Very special panel because now we're going to be talking about the importance of food.
And in particular, we've got three people up here who are going to talk about how they've
gotten very up close and personal with it.
And so I'd like to welcome up Dr. Ryan Cole, Dr. Robert Malone.
Please come on up.
Take some seats.
Yeah.
So.
Sure, sure.
It's up to you.
One, two, three.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now.
Wow.
This is going to be, like I said, a very different panel from any that we've had here at IMA
in the past.
We've heard about the importance of food and sunlight and vitamin D, almost like whatever
for God and nature gave us was important.
So three people up here, and I'm slipping also into presenter off
of moderator role, all three of us have farms.
And so we're going to talk about that a little bit
and also the importance of maybe new models
of organizing together.
Robert's got a great story
about an intentional community that's formed in South Africa.
But before we get into that, the why.
So I have my own why.
Why are you farming, like macro picture, why are you doing this?
I'm a doomsday prepper.
Pithy to the point, I like it.
No, I love the earth from childhood.
I was always a suburbanite
and my dad always had the little 12 by 12 postage stamp garden.
My grandparents always had a garden from post-World War II
in the Victory Garden era and just whether it was grandma's raspberries
or apricots or dad's cherry tomatoes, I always knew I would garden.
But when I was 18 or so, I bought a Reader's Digest book
that was called Back to Basics
and learning traditional American skills that most of us have lost.
And that was kind of my inspiration.
I read that book and just I knew I had years of schooling and debt
to acquire and go through and discharge over the years.
But once I got to that point where I can have a piece of land,
I think it's just prima.
All right.
Thank you.
What's the why behind your garden?
So our current farm, I think, is number six.
I've been doing small farming and landscaping and irrigation
and particularly orchard work, starting when I was about 12.
And my mother's side of the family used to have a big ranch,
sheep and wheat in eastern Oregon.
So we have, where my mom was born is now a ghost town technically.
So it's kind of deep in my roots.
I spent summers with her older sister on a Idaho, you know,
Eastern Oregon border dairy farm.
You mean greater Idaho now, eventually.
Yeah, okay.
From your lips to God's ears.
So long history, but also it's kind of deep in our marriage,
in our souls, that we balance the demands of this kind
of technical world that we live in, quasi-academic,
with something that centers us and brings us back closer.
And then it's gained new importance in momentum
as in our topic area today is food in particular,
but I think also the importance
of intentional communities is something
that we had become very sensitized to, partially consequent
to about a decade of breeding draft horses,
which brought us closely into contact with Mennonite
and Amish communities.
And so we learned a lot of kind of the ethic and the mechanism of how
to operate, in my opinion, the Amish and the Mennonites
are the only small farmers left in the United States
that actually make it work in a business sense.
And there's a lot of fundamentals to that and there's a lot of upside
in terms of what it does for you spiritually,
but in particular what it does for your children.
And then the other vector in this is the growing awareness
of the importance of intentional communities.
And that in a world in which so much around us has been corrupted
by the economic forces of kind of monopolistic practices,
and not just in medicine, but in ag food, food processing,
everything that I've come to believe strongly that we are facing
about another couple decades of having to find a way to tunnel
through into the future
through an increasingly totalitarian structure that's
being imposed on us top down.
And how do we do this?
and of course I'm very influenced by the writings of Ayn Rand
and in particular Atlas Shrugged.
Hence why our substack was originally called who is Robert Malone
as opposed to who is John Galt.
So that's kind of the genesis of it.
Thank you.
No, you're the moderator.
Why did you farm?
Thank you.
Well, likewise I had an origin story which I don't know why.
I just, I always had a garden.
When I was in graduate school at Duke, I had a vegetable garden,
and then I got goats as my first sort of experiment.
And then I found there's an old Persian proverb that goes back thousands
of years that says, if you have no problems, get a goat.
It's accurate.
There's a reason they write things down and pass them on.
And so I sort of trial by fire.
And then later I came across this work that I do now
which is understanding at a systems level how does our economy tie
together with our energy systems and then also our environment.
