came from.
I'll take responsibility forthat.
It came from my intention, frommy setting the intention that
this is the way it's going to be, and magic happens when you're

(01:14:52):
positive and happy.
In fact, when you come andinteract with us at our fruit
tree program, people often tellme it's like Christmas.

I bet it is, I bet it's one of those things
that I think probably resonateswith so many people at a very
intrinsic level and it's justone of those things that's not
readily available.
I think there's something verynatural within us that our hands
should be in soil, we should besort of there's something
around working the land that isjust kind of within us.

(01:15:23):
Do you enjoy the manual labor,the manual?

side of things I do, I bet.
Oh, I do, because I sit infront of with my podcast and the
videos that I do.
I sit in front of my computerway too much.
So getting out and plantingtrees, digging holes, building a
greenhouse, it's fun.

Yeah, it's got to be a really nice balance for
you.
Yeah, one last thing.
I had one other question I waslike are you optimistic about
the future?
I think you just answered thatwith the whole mindset thing.
Yeah, I think it will depend oneveryone's individual mindset.

I'm optimistic in many ways and the ecological
systems of this planet aresignificantly stressed and that
has me concerned and I stillcarry this stuff like this.
I put out my hand and say youknow what?

(01:16:18):
You can grow your own food.
Look at this, Check this out.
And then I don't throw it atpeople.
I kind of you know it's likecome and check this out, this is
fun, you can grow your own food.
Yeah, People have to want it.

Yeah, do you have a closing message?
You can leave everyone with.

Learn about permaculture and implement it in
your life and have fun.
If you're not having fun, whybother?
If you're in a job that youhate, why bother?
Go out and create happy and funin your life and it will change

(01:17:01):
your world.
And it will change the world Ilove it.

I really appreciate this conversation.
I have lots of notes for thingsthat we're going to link to in
the show notes.
We're going to link to yourpodcast.
We'll link to your website.
All the resources mentionedthroughout the show will link as
well.

Nice.

Greg, thanks so much for coming on.
This is a real pleasure havingto chat with you.

Thanks for having me.
I really enjoyed it.

Hey everyone.
That's all for today's show.
I want to thank you so much forstopping by and watching,
especially if you've made it allthe way to this point.
If you'd like to be notifiedwhen new episodes are going to
be released, feel free tosubscribe and make sure you hit
the bell button as well.
To learn more about today'sguests, feel free to look in the
description.
You can also visit the podcastwebsite, which is
exploringhealthpodcastcom.

(01:17:43):
That website will also belinked in the description.
As always, likes, shares,comments are a huge help to me
and to this channel and to theshow.
So any of that you can do Iwould really appreciate.
Again, thank you so much forwatching.
I'll see you next time.

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