August 18, 2025 • 47 mins
The scale of agriculture's environmental impact is staggering. According to the EPA, agricultural runoff is the leading cause of degraded water quality in rivers and streams. Today's farming practices lead to 1.70 billion tons of U.S. topsoil annually, and agriculture produces 31% of human greenhouse gas emissions. Tune in to meet Kelsey Timmerman, author of the new book, Regenerating Earth, from Patagonia Books, who faces a heartbreaking reality shared by many rural families: he can't let his children swim in the pond near their Indiana home because of agricultural contamination. Rather than accept environmental degradation as inevitable, Kelsey embarked on a global journey to find farmers and communities who prove there's another way. From standing barefoot in traditional Hawaiian kalo patches to protecting cattle from lions alongside Maasai warriors in Kenya to discovering how chocolate could save Brazilian rainforests, he found regenerative agriculture practices that build soil, sequester carbon, and challenge everything we think we know about farming.
Kelsey's story revolves around systems thinking that connects everything from chloroplasts to mycorrhizal fungi with how we eat. He argues that industrial agriculture leads to farmers being farmed by corporations, trapping them in debt to buy chemically treated seeds, fertilizer, herbicides, and fungicides. His journey uncovered regenerative practices rooted in Indigenous and traditional farming practices combined with cutting-edge soil science. Farming can be more profitable for farmers who heal the land. The solutions aren't new. They're already in hand but largely ignored or forgotten because they require attention to nature's complexity rather than simplifying life to fit profit margins. Regenerative thinking starts by approaching problems through the same lens that nature does, by putting everything to use and accounting for all positive and negative impacts while treating nothing as waste to be discarded. For consumers, this means understanding that grocery choices ripple through complex ecological networks, with practical steps starting at farmers markets and supporting farms that regenerate rather than degrade the land which you can find using the Farm Map at https://regenerationinternational.org/. You can learn more about Kelsey's work at kelseytimmerman.com and Regenerating Earth is available on Amazon, Powell's Books, and local booksellers.
Kelsey's story revolves around systems thinking that connects everything from chloroplasts to mycorrhizal fungi with how we eat. He argues that industrial agriculture leads to farmers being farmed by corporations, trapping them in debt to buy chemically treated seeds, fertilizer, herbicides, and fungicides. His journey uncovered regenerative practices rooted in Indigenous and traditional farming practices combined with cutting-edge soil science. Farming can be more profitable for farmers who heal the land. The solutions aren't new. They're already in hand but largely ignored or forgotten because they require attention to nature's complexity rather than simplifying life to fit profit margins. Regenerative thinking starts by approaching problems through the same lens that nature does, by putting everything to use and accounting for all positive and negative impacts while treating nothing as waste to be discarded. For consumers, this means understanding that grocery choices ripple through complex ecological networks, with practical steps starting at farmers markets and supporting farms that regenerate rather than degrade the land which you can find using the Farm Map at https://regenerationinternational.org/. You can learn more about Kelsey's work at kelseytimmerman.com and Regenerating Earth is available on Amazon, Powell's Books, and local booksellers.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating
the transition to a sustainable carbon neutral society, and I'm
your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation. Today,
we're going to talk about food and agriculture. Industrial agriculture
(00:33):
feeds the world, but it's also poisoning the communities where
our food has grown. In rural America, farm runoff contaminates
local water supplies and the air becomes unbreathable after giant
chicken factories spread maneuver on surrounding fields. And that's just
one of the many ways that that happens. According to
the EPA's National Water Quality Assessment QUOTE, agricultural runoff is
(00:55):
the leading cause of water quality impacts to rivers and streams,
the third leading source for lakes, and the second largest
source of impairments to wetlands. In fact, a twenty seventeen
report from the US Department of Agriculture found that the
US loses one point seven billion tons of top soil
a year, which accounts for about four point six tons
(01:17):
per acre each year due to wind and soil erosion. Agriculture,
particularly large scale agriculture, produces thirty one percent of human
greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, industrial farming squeezes the smaller farmers profits,
trapping many in cycles of debt to agribusiness companies. Our
guest today is Kelsey Timmerman, author of the new book
(01:39):
from Patagonia, Regenerating Earth. Kelsey knows the crisis intimately. He
grew up in a rural Indiana community and still lives
in corn Country today. Kelsey can't let his own children
swim in the pond near his home because of agricultural contamination,
but rather than accept this as inevitable, he embarked on
a global journey to find farmers and communities proving that
(02:00):
there's another way. Kelsey's journey took him from traditional Hawaiian
collo patches to protecting cattle from lions alongside Massai warriors.
He also discovered how chocolate could save resilient rainforests, and
met American farmers who've rejected the agrochemical industry entirely. Kelsey
found regenerative agriculture practices that build soil, sequester carbon, and
(02:23):
might even be our best shot at combating climate change.
His travels took him across five continents and revealed that
indigenous and traditional farming wisdom, combined with cutting edge soil science,
isn't just better for the planet, it can be more
profitable for farmers too. So we'll explore how agricultural practices
can connect us to everything from micasorial fungi to global
(02:45):
social justice, and why farmers are being farmed by corporation,
and as well what each of us can do to
support the regenerative future that starts in our own backyards
and can extend around the world. You can learn more
about Kelsey's work and regenerating Earth at his website Kelsey
Timmerman dot com. That's all one word, no space, no dash.
Kelsey Timmerman dot com. Will start the conversation right after
(03:09):
a brief commercial break. Welcome to the show, Kelsey, How
you doing this morning? Good?
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Well, thank you for joining me from an Airbnb and
Pittsburgh on your book tours. It must be quite a
thing to get a book out there.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Yeah, it's been a lot of fun about a lot
of people did some really cool things, like from a
jerky from Hoggs to all sorts of I can't even
remember all of them, to how alto like investors who
want to get in their general agriculture and I'm like,
I don't know what to do. You can talk to
this person. So it's been fun kind of connecting people
(03:49):
and things like that.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Well, the book is a great way to connect to
an entire world of thinking about regenerative agriculture. And thanks
for writing it. It was really an interesting read. But I
want to start off with what spurred this moment for you,
which was your own kids not being able to swim
in the pond near your home because of agricultural runoff,
because of your mother's lung polyps that were developed as
(04:11):
a result of airborne stuff in the environment. How did
all those fears drive you to write this book about solutions?
Speaker 3 (04:21):
I mean, for most of my life I've lived in
rural America. I got out a little bit in my
twenties and it pulled me back in. You know, it
was home for better or worse. My school used to
have a driver tract for the school day, if that
tells you anything. It was like I graduated like forty
seven students and the school was literally surrounded by corn
and soybeans. Everything was surrounded by corn and soybeans, and
(04:45):
to me, that was the country life.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
That was queen country living.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
And then bought a house in once the Indiana and
we lived like in town, and it just felt weird
because it was like you can look down and you
can see the mailboxes of you know, fifty houses, and
when it would snow at night time, there was like
never darkness because of the street lights and things like
(05:09):
that glowing off the snow. And so we wanted to
move out to the countryside to give our kids the
experience that my wife friend both had growing up. Out
we could hit a baseball as far as you want
to hit it. So we were looking at places and
there was a place that was gorgeous. We fell in
love with the outside. We're like, we don't even care
what the inside looks like. It's like twenty acres, half
(05:33):
of its woods, half of it is oh then it's
like the house and then like a three and a
half acre pond, which sounds like decadent and inf one's like,
oh my gosh, like that must cost Like this is Indiana, Okay,
So like the twenty acres is not that big of
a deal.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
And then we had this pond and I'm like, oh, well,
we go swimming in it.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
And then we discovered, well the pond isn't very deep,
and we were like, warre's is water coming from? While
the water's coming from, like the seven hundred and fifty
acres of runoff from the farms go into this three
and a half acre pond, so sometimes it comes gushing
through pretty big time.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
And so at first we're like, oh, we'll go swimming
in it, will hop in and we did.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
And then after a while you're thinking, okay, now when
did they spray? What did they spray? Are we swimming
in it? And farmers would be careful too with this stuff.
They would say, oh yeah, you wo don't want to
get in that this time of year. And so that
kind of makes you just think about what's happening like
upstream of out pond and I know and I can
see it, and so yeah, you can talk to any
(06:37):
family and they had some type of malady that could
be connected with the industrial practices that many of our
farmers have adopted, or maybe many of their grandparents have adopted,
and they're still doing so my mom has a nodule
and her lung from fungus from chicken manure. You go
to funerals of a farmer in their fifties and their
(06:59):
children whispering that maybe it was the chemicals that it
got dowsed with. So it's not quite the clean country
living that I was thinking about. And maybe when I
was a kid, I just didn't care think about that
kind of stuff. And then you have your own kids
and you're like, well, maybe we shouldn't do this, like
maybe we shouldn't be in this water very often.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Well, you come from a long line of farmers, how
do you reconcile that family legacy with what farming has become?
Are they even the same kind of practice at this point?
Speaker 3 (07:32):
So my grandfather farmed until he was eighty five, and
my dad grew up on that farm, and by the
time I was born, that farm was a much different farm.