I don't know if you saw, Guardian just reported
that the bee collapsed last year
in the United States was the worst ever.
My silent spring now that terrorizes me for about five years now is I stand
under a blooming apple tree and I hear nothing, no buzzing.
And if I get bees, I'll hear some buzzing, but it's just one buzzing.
There's no minor bees, which are these little ones
that are brightly colored.
There's no different sizes of bumblebees anymore.
And I live in a very rural part of western Massachusetts.
We don't have ag spraying.
There's really no explanation for this,
but something humans are doing is my hypothesis, is causing this.
And insects are a 440 million year old food web, and we are,
it's very complex, and we're busy shredding it and pretending
as if what Trump's doing on trade policy this week is the most
important thing, and I don't think it is.
And so I look at it that way, and I also understand that in 1920,
if you were a farmer, it was a net contributing process
to our species in the sense
that you would expend one calorie of energy.
Muscle calorie, you know, early diesel or steam technology.
You expend one, you get 10 back.
Every calorie we've eaten here this weekend has secretly 10
to 20 calories of fossil fuels baked into them.
They're just there, I'm walking oil, so are you.
When you look at that, you understand that we have no plan,
there is zero plan in this country for how we're going to navigate
that part of our story, which is coming faster
than most people realize.
You say totalitarian might be an organizing principle,
but for me it was, wow, maybe I should have a few percent
of my own food production under my own control.
So that was sort of the stick driving me.
You know, I was like, oh, maybe I should learn how to grow some food.
And the carrot was what both of you talked about.
Now, I would run towards this story,
not from something I'm worried about because this really fits
into Evie's and my life.
We create beauty.
We get to live in relationship with things that are way
too complicated to understand like soil and cows, you know.
And it's got its own spiritual and just grounding
that's really important.
So that's how we kind of came to it.
It was a little fear based and now it's.
I'm really not a doomsday prepper.
You're not?
No, I just like to be prepared.
Yes, thanks.
Okay, maybe I am.
It depends on how you define it.
Wonderful.
Well, good.
So, but just some pictures help drive it.
I see we have.
It's going to actually be your pictures coming up first.
Okay. It's, I think the big green, big green, big green wind.
Right. So, back in the day, right after the anthrax attacks,
Jill and I were living in Rockville.
We just, I'm also a carpenter,
and we just rebuilt a historic home in downtown Rockville.
And the planes hit the towers and the business
that we had just started with a group in Norway collapsed.
The Norwegian investors pulled out and we were left high and dry.
And I ended up taking kind of a key turn in the road which was that I went
to work for a company by Frederick, Maryland that had the contract
for all the DOD biodefense products.
That's how I became an expert in biodefense.
And suddenly that was the opportunity for us to transition
from this more academic research and development life to a world
in which we could afford a farm.
And Jill found 50 acres that were, I like to say there's farmhouses
that were built by rich people in the 1800s
and then there was farmhouses built by poor people.
This one had a lot of bugs,
and I don't think there was hardly a straight floor in the place.
But we got 50 acres outside of Frederick, and then it was
like the dog that caught the mail truck.
What are you going to do with it?
And we'd always, we're passionate about horses.
It's one of the things that brought us together
as a couple when we were very young.
And so we decided, well, we were going to try to farm it.
we were going to learn the technology for farming with horses.
And we were going to start breeding Percheron draft horses,
in part because it's what we could afford.
And so this is just an example of me driving a team.
I'm actually a teamster now and also a farrier.
The term teamster comes from driving teams.
If you look at the emblem of the teamsters, it's a horse with hams
and a formal collar, a driving horse.
So this is me driving a Amish-built four-cart.
Amish will attach this at times to,
they love a Volkswagen diesel engine, driving a power takeoff
that you can then use to run an automatic baler.
The reason this is not a fully Amish four-cart is
because it has rubber tires, by the way.
And the Amish only want to use steel tires
because rubber tires take you away from the home.
There's a whole logic in the frame of reference
for Amish and Mennonites.
We all think they're a bunch of Luddites,
but in fact they just have different core parameters.
And they're incredibly innovative within those core parameters.
Let's see if I can make this work.
So just another, this is I'm driving an old John Deere plow
that I rebuilt with two of our mayors.
This is a recent shot.
Jill decided that we were going to try to grow her own wheat.
That's a big stretch.
We've never done anything like that on a small scale.
She now prepares her own flour.
She's an excellent baker.
We actually do use a wood-fired stove, but this is a long way
from that, this is a Bushog brand rototiller heavy duty
on our Kubota, and I'm plowing in,
we're talking about regenerative farming.
So we were able to buy in Virginia a plot of land
that is beautiful, it has great water.
Coming from California, that's important to us,
but the soil is not great.
And in regenerative farming, if you follow Joel Salatin
or anyone else in this space, you know that one
of the key things is regenerating the soil.
And one of the things that enables soil regeneration
and rebuilding of micronutrients that are missing in so much
of our commercial veg, et cetera, is manure.
Manure is the gift from God.
It is the universal fix-it to bad soil and to feeding earthworms.
So if you want to, if you're doing a good job, you'd see a lot
of earthworms, and if you're not, you don't.
So this is plowing in a huge amount of, how do I say this gently,
stall litter that has partially fermented.
Yeah, and into a plot that is an old horse paddock.
Why a horse paddock?
Because we don't want the deer to eat all the wheat.
So this is an experiment in progress, and we'll see how that goes.
That's me with the bush hog tiller.
And oh, this is, this is foaling.
I think this is our infamous Christmas bowl.
He was born on Christmas Day and he's one of my favorites
and there's other colts in the background investigating him
and that's his dam.
So we produce a high quality horse.
One of the lessons from the Amish and Mennonites
for making small farms work is you have
to have specialty products in a diverse income stream.
So if you go on an Amish farm,
everybody is working the little kids all the way up
and they're producing all kinds of products
that get marketed in different ways.
So as opposed to big ag, monocrop culture,
to do small farms successfully,
you have to have a diversified source.
And we've now been breeding horses for decades and settled
in on this high value Lusitano horse that we sell
to a specialty market and our colts typically start at 10
and go up to 20 as wienlings.
And then the price goes up the older they get.
So I drive, I once, this is with one of our sons, we used to show,
because you have to show horses in order to sell them.
So mini jerseys, we used to have mini jerseys back in Georgia
and milk them and we, the Jersey milk is super rich.
And so we would eat whole milk and make cheese from whole milk.
Many Jerseys aren't really that many.
They're about yay tall at the shoulder at the, and many Jersey heifers,
which is the technical name for the young cow, retail at about three grand,
three to five grand.
So another high value product that you can produce
and it's not about the milk.
Many jerseys are really popular
and there's also a little mini beef breed for small farmers.
This is a turkey and chicks.
We have a lot of birds.
This is rebuilding an old falling down building
on our current farm.
It's now fully built out.
We keep chickens, and they produce more eggs
than we can possibly eat.
And once again, we use some kind of exotic breeds.
These are whiting true blues, or the blue eggs.
And there is nothing like, the store-bought eggs are nothing
like what you can produce yourself,
but you've got to let them have bugs and greens and stuff
like that, and at the same time,
you've got to keep the hawks off them.
In our greenhouse, we do keep, we overwinter citrus.
And then in Virginia, you can see the snow outside in Virginia.
We then take them out.
This goes back to Thomas Jefferson actually had an orangery.
Just another scene of me putting out hay.
We do use a small RTV.
We, you know, having the right farm equipment is super important
to make your life easy, and we're just farming
about 40 acres, 40 to 50 acres.
An example of one of the eggs.
Just a scene of foals hanging out in the sunshine.
Yes, we do have bees, and we've got about 50
to 60 fruit trees now that are really coming on.
And at the moment, the peach bloom is going big,
and we've got plenty of bees,
and we're just starting our new hive.