So Dad, as a kid, he talked, so we went
to visit the family farm. So because his since sold
like many family farms, and grandpa owned one hundred acres
and then he rented one hundred acres, so he had
(07:55):
two hundred acres of corn soybeans, which is like you
could not evecome close to make a living on that. Today,
I mean half the year the farmers lose money. And
if you're growing soybeans you can maybe get like three
four hundred dollars an acre up per year.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
But so on the farm the dad grew up on,
they had turkeys and guineas and hogs and the cow
for melk and just all sorts of animals. And the
turkeys were free range, not because they, you know, were
some free range organic farmers, That's just how it was.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
So the grocery store was in the yard rather than
you went down to the store to buy everything. But
where we were growing.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
They ate a lot of their own food, right, And
that's what farmers did. You ate food.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
And today, like I have a small garden and I
have some chickens, and I probably feed myself more calories
than the average farmer who owns thousands of acres in
the Midwest, which is bonkers. So that there was a
even that Dad tells these amazing stories that had a
(09:02):
hog got loose one time and got into the woods,
and I mean that's like heaven for a hog, and
so they never could get it. And as kids they
were terrified of like this hog because it would have
gotten quite huge, and so they just gotta worried about
that kind of thing. So that those are the things
that we don't worry about today. Our animals aren't out
there running around. They're in barns, So it's not like
(09:25):
this hyper focus on one thing. And maybe you have
hogs or chickens and you can and then you buy
more land so you can spread that manure on that land.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And that's the reason you have the land is.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Because you have to do something with this manure because
of state regulations. So it's a much different thing. It's
not near as diverse, and it supports way fewer families
than it used to.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Well, in this monocultural environment, you describe farmers as being
farmed by corporations. How does this industry real farming approach,
locked so many small farmers into a cycle of debt
and penury.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Yeah, So if you think about farming, the people farming
today are farming in a way that they're maybe their
grandparents are bought into and you can't you can't blame
them for that. So if someone shows up and wants
to sell you some fertilizer and they dump it in
your yard and say come back and check this out.
(10:28):
A double days later, grass is greener, taller. Well that's
money to a farmer. So they bought into it, and
they didn't know the negative repercussions of the synthetic fertilizer,
of the synthetic chemicals that they would spray. And now
we do know. But this entire system has been shaped
around industrial agriculture to the crop insurance has to be
(10:53):
planted by a certain date, would be planning by certain
dates in order to get crop insurance. One of the
things I learned I was far with a buddy and
which means writing in this tractor that was driven by satellite,
and you know, we were on the same basketball team.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
And like right before we.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Got in the tractor, I'm like, oh, this is a seed.
And it was like at smurf colored seed and it
was a soybean seed.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
He's like, oh, don't touch that. I'm like, what do
you mean.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
He's like, throw it down, wash your hands. Like immediately,
it's like and it's like a seed. You know, most
things that you can you can grow, you can pretty
much eat their seeds too, well, Like you would not
want to eat this. It was coded and fungus side,
and the company if you farm with the coated seeds,
which costs more money, of course, then they will fully
(11:37):
guarantee if the seed is bad.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
But if you.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Farm naked, which is like the natural seed that's not coded,
then they'll only like refund you fifty percent of the
cost of the seed. So all this is directed towards
the farmers staying on this one path, and if you
step off that path, you're not going to have the
same supports in place. So the people who have the
(12:03):
supports in place from the crop insurance and the payouts.
I have farmers in that close family friends who have
gotten millions and millions of dollars over the last few
decades and like farm support and you can read it
in the newspaper and you can look it up online.
It's all public information. But if you're a smaller farmer,
(12:24):
the supports are not there. So yeah, there's not the
system in place.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Well, there's another area where you talk about where industrial
operations just dominate, and that's the CAFO, the concentrated animal
feeding operation, which is an environmental disaster. But you also
went to Kenya spent time with the farmers there and
discovered that there are ways to raise cattle that it
actually helped restore the land. Talk about how we should
(12:50):
raise the meat that we choose to eat.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah, so I have family, family and friends that have
like chicken cafoes and turkey cafoes where the birds come in,
they're in there for a certain amount of time and
then they go off to some other building and they
don't own the birds. I asked one of my buddies,
I was like, could you eat one of the turkeys
from your barn?
Speaker 2 (13:10):
He's like, well, they would probably let me do that.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
And I'm like, if I told my Kenyon farmers that
you couldn't eat the turkey the animals that you were raising,
they would think it is nuts.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Right.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
So I got a chance to visit Kenya and hang
out with a Massi Massi are cattle herders for many
many hundreds thousand years or something. Yeah, a long time.
So they let me go. We went out to where
they were farming, where they had their herd, and.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
I was like I was meeting the herders.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I was like, we could I just stay with you
all for the day And they're like, I guess you can.
So the trucks with the guns left and I am
there with the Massi who have sticks, and one of
the massahs like I saw a lion over there, like,
let's go.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Check it out.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
And I'm like, that's the exact opposite reaction that I
would have, like let's go the opposite direction. So I
hung out with them for the day and we just
walked a mile to the Mara River to get a
drink for the cattle, and then we walked back and
that was our day. And we protected the herd, kept
them bunched and moved, which is a practice the Messia
have done for a long time. And the area that
(14:22):
we were, of course, was a former corn pivot. It's
like the industrial system wants the whole world to be
covered with corn, and the people who own the corn
acreage were no longer able to make a living, so
they open up to a conservancy and they work with
their neighbors to everyone to get their cattle together and
then have it in one big herd like it used
(14:43):
to be, or like you would see the animals like
move through nature because they are bunched for safety, and
they constantly moved because the safety are from predators. So
like lions or you know in our country, wolves or whatever. Uh,
And they keep moving because they don't want to eat
grass that they've already eaten or pooped on and feed on.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
So they keep moving. So this isn't the natural way
of things.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
How does that help the soil, because that's the key
is they're moving around, they're not just filling one place
with filth.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Yeah, so they you know, they're they're poop and pee,
they step on it. It gets you know, kind of
errates the ground a little bit, seats in and that
encourages more fertility in the soil. Actually, when they bite
onto the soil, bite onto the grass, if you don't
let them, they're too long with too long, they'll get it,
(15:39):
eat it all.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
The way down to the roots.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
But if you just say, bite the part of the
grass off, it encourages the roots to grow longer. So
you have these roots growing longer, and then there's always something,
always living root in the ground and so that holds
the soil more. And that also through photosynthesis, can put
carbon back into the which is one of the kind
(16:02):
of good benefits of regenera of ogriculture as well.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
So another interesting passage. It feels almost counterfactual if you
have taken history as it's given to us, and that
relates to the Green Revolution. Norman Barlog started this with
his innovations and weak productivity. It's credited with saving billions
of people from starvation, but you go into a lot
of detail about the continuing price we're paying for that.
(16:27):
Can you explain some of the things we should be
aware of about the Green Revolution's detrimental impacts?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, so, I mean, first off, I had a pretty
big positive impact at the time. Mean, it's credit with
saving like a billion lives, and there's few people that
can say they came up with some idea it's gon
save a billion lives. But maybe we've outgrown that, Maybe
our population has outgrown that, maybe our technology has outgrown that.
So while I was in Kenya, I visited this young
(16:54):
woman named Celestein who's basically a permaculture activist and maybe
an anti green revolution activist. So she's seen in her
community where these modern seeds and fertilizers are often given
out as a loan from NGO's like leaning local nonprofits,
and you know they give them out and like, well,
when you when you harvest your crop, then you can
(17:16):
pay us back. And she took me to visit a
farmer who she was a mother of eleven. That's a
lot of kids. She had five after harvest, she had
five bags of maize in the corner. Four of them
she was going to sell, and one she was going
to eat. After she sold those, she would still be
in debt to the nonprofit organization. And she was going
(17:41):
to eat the one bag of rice, which would last
a month, and then she would have.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
To buy rice or buy maize.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
So she was buying the maize after she ate that
one bag at the highest possible price. And when she
was selling her maize, she was selling everyone was selling
their maids. She was selling the lowest possible price. And
so this has had some pretty negative consequences, and Celsine
wanted to me to see like the most negative of them.
(18:07):
So she's like, come and check out sanding in my village.
And I had no idea like what sanding meant. So
we're walking through her village and then we come to
this area's big open area looks like it's been bombed
out size of Central Park, just sand. And what has
happened is that farmers who had stepped on to this
(18:29):
kind of industrial technology treadmill of it where you have
to keep using it once you start using it, going
to use more of it. They had lost hope that
their soil could provide their families with the life. They
wanted to provide them anymore, so and they could do
a short term kind of game where they could sell
the sand beneath their soil because it was an area
(18:50):
that had really coarse sand that was good for construction,
so they would do that, and the people that were
digging it out were big excavators, as people their neighbors
with like wooden hose that would then dig it out.
Sometimes it would collapse on top of them. And many
of the people working and sanding were the neighbors who
had sold out their land and I'll got dug out
(19:12):
and now they were just trying to make a living
in some other way. And we're standing there in this
space of degeneration, and you see these pillars and I'm like,
what are those pillars?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Why didn't they dig that part? She's like, well, those are.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
The family's graves. They bury their dead around the side
of the homes, and out of respect, the diggers have
dug around those graves. She said, some places you can
see bones sticking out, and some places you can see
clothing sticking out. But you know, she turned her back
to that this absolute degeneration, to me the most depressing
(19:43):
part of the whole entire book. And she looked at
me about how excited she was about the future and
how she was going to pass on these practices, these
permaculture practices which she was learning, which were kind of
echoes of the past, reminded her of the way her
grandma used to farm and to combat the destrial agriculture
that was forcing people to sell their land for sand.
(20:07):
I don't think that these technologies are good for subsistence
farmers focusing on one crop and if that crop has
a gets wiped out by a past of some sort
which has happened, or disease which has happened, then what
do they eat?
Speaker 1 (20:25):
So is the right way to think about the configuration
of a rural community like this, of different farming practices
and strategies and different crops and animals, so that everybody
is contributing to a comprehensively nutritious diet within that community.