We do have raised beds.
We use these hoops to keep the bugs out.
The dogs are ever-present, pretty much all our own breeding.
And with that, we pass off to Chris.
All right.
Same story, pretty much so.
In, for whatever reason, in August of 2019, Evie and I had this bug
that we were living in Greenfield,
little city in Massachusetts on a half acre.
And suddenly we just got like this overwhelming sense we got to move.
And so we were looking for 10 acres or more.
And my first lesson was there aren't that many pieces.
Because you can find over 10 acres, but if you have things like I wanted
to have good soil as a starting condition and it has
to have southern exposure, it's surprising how many things start
to fall off of that.
And if you want something like water, oh, you didn't want it to be molested
by agricultural practices so it's full of atrazine
or other long-term, it becomes a very complicated search.
So what we found was looking across four states,
I knew every single property, and we were competing
for all the good ones, because this was 2019.
Now, in 2020, that became an impossible project,
because everybody moved out of the cities all of a sudden.
So we got lucky.
This is where we ended up.
We were looking all over.
We were driving home one day.
We had made some offers on a questionable piece.
we were trying to make it work further in the Berkshires, didn't work.
Evie's crying, I'm on Zillow while driving, and this thing popped up.
So we called the realtor and she said, I can't show you the house
but you can walk the lands.
We walked out onto the field and we made a full price offer 100 yards
in because we could feel it.
So it's a beautiful place.
All those hills are contained by state land.
This is our first born on the property, Mojo.
He's now larger than anything in this room.
His head is like this big and he likes scritches.
He's a good boy.
And we have about 10 acres that we work.
Mostly I have that Swedish scowl on my face
because nothing's quite ever goes right.
Just how it is.
This is one of our core assets so we've been harvesting off our own land
and cutting as much of our own timber as we can for all
of the projects that we have.
It's a Norwood machine.
I call it Dr. Norwood because this is my psychotherapist.
Bad day at work, a couple hours
on Dr. Norwood is all I need.
He knows everything.
This is a local neighbor, so we've got great neighbors
and we're just milling up some lumber here
for a variety of things.
Morels popped up one year and I took a picture next
to the apple blossoms so I wouldn't forget what time
of year it was because I sometimes forget these things.
So now I know when I see the apple blossoms it's time to go look
for the Morels out there.
This is what it looks like when you order fruit trees.
They look so great in the catalogs.
They show up all burnt and like nothing's going to happen.
It's just so disappointing.
And, you know, here we're seeing some of our first projects.
We had to put up a stall barn.
There was just an old barn.
We live in an old barn.
That was the thing.
And the claim to fame on this property, everybody in town,
knows our property because it used to be owned by Carolyn Kennedy
and her husband Schlossberg, Ed Schlossberg, for years and years
and years, so everybody says, oh, you live in the Kennedy place.
Yeah. So back when I was first interviewing Secretary Kennedy,
I didn't know the relationship he had with his family,
so I thought I had an in.
I think we cut this part out of the interview.
I said, oh, I happen to be living in Carolyn's old place,
And he just went, mm-hmm.
So I caught on.
It's going to be known as the Martinson place coming next,
for the next, yeah.
This is a boiler, so we do sap and, you know, to get sugar.
There's two things, if you really think it through,
that you really need that are hard to come by in nature.
And sugar is one, and fat is the other.
So we're back to the jerseys.
Because they do this magic.
They take sunlight and turn it into butter.
There's a couple steps, but it's amazing.
And it's an A2 protein.
It's a non-inflammatory milk protein.
Yes, and so we have, we do have New New Jersey's now.
So we tried everything.
We had a field that had been,
it hadn't been industrially molested by modern ag.
Good news.
Bad news, our place had been owned by rich people
who didn't know anything.
So a local farmer would just come and hay it,
and it had been hayed out for probably 30 years straight.
So by the time we got there, very good soil,
but it had been strip mined.
And we had just these legacy, like these, they're good species.
They are species of, that come in and live on ruined soil.