And I guess the extension of that question is just
(20:46):
do we need more small farmers.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
I mean, I would say yes.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
The question is that we're going to able to find
more small farmers if people want to actually farm and
do the work. It's not easy if you've had a
garden before. Like I'm on a road trip for three
weeks here, Oh my gosh. You know, my wife is
juggling all our balls at home, and I go home
and that garden is going to be the weeds are
going to be the tallest that they were taller than
my tomato plants. So it is not an easy thing
(21:12):
to do. So do people want to do it? Where
three quarters of American farm workers are immigrants, we used
to have to rely on each other more.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
And this book is mostly.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
About connection and how many of these connections have been broken,
our connection with nature, our connection.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
With each other.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
And many of these places where connections used to exist
between the animals and plants, manure to the plants, plants
to the animals, have been broken and now a product
or service is in place, and it has made things easier.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
But at what costs.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Well, that's the striking thing about regenerative thinking is that
it's systems thinking in practice. And you're right about the
connection between chloroplast lions, fungui and how that's all connected
to what we eat and how we interact with one another.
Can you explain the system that's producing food for the
American shopper briefly? I know it's a complex question. Yeah,
(22:11):
I mean, I think there's natural or synthetic at this point.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Oh, it is totally synthetic that we're eating off of.
I think we've come so disconnected, we've we've lost.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
The how much of this is like a miracle?
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Like someone people maybe have a planet sunflower before you
hold that sunflower se in your hand, you can roll
it around in the palm of your hand, and then
you stick that bad boy in the ground. You know,
you come back, you know two months later, three months later,
it's taller than you are, like, and it has a
thousand more seeds on it. Like, let's just stop for
a moment and acknowledge just the absolute miracle that is
(22:49):
a single seed. And for most of us, we don't
we don't think about that at all anymore. The break
from the the farm to our lives, like it has
been a generation, two generations, three generations, which one where
when was the last time your family was farmers.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
They moved off of the farm, and my great grandparents
moved off the farm in nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Okay, So, like you know, they had a different relationship
with the land than your parents, and and.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
My dad grew up on that farm and had a
different experience than when he moved to Evansville in Indiana.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
But they didn't feel like they lost something, but they
did in retrospect, what did we lose?
Speaker 3 (23:34):
And we lost that knowledge that were passing down from
generation to generation. Many of the farmers I meant that
one of their general farmers I met. One of the
things I add to what is it regenera of ogriculture
is that they believe that humans can be a force
of good and there's some type of like spiritual connection.
Not to get too woo woo with it, but that
(23:55):
like the way they talk about it, and the farmers
in Minnesota and Wisconsin may not have the same language
or stories around it that the indigenous farmers I met
in Hawaii and Columbia and Kenya have. But it's like
this remembering that is happening where the industrial system that
like outside my house in this in this this spring,
(24:15):
I really noticed that you can take a handful of dirt,
just throw it into the air and it disappears.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
It's just like dust.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
It's a desert, and that soil is treated as if
it's just meant there to hold a seed, because we're
gonna bring all the synthetic fertility to it. We're gonna
spray all the chemicals that protect it from the weeds
where nature diversity would protect it more from weeds and
pests and things like that.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
So it's just like this substrate to hold a seed.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
We're not thinking about all the life from the fungi
that's in the soil that helps bring nutrients through the plant.
We're not thinking about the just the miracle that is
sort of synthesis well, and.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
The connection between people that yielded that passion of knowledge
from one generation to another as well. I mean, when
we talk about indigenous communities, it's they're indigenous because they
are embedded in and grew up among the nature that
they coexist with. We think of it as something we manage.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, for sure, it's a place that they are a
part of.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Native Hawaiian see the collo plant, which is taro as
I think it says an older brother and that's not
uncommon to look at a mountain and have some type
of familial relation to that mountain in some way, some
connection that's not just all that mountains called this. If
(25:40):
you go up it, you can see out like now,
there's like a relationship with that, with those places. And
we've all been indigenous to somewhere at some point in
time in our ancestry, and we've been moved from that,
and our roots have been cut and they've been shortened,
and we continue to move around a lot. But what
if we stopped a little bit and stop to observe
(26:01):
a place and think about see it in all four seasons.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Over the course of years. I think about where I
live used to be.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
The home of the Miamia, the Miami Indians, and the Delaware,
and they were there for and still are been there
for thousands of years.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
And then I think about.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
The modern farming technique of a round up ready corn
that's been here since the nineties. And so we think
we know agriculture, We think we know this place where
we're planning.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
They've been there for.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Just thousands of thousands of years and we just let's
scratching the surface.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Well, we're going to have to take a quick commercial
break so that the industrial economy can intrude on this conversation.
But we're going to be right back right, stay tuned, folks, Hey,
welcome back to Sustainability in your ear, and let's get
back to the discussion with Kelsey Timmerman. He's author of
(26:59):
Regenerating Earth. If it's a recent book from Patagonia, you know,
they don't just make clothes, they make information for environmentally
responsible living. Love those books. Kelsey. In Brazil, you discovered how,
as you put it, chocolate could save the rainforest. Can
you take it into the moment when you realize that
and explain the regenerative connection that de Mendez chocolate is cultivating.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
So as a chocolate eater, I love to hear this news. Right,
if you eat a certain type of chocolate, you just
eat it guilt free. Also that chocolate has no calories
or harmful sugar. I'm joking about that, but so yes,
Sezar de Mendez is I met him in Blim, Brazil,
which is in the Amazon region of Brazil, and which
(27:45):
parts of the Amazon now, which is to get back
a little bit industract culture look like farms in Indiana
once where once there was abundance of rainforest, now there's
a field of corn, there's a field of soybeans, and
the grain bends and the Ford trucks and the John
Deere tractors looks the same.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
So anyway back to de Mendez. So de Mendez had
been working in.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
The chocolate industry for for years and was not like
loving it as much as he used to. And we
started to see that there could be a different way.
And so he started to talk go off into the
rainforest and talk to people about their caca because cacal
like originated in the Amazon, and so there's you know,
(28:28):
types of cacal that aren't out and generally included in
the making of.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Your chocolate bar.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Though, he started to visit folks and uh, you know
they have you can eat the caca beans.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
You can make alcohol from.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
And of course it has like this fruity substance around
each of this each of the be the beans receives
and so they had a relationship with this already, but
not necessarily turn it into chocolate bars. And they didn't
know about the whole process of fermenting the bee like
in that in the place where they before they get
shipped to like a chocolate company, and so the Yanamami
(29:08):
he deep into the rainforest at times. In fact, he
joked once he was with some anthropologists going to go
visit some people, and overnight he was in his tent
and heard.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
A jaguar outside. He's like, oh gosh, it's going to
come and get me.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
And then he got out of his tent and the
jaguar run away right away, he thinks because he smelled
so bad. So he was an adventurer. Some people call
him the Santa Claus of chocolate. Other people have called
him the Indiana Jones of chocolate.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
And so he works with these communities and to.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Help them, like know about this processing of the cacal
beans before it can become chocolate. And he has developed
these line of chocolate bars, the Mindez chocolate that have
the name of it is the name of like the farmer.
He gets it from a single farmer and has their
story on the back. He shows it to them our partners.
(29:59):
He pays them way more than they would get in
any other way.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Yeah, and that story is one of the things that
makes Tremendous so interesting is that it's not a massified story.
It's a very personal individuals experience of food. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
And one of the ways that he's trying to preserve
the rainforests and others are trying to preserve the rainforest
is to show that there can be modern economic value
because the especially with the Boston arrow regime that was
in place a few years ago, and many people in
the past and still to this day look at the rainforest,
(30:35):
look at the Amazon as this void that doesn't produce
anything for their gross domestic product, and so here it
is one of the most ecologically important places on our planet,
and it's worthless to them, and they think that the
people who live there need to be modernized, which is
kind of a terrible word to throw at these cultures.
And so folks like the Mendez are being able to
(30:58):
give income to some of the folks who live in
the Amazon that they then can spend to educate their
children at universities, can they become lawyers, to become doctors,
to access medicine when they need to, so they can
kind of interact with the community on their own terms
(31:19):
and fight for their land because it is being encroached
upon all the time.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
You relate a number of stories about American farmers who
were inspired by ancient and indigenous practices. What's a particular
practice or generative practice? It really blew your mind when
you thought, why didn't we figure that out before?
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Yeah, I mean one of the ones that stands up
to me is just having diverse plants together and how
they do things, like, for past they mask the smell
of a certain plant, and so if you have a
bunch of diverse plants, they can't smell that one thing
they would come after and how off Also a plant
(31:59):
might attract the predator of a pest of another planet.
Where the diversity of life manages itself and keeps things
in balance. So that was one of the ones I
really you know, you plant marigolds on the edge of
your garden, and I knew that it's kind of like
the the one oh one version of that. But to
(32:20):
embraces so much more diversity gives your system, gives nature
so much more resilience, and you need those chemicals less
or not at all.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Well, you mentioned your garden before. How do you practice
that kind of a wisdom? Yeah, in your own garden.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
So you know, I had sheep and all this, and
I'm like the counties worse shepherd, and I might be
the counties worse gardener too, because I travel a lot
and I leave my garden, I come back months later
and I'm like, well, I guess it's.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Full of weens.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
The beautiful thing is that you still can get food
from it. It's just amazing how resilient it is. So
I've done a couple of things. The cover crops. So
I planted winter rye in my garden. So over the
wintertime I had like a small you know, you know,
a couple of inches of green sticking out of it,
(33:11):
and then the spring it blew up and you smash
that down. It can act as a thatched, so it's
supressed weeds. I didn't have much luck at that the
first time that I did it, so I ended up
having to cut it down and like till, you know,
try to till it in or take it off or so,
but still having that living root in the ground all
winter where wind is blowing across the garden, the soil
(33:32):
is standing there. When it rains, that rain is going
into the ground. Like There's so many positive things. So
that's sometime I tried in the garden. Also, composting has
been a really easy thing to do. That has really
reduced the amount.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Of waste that we throw out in the trash van,
Like we don't.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
I see people with two trash oats after one week,
and we've got like we could do it one every
three weeks.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
You know, I moved to live on a couple of
acres of wilderness, but I'm always struck by people who
don't compost. You know, they'll pick it all up and
they'll ship it off to the transfer station and then
they'll buy fertilizer or replace the biomass that they lost. Yeah,
I mean it's a shame.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Again, it's just an example of a connection that has
been broken. And maybe our grandparents did this without even
thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
So do we need new ideas or all the answers
already there but just kind of lost.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
So my take away for this has been often if
you watch some documentaries on our gener Aaric culture, especially
once produced you know over five years ago or more,
they would act like Generalaric culture is this new and
exciting thing, and it's not. It's an old and exciting
thing that we are relearning and remembering. And the riots
(34:53):
of that have been from the digitous people around the world.
Who you know, like Sir Albert Howard went to educate
He was a farm educator agrandom US who went from
England to India to teach them how to farm correctly. Well,
they taught him how to farm correctly and he's taking
those practices back and he was with Thedale Institute for
(35:14):
a while in Rdale Organic Gardening, and you know they
start to spread those practices and so sometimes it can
be like, well I.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Learned this from Rdale's and they're the original.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
They played an important part in the American organic and
regenitor of agriculture, but their roots are in indigenous soil
as well.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Like a good healthy ecosystem. Why do you talk to
your kids about the future. I mean, you know, they
avoid the local pond in your property, they see your
mother's lung condition. How do you talk to them about
what they might want to aspire to do? And do
you say farming is an option?
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
You know, they've been on a box before where the
high boys prayers come out. We've had to like run
to the house to not breathe it in, and so
they're aware of this is it's just you know, like
when I grew up, it was just completely natural to them.
Now I started to question some of this, and we
do things a little differently where we live, and we
don't mow one hundred percent of our yard, which is god,
(36:18):
I know.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Bad neighbors. We are bad neighbors. We love an acre
of grass.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Girl up and it's got beautiful walnut trees and wild
flowers and all that stuff in it. So we're bad neighbors.
But there's so much more life of the bees and
other insects out there, good in but ones that bite you.
A lot of triggers out there too at times. So
they are living in this and the thing for now,
my daughter sixteen, she's actually thinking that she would like
(36:44):
to get into some type of environmental like being outside career,
and we're not putting any pressure on that whatsoever. So
you don't exactly what that looks like. But the important
thing has been for them to they love to be outside.
My son has started to kind of recut some of
the trails that we had in our woods and love
(37:05):
to be out there. He's thirteen and he's autistic and
for him to be outside is man. It's good for him.
It's good for him to be out there. It's good
for him to do work and sweat. And the thing
we want them to is to know a place, to
be part of a place. And like the I went
to visit ar Waco and Northern Columbia Indigenous group and
(37:27):
I was like, Oh, teach me her farmiing practices.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
You know, that's what kind of what I was thinking.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
And they're like, sit down, we're going to do a
lot of sitting and we're going to ask you questions
you ask yourself.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
You don't have to tell us the answers.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
You're just gonna sit and you're gonna question your own
intentions that you're what you're asking for nature from nature.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
And why you are here.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
And that sitting and observing and be connected to a
place came up again and again with indigenous farmers. The
one of the farmers in on the on the Kwai
said asked me the question that he asked like kids
when he's trying to help them relearn some of their culture.
It's like, what river do you belong to? I think
(38:07):
that's an awesome question. So we've gotten kayaks and we've interact
with our river a heck of a lot more than
we used to.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
We hike down to it, we go swimming in it.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
Even though gets back to those chemical questions a little
bit as well.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
So it's tough.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
I mean, we live among the degradation. And but I
think this journey, largely from me, was one of hope,
and I hope that kids can get a sense of
that because back to Salestine and Kenya, with her back
to degeneration, she looked forward to the future full of
hope and joy if she can like, how could we not? Well?
Speaker 1 (38:47):
I was struck by the fact that you discovered that
over and over that it was human connections that were
really re knitting our relationship with nature. And here for
a lot of the people who are listening, they're one
opportunit need to support regenerative farming is to shop for
regenerative food. What's your advice about doing that and what
questions do you should suggest somebody ask about the food
(39:09):
that they're going to buy.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
Yeah, so you might see the word regenerative start to
pop up in farmers' markets.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
It's in Indiana.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
It's interesting when I was just in San Francisco, they're
not seeing it pop up so much. I don't know
if it's just like because everyone's doing it. I don't
know exactly what that means. But you can go to
Regenerative No, it's Regeneration International's website. Click on farm map
and they'll be farmers that are self identify themselves as
regenerative farmers near you that you could reach out to
(39:37):
and go visit their farm.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
That's why I would ask you to do.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Go visit one of these farms and if it truly
is regenerative, and it probably I mean it probably is.
It might not be certified in some way, but you
can feel it from the farmer's enthusiasm. That then connection
for the place. They want people to come out look
and see and feel and smell and hear how this
place is different. So just don't buy something that's regenerative,
(40:04):
which you you know you should You should do is
start to incorporate it in small ways, especially with meat.
I think is a big one. But it's not just
we're a shop our way to a better world. Part
of this is a heart shift, the cultural shift that
needs to happen. The way we see ourselves. It's not
the dominators of nature but part of it. So you know,
plant something, adopt the local park, start to have more
(40:28):
of a relationship with your river, where you're seeing a
place and being part of it of every single season
for years to come.
Speaker 2 (40:36):
And I'm sure there's groups that protect those places that
then you could volunteer for.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
So I think it is just to say just shop
in a new way. I think it's pretty kind of
a It needs to be more than that.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Thanks, that's that's that's wise, counsel, because you're talking about
not simply understanding where the food came up from, but
becoming part of that system, becoming small eyes indigenous to
your food ecosystem.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Absolutely, we need to be part of the places that
we are eating from.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
When when possible.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
I mean, I just I'm drinking coffee this morning, and
like obviously, you know, not a lot of coffee growing
in Indiana, So that's kind of now.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
I've actually traveled to coffee.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Farmers around the world to talk see other lives are
affected by things like organic confair trade, but most people
have not, and so it's not we almost have to
do one hundred percent right, just take small steps and
over the US, Oh, I love this local cheese that
I'm getting, or you know, I can get milk delivered
from from this company, or go and get it. Or
(41:40):
there's an intensive vegetable operation near me, intensive in the
way like intensive labor, that's farming using Reginia practices. Those
probably exists wherever you are, wherever you're listening to this
that you can become a member of the CSA with.
So those are things that you can do and kind
of connect with and be part of.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
You know, you ended your book by saying reading the
book is the place to start. And I was going
to ask what step two? But you just answered my question. Kelsey,
Thank you for the time today and for the book.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Thanks. I'm excited for people to hear these stories of
the folks.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
I met, get them in their heads, in their heart.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Welcome back to Sustainability in your ear. You've been listening
to my conversation with author Kelsey Timmerman and his new book,
Regenerating Earth is available now from Patagonia. You can learn
more about Kelsey and his work at Kelsey Timmerman dot
com Kelsey Timmerman's all one word, no space, no dash,
Kelsey Timmerman dot com. Regeneration is more than the word
(42:44):
that will supersede sustainability in the climate lexicon. It's a
different way of thinking than traditional sustainability, which is focused
on limiting environmental damage. Regeneration is a way of thinking
and specifically thinking like nature about the flows of energy
and materials through our economy, social infrastructures, and our individual lifestyles.
(43:06):
Regenerative thinking doesn't recognize waste as something with no value. Instead,
it responds to waste to any leftovers after a life
process is complete as a potential input to another life process.
That could be turning packaging into a compostable that can
feed the soil, or recovering a byproduct of industrial production
to create feedstock for another use, for example, by turning
(43:29):
fly ash into the basis for low carbon concrete. As
egomterials technologies as explained on the show in the Past
or in the agricultural world that Kelsey explored, restoring the
soil with active composting, no till planting strategies and supporting
diverse ecosystems by planting many different crops rather than a
monoculture of say corn, or just soil that cannot withstand
(43:53):
natural predators. Without chemicals that pollute the soil, air and
water on which life relies Kelsey unearthed regenerative agricultural knowledge
that has been buried by industrial processes. We have all
the knowledge needed to restore the land to resilient productivity,
but it requires being attentive to the systems and complexity
(44:15):
of nature instead of trying to simplify and standardized life
to fit profit margins. Yes, profits are important preserving an
organization or a smallholder farm, but they're just one form
of value created when undertaking regenerative practices. But unfortunately, we
don't account for most of that value, such as the
ongoing ability of soil to provide nourishment for crops, or
(44:37):
the safety of people living near farmland. Industrial agriculture, like
all extractive industries, fails to count the many benefits of
healthy land, water, and people that are treated as financial
externalities in today's economy. Each of us can use our
financial influence to make companies pay attention. We can do
that by buying regenerative products. So do take a moment
(45:00):
to find the regenerative farms near you. Search at Regeneration
International dot org. That's all one word, no space, no dash,
Regeneration International dot org and look for the farm map
in the menu at the top. Of the page. Paying
a visit to a regenerative farm can open your eyes
to the bounty nature provides when cared for instead of
(45:20):
just exploited. Now, perhaps the advent of AI, which supposedly
will put all of us out of jobs, will create
an abundance of labor that allows more people to earn
a living caring for the land, for healthy farmland, for forests,
for watersheds and wetlands. In other words, we might be
able to afford to let people get their hands dirty
and the glorious complexity that is nature. But one way
(45:43):
or another, humans must find a way to restore nature,
not just live off it. Indigenous communities recognize that unbreakable
bond between people in place, and Kelsey's journey toward recognizing
what he called the miracle of reproduction is a map
to discover how we can live with and for nature
because it is part of all of us and we
(46:05):
are part of it. We've got several regenerative leaders coming
up on the show, so stay tuned, and would you
take a moment to consider sharing one of the more
than five hundred episodes of sustainability in your ear with
your friends or your family, Writing a review on your
favorite podcast platform is a way to help your neighbors
find us, because folks, you are the amplifiers that can
(46:25):
spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell
your family, your friends, your coworkers, the people you meet
on the street that they can find sustainability in your
ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor
of podcast goodness they prefer. Thank you for your support.