We had sink foil and something called quack grass,
which is just this, it comes from another planet.
It's awful stuff.
So we were trying everything.
This is us trying burning.
Nope, quack grass thinks that's amazing and good fun.
So it's just, and both of you guys can attest,
a farm is a series of projects that are never finished.
Yeah, lots of nodding on that one.
Here's some output from one of the sawmill projects
and I just love cutting it up.
And so here's what we do with it.
Here's our first pole barn, cut all the logs.
These are cedars that were up on a part of the property.
So we put up the cedars and then started popping everything up.
And as soon as we had a roof on it, didn't have enough sides,
We're like, we're using it, and that's how that goes.
So this is where we live.
It's an old, you know, we live in the Appalachians Western Mass.
It's very worn down nubs of hills, so it means that anything that's
in our river system is like the hardest.
This is stuff that's been rattled around in a river
for a billion years.
There's not a lot left to get out of it,
so it makes the soil a little bit weaker.
We do, regularly do pigs, some of our favorite animals ever to do.
They are very personable.
These two here every morning they needed the fist bump to nose bump,
you know, insisted on that.
And they start fattening up at the time of the year
when you have zucchini coming out of the garden.
It's a match made in heaven.
It's just an amazing thing.
Evie does all these very complicated things where sometimes, you know,
we have too many eggs in the center bucket or fermenting things
because when you ferment the foods for animals, chickens
and pigs particularly, it really does great things for them.
It's very positive.
And this is what they do.
They just make holes in the ground and lie around.
We also run a workshop.
So this was a workshop where we had a bunch of people come
up to our property from my community, Peak Prosperity.
And here we are having a fifth generation farmer from Maine
in the center there, Simon Alexander, discussing how to go
about dressing a pig, which a lot of people wanted to know.
And this is what it looks like when you are connected
to the cycle of life.
you're their friends, you fist bump them,
and then you put them down.
And it's a very, I'm not going to say honest,
but it's very connective.
It's spiritual.
It is spiritual.
It is spiritual.
It really is.
And, you know, smoking the meat up is a wonderful way
of preserving, so we're always trying to figure out if you can,
you know, salt and sugar and fat are the hard things to come by,
because I forgot to mention salt, but how do you preserve food?
So we get too many eggs now, Robert, all the time,
because it's spring again.
And so we have a harvest rate freeze dryer,
and we freeze dry the eggs.
And the most astonishing thing, you just crack them,
you scramble them, that's what we do.
You freeze dry them, it turns into a powder.
And when you reconstitute them, I can't tell
that they weren't just cracked this morning.
It's very difficult.
Evie likes to plant for beauty, so we have lots
of different flowers everywhere, and those are for the bees,
and it's for us, and some of you will be sharp-eyed
and notice there's potential for medicine hidden in there.
And, yep, we've got a Kubota as well.
And we also practiced, you know, we had drip irrigation
in our garden, doing the raised beds, lots of manure in there.
But it turns out, we found something that when we've been
on the property for a year,
it turns out our property has a spring on it.
And the spring actually was so important, it's on a map
from the 1850s, and it had four separate lines run to it,
an old galvey rusted out one, another smaller galvey,
and then two plastics, and we said, oh, it must be important,
so we reconditioned the lines, and we now have 30,000 gallons a day
of water coming down a hill.
It has about 110 PSI at the bottom of the hill, no pumps,
because it's 200 feet in elevation,
and we own the whole watershed.
It's honestly the most important thing we own.
The more I learn about what's in our water, microplastics,
whatever's coming out of the atmosphere, we have a great
filtration system. Is it perfect? I don't know, but the water tests out beautifully.
So now we don't worry about watering. We have too much or a lot. And this is what
it's going to look like in a few weeks as we as we get into spring. So our goal
was never to grow a hundred percent of our food. Right now we're darn close to
a hundred percent of our own meat. We're absolutely at a hundred percent of our
own eggs except for a certain dark period when the chickens go a little
quiet, and maybe two, three, four percent of the total calories.