I'm met Tracliffe. This is sustainability in your ear and
(46:47):
we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In
the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of
one another, and let's all take care of this beautiful
planet of ours, the only one we've got. Have a
green day, says Speak, and
Speaker 2 (47:03):
A ten sixtis replace
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating
the transition to a sustainable carbon neutral society, and I'm
your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation. Today,
we're going to talk about food and agriculture. Industrial agriculture
(00:33):
feeds the world, but it's also poisoning the communities where
our food has grown. In rural America, farm runoff contaminates
local water supplies and the air becomes unbreathable after giant
chicken factories spread maneuver on surrounding fields. And that's just
one of the many ways that that happens. According to
the EPA's National Water Quality Assessment QUOTE, agricultural runoff is
(00:55):
the leading cause of water quality impacts to rivers and streams,
the third leading source for lakes, and the second largest
source of impairments to wetlands. In fact, a twenty seventeen
report from the US Department of Agriculture found that the
US loses one point seven billion tons of top soil
a year, which accounts for about four point six tons
(01:17):
per acre each year due to wind and soil erosion. Agriculture,
particularly large scale agriculture, produces thirty one percent of human
greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, industrial farming squeezes the smaller farmers profits,
trapping many in cycles of debt to agribusiness companies. Our
guest today is Kelsey Timmerman, author of the new book
(01:39):
from Patagonia, Regenerating Earth. Kelsey knows the crisis intimately. He
grew up in a rural Indiana community and still lives
in corn Country today. Kelsey can't let his own children
swim in the pond near his home because of agricultural contamination,
but rather than accept this as inevitable, he embarked on
a global journey to find farmers and communities proving that
(02:00):
there's another way. Kelsey's journey took him from traditional Hawaiian
collo patches to protecting cattle from lions alongside Massai warriors.
He also discovered how chocolate could save resilient rainforests, and
met American farmers who've rejected the agrochemical industry entirely. Kelsey
found regenerative agriculture practices that build soil, sequester carbon, and
(02:23):
might even be our best shot at combating climate change.
His travels took him across five continents and revealed that
indigenous and traditional farming wisdom, combined with cutting edge soil science,
isn't just better for the planet, it can be more
profitable for farmers too. So we'll explore how agricultural practices
can connect us to everything from micasorial fungi to global
(02:45):
social justice, and why farmers are being farmed by corporation,
and as well what each of us can do to
support the regenerative future that starts in our own backyards
and can extend around the world. You can learn more
about Kelsey's work and regenerating Earth at his website Kelsey
Timmerman dot com. That's all one word, no space, no dash.
Kelsey Timmerman dot com. Will start the conversation right after
(03:09):
a brief commercial break. Welcome to the show, Kelsey, How
you doing this morning? Good?
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Well, thank you for joining me from an Airbnb and
Pittsburgh on your book tours. It must be quite a
thing to get a book out there.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Yeah, it's been a lot of fun about a lot
of people did some really cool things, like from a
jerky from Hoggs to all sorts of I can't even
remember all of them, to how alto like investors who
want to get in their general agriculture and I'm like,
I don't know what to do. You can talk to
this person. So it's been fun kind of connecting people
(03:49):
and things like that.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Well, the book is a great way to connect to
an entire world of thinking about regenerative agriculture. And thanks
for writing it. It was really an interesting read. But I
want to start off with what spurred this moment for you,
which was your own kids not being able to swim
in the pond near your home because of agricultural runoff,
because of your mother's lung polyps that were developed as
(04:11):
a result of airborne stuff in the environment. How did
all those fears drive you to write this book about solutions?
Speaker 3 (04:21):
I mean, for most of my life I've lived in
rural America. I got out a little bit in my
twenties and it pulled me back in. You know, it
was home for better or worse. My school used to
have a driver tract for the school day, if that
tells you anything. It was like I graduated like forty
seven students and the school was literally surrounded by corn
and soybeans. Everything was surrounded by corn and soybeans, and
(04:45):
to me, that was the country life.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
That was queen country living.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
And then bought a house in once the Indiana and
we lived like in town, and it just felt weird
because it was like you can look down and you
can see the mailboxes of you know, fifty houses, and
when it would snow at night time, there was like
never darkness because of the street lights and things like
(05:09):
that glowing off the snow. And so we wanted to
move out to the countryside to give our kids the
experience that my wife friend both had growing up. Out
we could hit a baseball as far as you want
to hit it. So we were looking at places and
there was a place that was gorgeous. We fell in
love with the outside. We're like, we don't even care
what the inside looks like. It's like twenty acres, half
(05:33):
of its woods, half of it is oh then it's
like the house and then like a three and a
half acre pond, which sounds like decadent and inf one's like,
oh my gosh, like that must cost Like this is Indiana, Okay,
So like the twenty acres is not that big of
a deal.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
And then we had this pond and I'm like, oh, well,
we go swimming in it.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
And then we discovered, well the pond isn't very deep,
and we were like, warre's is water coming from? While
the water's coming from, like the seven hundred and fifty
acres of runoff from the farms go into this three
and a half acre pond, so sometimes it comes gushing
through pretty big time.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
And so at first we're like, oh, we'll go swimming
in it, will hop in and we did.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
And then after a while you're thinking, okay, now when
did they spray? What did they spray? Are we swimming
in it? And farmers would be careful too with this stuff.
They would say, oh yeah, you wo don't want to
get in that this time of year. And so that
kind of makes you just think about what's happening like
upstream of out pond and I know and I can
see it, and so yeah, you can talk to any
(06:37):
family and they had some type of malady that could
be connected with the industrial practices that many of our
farmers have adopted, or maybe many of their grandparents have adopted,
and they're still doing so my mom has a nodule
and her lung from fungus from chicken manure. You go
to funerals of a farmer in their fifties and their
(06:59):
children whispering that maybe it was the chemicals that it
got dowsed with. So it's not quite the clean country
living that I was thinking about. And maybe when I
was a kid, I just didn't care think about that
kind of stuff. And then you have your own kids
and you're like, well, maybe we shouldn't do this, like
maybe we shouldn't be in this water very often.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Well, you come from a long line of farmers, how
do you reconcile that family legacy with what farming has become?
Are they even the same kind of practice at this point?
Speaker 3 (07:32):
So my grandfather farmed until he was eighty five, and
my dad grew up on that farm, and by the
time I was born, that farm was a much different farm.
So Dad, as a kid, he talked, so we went
to visit the family farm. So because his since sold
like many family farms, and grandpa owned one hundred acres
and then he rented one hundred acres, so he had
(07:55):
two hundred acres of corn soybeans, which is like you
could not evecome close to make a living on that. Today,
I mean half the year the farmers lose money. And
if you're growing soybeans you can maybe get like three
four hundred dollars an acre up per year.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Right.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
But so on the farm the dad grew up on,
they had turkeys and guineas and hogs and the cow
for melk and just all sorts of animals. And the
turkeys were free range, not because they, you know, were
some free range organic farmers, That's just how it was.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
So the grocery store was in the yard rather than
you went down to the store to buy everything. But
where we were growing.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
They ate a lot of their own food, right, And
that's what farmers did. You ate food.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
And today, like I have a small garden and I
have some chickens, and I probably feed myself more calories
than the average farmer who owns thousands of acres in
the Midwest, which is bonkers. So that there was a
even that Dad tells these amazing stories that had a
(09:02):
hog got loose one time and got into the woods,
and I mean that's like heaven for a hog, and
so they never could get it. And as kids they
were terrified of like this hog because it would have
gotten quite huge, and so they just gotta worried about
that kind of thing. So that those are the things
that we don't worry about today. Our animals aren't out
there running around. They're in barns, So it's not like
(09:25):
this hyper focus on one thing. And maybe you have
hogs or chickens and you can and then you buy
more land so you can spread that manure on that land.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And that's the reason you have the land is.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Because you have to do something with this manure because
of state regulations. So it's a much different thing. It's
not near as diverse, and it supports way fewer families
than it used to.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Well, in this monocultural environment, you describe farmers as being
farmed by corporations. How does this industry real farming approach,
locked so many small farmers into a cycle of debt
and penury.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Yeah, So if you think about farming, the people farming
today are farming in a way that they're maybe their
grandparents are bought into and you can't you can't blame
them for that. So if someone shows up and wants
to sell you some fertilizer and they dump it in
your yard and say come back and check this out.
(10:28):
A double days later, grass is greener, taller. Well that's
money to a farmer. So they bought into it, and
they didn't know the negative repercussions of the synthetic fertilizer,
of the synthetic chemicals that they would spray. And now
we do know. But this entire system has been shaped
around industrial agriculture to the crop insurance has to be
(10:53):
planted by a certain date, would be planning by certain
dates in order to get crop insurance. One of the
things I learned I was far with a buddy and
which means writing in this tractor that was driven by satellite,
and you know, we were on the same basketball team.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
And like right before we.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Got in the tractor, I'm like, oh, this is a seed.
And it was like at smurf colored seed and it
was a soybean seed.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
He's like, oh, don't touch that. I'm like, what do
you mean.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
He's like, throw it down, wash your hands. Like immediately,
it's like and it's like a seed. You know, most
things that you can you can grow, you can pretty
much eat their seeds too, well, Like you would not
want to eat this. It was coded and fungus side,
and the company if you farm with the coated seeds,
which costs more money, of course, then they will fully
(11:37):
guarantee if the seed is bad.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
But if you.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Farm naked, which is like the natural seed that's not coded,
then they'll only like refund you fifty percent of the
cost of the seed. So all this is directed towards
the farmers staying on this one path, and if you
step off that path, you're not going to have the
same supports in place. So the people who have the
(12:03):
supports in place from the crop insurance and the payouts.
I have farmers in that close family friends who have
gotten millions and millions of dollars over the last few
decades and like farm support and you can read it
in the newspaper and you can look it up online.
It's all public information. But if you're a smaller farmer,
(12:24):
the supports are not there. So yeah, there's not the
system in place.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Well, there's another area where you talk about where industrial
operations just dominate, and that's the CAFO, the concentrated animal
feeding operation, which is an environmental disaster. But you also
went to Kenya spent time with the farmers there and
discovered that there are ways to raise cattle that it
actually helped restore the land. Talk about how we should
(12:50):
raise the meat that we choose to eat.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah, so I have family, family and friends that have
like chicken cafoes and turkey cafoes where the birds come in,
they're in there for a certain amount of time and
then they go off to some other building and they
don't own the birds. I asked one of my buddies,
I was like, could you eat one of the turkeys
from your barn?
Speaker 2 (13:10):
He's like, well, they would probably let me do that.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
And I'm like, if I told my Kenyon farmers that
you couldn't eat the turkey the animals that you were raising,
they would think it is nuts.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Right.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
So I got a chance to visit Kenya and hang
out with a Massi Massi are cattle herders for many
many hundreds thousand years or something. Yeah, a long time.
So they let me go. We went out to where
they were farming, where they had their herd, and.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
I was like I was meeting the herders.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I was like, we could I just stay with you
all for the day And they're like, I guess you can.
So the trucks with the guns left and I am
there with the Massi who have sticks, and one of
the massahs like I saw a lion over there, like,
let's go.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Check it out.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
And I'm like, that's the exact opposite reaction that I
would have, like let's go the opposite direction. So I
hung out with them for the day and we just
walked a mile to the Mara River to get a
drink for the cattle, and then we walked back and
that was our day. And we protected the herd, kept
them bunched and moved, which is a practice the Messia
have done for a long time. And the area that
(14:22):
we were, of course, was a former corn pivot. It's
like the industrial system wants the whole world to be
covered with corn, and the people who own the corn
acreage were no longer able to make a living, so
they open up to a conservancy and they work with
their neighbors to everyone to get their cattle together and
then have it in one big herd like it used
(14:43):
to be, or like you would see the animals like
move through nature because they are bunched for safety, and
they constantly moved because the safety are from predators. So
like lions or you know in our country, wolves or whatever. Uh,
And they keep moving because they don't want to eat
grass that they've already eaten or pooped on and feed on.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
So they keep moving. So this isn't the natural way
of things.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
How does that help the soil, because that's the key
is they're moving around, they're not just filling one place
with filth.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Yeah, so they you know, they're they're poop and pee,
they step on it. It gets you know, kind of
errates the ground a little bit, seats in and that
encourages more fertility in the soil. Actually, when they bite
onto the soil, bite onto the grass, if you don't
let them, they're too long with too long, they'll get it,
(15:39):
eat it all.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
The way down to the roots.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
But if you just say, bite the part of the
grass off, it encourages the roots to grow longer. So
you have these roots growing longer, and then there's always something,
always living root in the ground and so that holds
the soil more. And that also through photosynthesis, can put
carbon back into the which is one of the kind
(16:02):
of good benefits of regenera of ogriculture as well.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
So another interesting passage. It feels almost counterfactual if you
have taken history as it's given to us, and that
relates to the Green Revolution. Norman Barlog started this with
his innovations and weak productivity. It's credited with saving billions
of people from starvation, but you go into a lot
of detail about the continuing price we're paying for that.
(16:27):
Can you explain some of the things we should be
aware of about the Green Revolution's detrimental impacts?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, so, I mean, first off, I had a pretty
big positive impact at the time. Mean, it's credit with
saving like a billion lives, and there's few people that
can say they came up with some idea it's gon
save a billion lives. But maybe we've outgrown that, Maybe
our population has outgrown that, maybe our technology has outgrown that.
So while I was in Kenya, I visited this young
(16:54):
woman named Celestein who's basically a permaculture activist and maybe
an anti green revolution activist. So she's seen in her
community where these modern seeds and fertilizers are often given
out as a loan from NGO's like leaning local nonprofits,
and you know they give them out and like, well,
when you when you harvest your crop, then you can
(17:16):
pay us back. And she took me to visit a
farmer who she was a mother of eleven. That's a
lot of kids. She had five after harvest, she had
five bags of maize in the corner. Four of them
she was going to sell, and one she was going
to eat. After she sold those, she would still be
in debt to the nonprofit organization. And she was going
(17:41):
to eat the one bag of rice, which would last
a month, and then she would have.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
To buy rice or buy maize.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
So she was buying the maize after she ate that
one bag at the highest possible price. And when she
was selling her maize, she was selling everyone was selling
their maids. She was selling the lowest possible price. And
so this has had some pretty negative consequences, and Celsine
wanted to me to see like the most negative of them.
(18:07):
So she's like, come and check out sanding in my village.
And I had no idea like what sanding meant. So
we're walking through her village and then we come to
this area's big open area looks like it's been bombed
out size of Central Park, just sand. And what has
happened is that farmers who had stepped on to this
(18:29):
kind of industrial technology treadmill of it where you have
to keep using it once you start using it, going
to use more of it. They had lost hope that
their soil could provide their families with the life. They
wanted to provide them anymore, so and they could do
a short term kind of game where they could sell
the sand beneath their soil because it was an area
(18:50):
that had really coarse sand that was good for construction,
so they would do that, and the people that were
digging it out were big excavators, as people their neighbors
with like wooden hose that would then dig it out.
Sometimes it would collapse on top of them. And many
of the people working and sanding were the neighbors who
had sold out their land and I'll got dug out
(19:12):
and now they were just trying to make a living
in some other way. And we're standing there in this
space of degeneration, and you see these pillars and I'm like,
what are those pillars?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Why didn't they dig that part? She's like, well, those are.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
The family's graves. They bury their dead around the side
of the homes, and out of respect, the diggers have
dug around those graves. She said, some places you can
see bones sticking out, and some places you can see
clothing sticking out. But you know, she turned her back
to that this absolute degeneration, to me the most depressing
(19:43):
part of the whole entire book. And she looked at
me about how excited she was about the future and
how she was going to pass on these practices, these
permaculture practices which she was learning, which were kind of
echoes of the past, reminded her of the way her
grandma used to farm and to combat the destrial agriculture
that was forcing people to sell their land for sand.
(20:07):
I don't think that these technologies are good for subsistence
farmers focusing on one crop and if that crop has
a gets wiped out by a past of some sort
which has happened, or disease which has happened, then what
do they eat?
Speaker 1 (20:25):
So is the right way to think about the configuration
of a rural community like this, of different farming practices
and strategies and different crops and animals, so that everybody
is contributing to a comprehensively nutritious diet within that community.
And I guess the extension of that question is just
(20:46):
do we need more small farmers.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
I mean, I would say yes.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
The question is that we're going to able to find
more small farmers if people want to actually farm and
do the work. It's not easy if you've had a
garden before. Like I'm on a road trip for three
weeks here, Oh my gosh. You know, my wife is
juggling all our balls at home, and I go home
and that garden is going to be the weeds are
going to be the tallest that they were taller than
my tomato plants. So it is not an easy thing
(21:12):
to do. So do people want to do it? Where
three quarters of American farm workers are immigrants, we used
to have to rely on each other more.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
And this book is mostly.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
About connection and how many of these connections have been broken,
our connection with nature, our connection.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
With each other.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
And many of these places where connections used to exist
between the animals and plants, manure to the plants, plants
to the animals, have been broken and now a product
or service is in place, and it has made things easier.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
But at what costs.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Well, that's the striking thing about regenerative thinking is that
it's systems thinking in practice. And you're right about the
connection between chloroplast lions, fungui and how that's all connected
to what we eat and how we interact with one another.
Can you explain the system that's producing food for the
American shopper briefly? I know it's a complex question. Yeah,
(22:11):
I mean, I think there's natural or synthetic at this point.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Oh, it is totally synthetic that we're eating off of.
I think we've come so disconnected, we've we've lost.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
The how much of this is like a miracle?
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Like someone people maybe have a planet sunflower before you
hold that sunflower se in your hand, you can roll
it around in the palm of your hand, and then
you stick that bad boy in the ground. You know,
you come back, you know two months later, three months later,
it's taller than you are, like, and it has a
thousand more seeds on it. Like, let's just stop for
a moment and acknowledge just the absolute miracle that is
(22:49):
a single seed. And for most of us, we don't
we don't think about that at all anymore. The break
from the the farm to our lives, like it has
been a generation, two generations, three generations, which one where
when was the last time your family was farmers.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
They moved off of the farm, and my great grandparents
moved off the farm in nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Okay, So, like you know, they had a different relationship
with the land than your parents, and and.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
My dad grew up on that farm and had a
different experience than when he moved to Evansville in Indiana.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
But they didn't feel like they lost something, but they
did in retrospect, what did we lose?
Speaker 3 (23:34):
And we lost that knowledge that were passing down from
generation to generation. Many of the farmers I meant that
one of their general farmers I met. One of the
things I add to what is it regenera of ogriculture
is that they believe that humans can be a force
of good and there's some type of like spiritual connection.
Not to get too woo woo with it, but that
(23:55):
like the way they talk about it, and the farmers
in Minnesota and Wisconsin may not have the same language
or stories around it that the indigenous farmers I met
in Hawaii and Columbia and Kenya have. But it's like
this remembering that is happening where the industrial system that
like outside my house in this in this this spring,
(24:15):
I really noticed that you can take a handful of dirt,
just throw it into the air and it disappears.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
It's just like dust.
Speaker 3 (24:21):
It's a desert, and that soil is treated as if
it's just meant there to hold a seed, because we're
gonna bring all the synthetic fertility to it. We're gonna
spray all the chemicals that protect it from the weeds
where nature diversity would protect it more from weeds and
pests and things like that.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
So it's just like this substrate to hold a seed.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
We're not thinking about all the life from the fungi
that's in the soil that helps bring nutrients through the plant.
We're not thinking about the just the miracle that is
sort of synthesis well, and.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
The connection between people that yielded that passion of knowledge
from one generation to another as well. I mean, when
we talk about indigenous communities, it's they're indigenous because they
are embedded in and grew up among the nature that
they coexist with. We think of it as something we manage.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, for sure, it's a place that they are a
part of.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Native Hawaiian see the collo plant, which is taro as
I think it says an older brother and that's not
uncommon to look at a mountain and have some type
of familial relation to that mountain in some way, some
connection that's not just all that mountains called this. If
(25:40):
you go up it, you can see out like now,
there's like a relationship with that, with those places. And
we've all been indigenous to somewhere at some point in
time in our ancestry, and we've been moved from that,
and our roots have been cut and they've been shortened,
and we continue to move around a lot. But what
if we stopped a little bit and stop to observe
(26:01):
a place and think about see it in all four seasons.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Over the course of years. I think about where I
live used to be.
Speaker 3 (26:08):
The home of the Miamia, the Miami Indians, and the Delaware,
and they were there for and still are been there
for thousands of years.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
And then I think about.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
The modern farming technique of a round up ready corn
that's been here since the nineties. And so we think
we know agriculture, We think we know this place where
we're planning.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
They've been there for.
Speaker 3 (26:34):
Just thousands of thousands of years and we just let's
scratching the surface.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Well, we're going to have to take a quick commercial
break so that the industrial economy can intrude on this conversation.
But we're going to be right back right, stay tuned, folks, Hey,
welcome back to Sustainability in your ear, and let's get
back to the discussion with Kelsey Timmerman. He's author of
(26:59):
Regenerating Earth. If it's a recent book from Patagonia, you know,
they don't just make clothes, they make information for environmentally
responsible living. Love those books. Kelsey. In Brazil, you discovered how,
as you put it, chocolate could save the rainforest. Can
you take it into the moment when you realize that
and explain the regenerative connection that de Mendez chocolate is cultivating.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
So as a chocolate eater, I love to hear this news. Right,
if you eat a certain type of chocolate, you just
eat it guilt free. Also that chocolate has no calories
or harmful sugar. I'm joking about that, but so yes,
Sezar de Mendez is I met him in Blim, Brazil,
which is in the Amazon region of Brazil, and which
(27:45):
parts of the Amazon now, which is to get back
a little bit industract culture look like farms in Indiana
once where once there was abundance of rainforest, now there's
a field of corn, there's a field of soybeans, and
the grain bends and the Ford trucks and the John
Deere tractors looks the same.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
So anyway back to de Mendez. So de Mendez had
been working in.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
The chocolate industry for for years and was not like
loving it as much as he used to. And we
started to see that there could be a different way.
And so he started to talk go off into the
rainforest and talk to people about their caca because cacal
like originated in the Amazon, and so there's you know,
(28:28):
types of cacal that aren't out and generally included in
the making of.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Your chocolate bar.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Though, he started to visit folks and uh, you know
they have you can eat the caca beans.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
You can make alcohol from.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
And of course it has like this fruity substance around
each of this each of the be the beans receives
and so they had a relationship with this already, but
not necessarily turn it into chocolate bars. And they didn't
know about the whole process of fermenting the bee like
in that in the place where they before they get
shipped to like a chocolate company, and so the Yanamami
(29:08):
he deep into the rainforest at times. In fact, he
joked once he was with some anthropologists going to go
visit some people, and overnight he was in his tent
and heard.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
A jaguar outside. He's like, oh gosh, it's going to
come and get me.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
And then he got out of his tent and the
jaguar run away right away, he thinks because he smelled
so bad. So he was an adventurer. Some people call
him the Santa Claus of chocolate. Other people have called
him the Indiana Jones of chocolate.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
And so he works with these communities and to.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Help them, like know about this processing of the cacal
beans before it can become chocolate. And he has developed
these line of chocolate bars, the Mindez chocolate that have
the name of it is the name of like the farmer.
He gets it from a single farmer and has their
story on the back. He shows it to them our partners.
(29:59):
He pays them way more than they would get in
any other way.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Yeah, and that story is one of the things that
makes Tremendous so interesting is that it's not a massified story.
It's a very personal individuals experience of food. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
And one of the ways that he's trying to preserve
the rainforests and others are trying to preserve the rainforest
is to show that there can be modern economic value
because the especially with the Boston arrow regime that was
in place a few years ago, and many people in
the past and still to this day look at the rainforest,
(30:35):
look at the Amazon as this void that doesn't produce
anything for their gross domestic product, and so here it
is one of the most ecologically important places on our planet,
and it's worthless to them, and they think that the
people who live there need to be modernized, which is
kind of a terrible word to throw at these cultures.
And so folks like the Mendez are being able to
(30:58):
give income to some of the folks who live in
the Amazon that they then can spend to educate their
children at universities, can they become lawyers, to become doctors,
to access medicine when they need to, so they can
kind of interact with the community on their own terms
(31:19):
and fight for their land because it is being encroached
upon all the time.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
You relate a number of stories about American farmers who
were inspired by ancient and indigenous practices. What's a particular
practice or generative practice? It really blew your mind when
you thought, why didn't we figure that out before?
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Yeah, I mean one of the ones that stands up
to me is just having diverse plants together and how
they do things, like, for past they mask the smell
of a certain plant, and so if you have a
bunch of diverse plants, they can't smell that one thing
they would come after and how off Also a plant
(31:59):
might attract the predator of a pest of another planet.
Where the diversity of life manages itself and keeps things
in balance. So that was one of the ones I
really you know, you plant marigolds on the edge of
your garden, and I knew that it's kind of like
the the one oh one version of that. But to
(32:20):
embraces so much more diversity gives your system, gives nature
so much more resilience, and you need those chemicals less
or not at all.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Well, you mentioned your garden before. How do you practice
that kind of a wisdom? Yeah, in your own garden.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
So you know, I had sheep and all this, and
I'm like the counties worse shepherd, and I might be
the counties worse gardener too, because I travel a lot
and I leave my garden, I come back months later
and I'm like, well, I guess it's.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Full of weens.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
The beautiful thing is that you still can get food
from it. It's just amazing how resilient it is. So
I've done a couple of things. The cover crops. So
I planted winter rye in my garden. So over the
wintertime I had like a small you know, you know,
a couple of inches of green sticking out of it,
(33:11):
and then the spring it blew up and you smash
that down. It can act as a thatched, so it's
supressed weeds. I didn't have much luck at that the
first time that I did it, so I ended up
having to cut it down and like till, you know,
try to till it in or take it off or so,
but still having that living root in the ground all
winter where wind is blowing across the garden, the soil
(33:32):
is standing there. When it rains, that rain is going
into the ground. Like There's so many positive things. So
that's sometime I tried in the garden. Also, composting has
been a really easy thing to do. That has really
reduced the amount.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Of waste that we throw out in the trash van,
Like we don't.
Speaker 3 (33:51):
I see people with two trash oats after one week,
and we've got like we could do it one every
three weeks.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
You know, I moved to live on a couple of
acres of wilderness, but I'm always struck by people who
don't compost. You know, they'll pick it all up and
they'll ship it off to the transfer station and then
they'll buy fertilizer or replace the biomass that they lost. Yeah,
I mean it's a shame.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Again, it's just an example of a connection that has
been broken. And maybe our grandparents did this without even
thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
So do we need new ideas or all the answers
already there but just kind of lost.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
So my take away for this has been often if
you watch some documentaries on our gener Aaric culture, especially
once produced you know over five years ago or more,
they would act like Generalaric culture is this new and
exciting thing, and it's not. It's an old and exciting
thing that we are relearning and remembering. And the riots
(34:53):
of that have been from the digitous people around the world.
Who you know, like Sir Albert Howard went to educate
He was a farm educator agrandom US who went from
England to India to teach them how to farm correctly. Well,
they taught him how to farm correctly and he's taking
those practices back and he was with Thedale Institute for
(35:14):
a while in Rdale Organic Gardening, and you know they
start to spread those practices and so sometimes it can
be like, well I.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
Learned this from Rdale's and they're the original.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
They played an important part in the American organic and
regenitor of agriculture, but their roots are in indigenous soil
as well.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Like a good healthy ecosystem. Why do you talk to
your kids about the future. I mean, you know, they
avoid the local pond in your property, they see your
mother's lung condition. How do you talk to them about
what they might want to aspire to do? And do
you say farming is an option?
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
You know, they've been on a box before where the
high boys prayers come out. We've had to like run
to the house to not breathe it in, and so
they're aware of this is it's just you know, like
when I grew up, it was just completely natural to them.
Now I started to question some of this, and we
do things a little differently where we live, and we
don't mow one hundred percent of our yard, which is god,
(36:18):
I know.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Bad neighbors. We are bad neighbors. We love an acre
of grass.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
Girl up and it's got beautiful walnut trees and wild
flowers and all that stuff in it. So we're bad neighbors.
But there's so much more life of the bees and
other insects out there, good in but ones that bite you.
A lot of triggers out there too at times. So
they are living in this and the thing for now,
my daughter sixteen, she's actually thinking that she would like
(36:44):
to get into some type of environmental like being outside career,
and we're not putting any pressure on that whatsoever. So
you don't exactly what that looks like. But the important
thing has been for them to they love to be outside.
My son has started to kind of recut some of
the trails that we had in our woods and love
(37:05):
to be out there. He's thirteen and he's autistic and
for him to be outside is man. It's good for him.
It's good for him to be out there. It's good
for him to do work and sweat. And the thing
we want them to is to know a place, to
be part of a place. And like the I went
to visit ar Waco and Northern Columbia Indigenous group and
(37:27):
I was like, Oh, teach me her farmiing practices.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
You know, that's what kind of what I was thinking.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
And they're like, sit down, we're going to do a
lot of sitting and we're going to ask you questions
you ask yourself.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
You don't have to tell us the answers.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
You're just gonna sit and you're gonna question your own
intentions that you're what you're asking for nature from nature.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
And why you are here.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
And that sitting and observing and be connected to a
place came up again and again with indigenous farmers. The
one of the farmers in on the on the Kwai
said asked me the question that he asked like kids
when he's trying to help them relearn some of their culture.
It's like, what river do you belong to? I think
(38:07):
that's an awesome question. So we've gotten kayaks and we've interact
with our river a heck of a lot more than
we used to.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
We hike down to it, we go swimming in it.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
Even though gets back to those chemical questions a little
bit as well.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
So it's tough.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
I mean, we live among the degradation. And but I
think this journey, largely from me, was one of hope,
and I hope that kids can get a sense of
that because back to Salestine and Kenya, with her back
to degeneration, she looked forward to the future full of
hope and joy if she can like, how could we not? Well?
Speaker 1 (38:47):
I was struck by the fact that you discovered that
over and over that it was human connections that were
really re knitting our relationship with nature. And here for
a lot of the people who are listening, they're one
opportunit need to support regenerative farming is to shop for
regenerative food. What's your advice about doing that and what
questions do you should suggest somebody ask about the food
(39:09):
that they're going to buy.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
Yeah, so you might see the word regenerative start to
pop up in farmers' markets.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
It's in Indiana.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
It's interesting when I was just in San Francisco, they're
not seeing it pop up so much. I don't know
if it's just like because everyone's doing it. I don't
know exactly what that means. But you can go to
Regenerative No, it's Regeneration International's website. Click on farm map
and they'll be farmers that are self identify themselves as
regenerative farmers near you that you could reach out to
(39:37):
and go visit their farm.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
That's why I would ask you to do.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Go visit one of these farms and if it truly
is regenerative, and it probably I mean it probably is.
It might not be certified in some way, but you
can feel it from the farmer's enthusiasm. That then connection
for the place. They want people to come out look
and see and feel and smell and hear how this
place is different. So just don't buy something that's regenerative,
(40:04):
which you you know you should You should do is
start to incorporate it in small ways, especially with meat.
I think is a big one. But it's not just
we're a shop our way to a better world. Part
of this is a heart shift, the cultural shift that
needs to happen. The way we see ourselves. It's not
the dominators of nature but part of it. So you know,
plant something, adopt the local park, start to have more
(40:28):
of a relationship with your river, where you're seeing a
place and being part of it of every single season
for years to come.
Speaker 2 (40:36):
And I'm sure there's groups that protect those places that
then you could volunteer for.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
So I think it is just to say just shop
in a new way. I think it's pretty kind of
a It needs to be more than that.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
Thanks, that's that's that's wise, counsel, because you're talking about
not simply understanding where the food came up from, but
becoming part of that system, becoming small eyes indigenous to
your food ecosystem.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Absolutely, we need to be part of the places that
we are eating from.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
When when possible.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
I mean, I just I'm drinking coffee this morning, and
like obviously, you know, not a lot of coffee growing
in Indiana, So that's kind of now.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
I've actually traveled to coffee.
Speaker 3 (41:18):
Farmers around the world to talk see other lives are
affected by things like organic confair trade, but most people
have not, and so it's not we almost have to
do one hundred percent right, just take small steps and
over the US, Oh, I love this local cheese that
I'm getting, or you know, I can get milk delivered
from from this company, or go and get it. Or
(41:40):
there's an intensive vegetable operation near me, intensive in the
way like intensive labor, that's farming using Reginia practices. Those
probably exists wherever you are, wherever you're listening to this
that you can become a member of the CSA with.
So those are things that you can do and kind
of connect with and be part of.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
You know, you ended your book by saying reading the
book is the place to start. And I was going
to ask what step two? But you just answered my question. Kelsey,
Thank you for the time today and for the book.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Thanks. I'm excited for people to hear these stories of
the folks.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
I met, get them in their heads, in their heart.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Welcome back to Sustainability in your ear. You've been listening
to my conversation with author Kelsey Timmerman and his new book,
Regenerating Earth is available now from Patagonia. You can learn
more about Kelsey and his work at Kelsey Timmerman dot
com Kelsey Timmerman's all one word, no space, no dash,
Kelsey Timmerman dot com. Regeneration is more than the word
(42:44):
that will supersede sustainability in the climate lexicon. It's a
different way of thinking than traditional sustainability, which is focused
on limiting environmental damage. Regeneration is a way of thinking
and specifically thinking like nature about the flows of energy
and materials through our economy, social infrastructures, and our individual lifestyles.
(43:06):
Regenerative thinking doesn't recognize waste as something with no value. Instead,
it responds to waste to any leftovers after a life
process is complete as a potential input to another life process.
That could be turning packaging into a compostable that can
feed the soil, or recovering a byproduct of industrial production
to create feedstock for another use, for example, by turning
(43:29):
fly ash into the basis for low carbon concrete. As
egomterials technologies as explained on the show in the Past
or in the agricultural world that Kelsey explored, restoring the
soil with active composting, no till planting strategies and supporting
diverse ecosystems by planting many different crops rather than a
monoculture of say corn, or just soil that cannot withstand
(43:53):
natural predators. Without chemicals that pollute the soil, air and
water on which life relies Kelsey unearthed regenerative agricultural knowledge
that has been buried by industrial processes. We have all
the knowledge needed to restore the land to resilient productivity,
but it requires being attentive to the systems and complexity
(44:15):
of nature instead of trying to simplify and standardized life
to fit profit margins. Yes, profits are important preserving an
organization or a smallholder farm, but they're just one form
of value created when undertaking regenerative practices. But unfortunately, we
don't account for most of that value, such as the
ongoing ability of soil to provide nourishment for crops, or
(44:37):
the safety of people living near farmland. Industrial agriculture, like
all extractive industries, fails to count the many benefits of
healthy land, water, and people that are treated as financial
externalities in today's economy. Each of us can use our
financial influence to make companies pay attention. We can do
that by buying regenerative products. So do take a moment
(45:00):
to find the regenerative farms near you. Search at Regeneration
International dot org. That's all one word, no space, no dash,
Regeneration International dot org and look for the farm map
in the menu at the top. Of the page. Paying
a visit to a regenerative farm can open your eyes
to the bounty nature provides when cared for instead of
(45:20):
just exploited. Now, perhaps the advent of AI, which supposedly
will put all of us out of jobs, will create
an abundance of labor that allows more people to earn
a living caring for the land, for healthy farmland, for forests,
for watersheds and wetlands. In other words, we might be
able to afford to let people get their hands dirty
and the glorious complexity that is nature. But one way
(45:43):
or another, humans must find a way to restore nature,
not just live off it. Indigenous communities recognize that unbreakable
bond between people in place, and Kelsey's journey toward recognizing
what he called the miracle of reproduction is a map
to discover how we can live with and for nature
because it is part of all of us and we
(46:05):
are part of it. We've got several regenerative leaders coming
up on the show, so stay tuned, and would you
take a moment to consider sharing one of the more
than five hundred episodes of sustainability in your ear with
your friends or your family, Writing a review on your
favorite podcast platform is a way to help your neighbors
find us, because folks, you are the amplifiers that can
(46:25):
spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell
your family, your friends, your coworkers, the people you meet
on the street that they can find sustainability in your
ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor
of podcast goodness they prefer. Thank you for your support.
I'm met Tracliffe. This is sustainability in your ear and
(46:47):
we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In
the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of
one another, and let's all take care of this beautiful
planet of ours, the only one we've got. Have a
green day, says Speak, and
Speaker 2 (47:03):
A ten sixtis replace
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