But if we ever had to go to 100 percent, that's very different
to go from three percent than to start from zero.
Because to get off of zero, there's a lot of mistakes you have
to make, just tons of them.
So I think that's my last one there.
Oh, and getting local help really matters.
Yeah, we had to dig the quack grass out of wheat.
These guys dug the quack grass out of our garden.
And this is what it looks like when everything is all said and done.
So we love it.
It's spiritual.
We commune with our animals.
We have great relationships with all of them.
This is my eldest daughter, and she makes these baskets that I keep.
She weaves them completely out of natural fibers.
That's dog vein plus some other things all, you know,
dyed with willow bark and walnuts, things like that.
I keep telling her she should take one of these
and go to an Anasazi site and bury it
to really excite an anthropologist.
But it's fully authentic.
So the point here is that it really,
all our kids saw us growing up this way
and we didn't make anything of it.
We didn't say you have to learn these skills because X, Y, or Z.
We just lived this way and they all picked it up and became very,
very well-rounded people as a result.
And she's just a dynamo.
So we have a dam.
We also get eggs, and they come out just like that.
All pre-ordered.
And we live around beauty.
This is some waterfalls on our property.
So with that, that's our little operation.
I like the picture with Robert with all the hay on his scarf
in the winter, and then I have two sawmills as well,
so I refer to hay and sawdust as man glitter.
And I think this whole weekend was worth it just
to see Robert and a wife beater, you know.
Let's see.
Dr. Cole slides in there anywhere?
All right.
I'm going to have to start telling jokes
and I know you guys don't want that.
Is it?
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
So you can envision my farm.
I'll tell the story while they're getting my slides up.
Like I mentioned, my grandparents had the Victory Garden
in their little yard, and when we, I grew up in the Washington DC area
in Virginia, and again, suburbanite there,
we had the post stamp garden, but I remember helping my dad since.
We bought 30 acres out in Leesburg, Virginia in the Shenandoah
on mountains and, you know, the construct
of a gentleman farmer, Thomas Jefferson's one of my heroes
and it took him about 40 years to finish Monticello
so we both have many years to finish our farm projects.
Gentlemen, you did.
And, you know, the gentleman farmer,
what it really means is you earn your money in the city
and lose it on the farm.
And that's why Thomas Jefferson was broke.
Yeah, Thomas Jefferson died in debt.
He did. And I'm like, oh, but, and then the Mayo Brothers,
I trained at the Mayo Clinic, did my residency there,
and the Mayo Brothers were gentlemen farmers.
And, you know, they bought, back in the day,
a $100,000 breeding bowl, which, a month after buying it, died.
They bought a flock of 4,000 turkeys, a freak windstorm,
blew those turkeys against a fence.
They lost their 4,000 turkey flock.
So they're like, that was rare.
Okay, so they redo a 4,000 turkey flock, and it just happened
to happen again a couple months later.
And so when the male brothers would have dignitaries come
over to their house, you know, from the hospital and whatnot,
they would say, with dinner, would you like champagne or milk?
It cost us the same.
Wow. And I don't know if anyone's ever read the book,
The $80 Tomato, and that's generally how getting started
in gardening and farming starts.
Your first tomato generally costs you about $80.
So it's, anyway, I love this quote.
Aldo Leopold was kind of the grandfather
of the environmental movement.
And he lived in upper Michigan, in Sand County.
And he wrote a book called, A Sand County Almanac.
And the first line in the book is this.
There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm.
One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes
from the grocery.
And the other, that heat comes from the furnace.
And I think we have a society that lives this way,
and we're detached from those cycles of life.
All the systems that are broken in the world, there's one system
that if you do it honestly isn't,
because mother nature tells you what she is and isn't going to do.
And we can kind of force her, and we can dance with her,
and it's a beautiful duet, but you can't fool her.
And that's the beauty in farming.
It's honest.
Also from Aldo Leopold, a thing is right when it tends
to preserve the integrity, stability,
and beauty of the biotic community.
It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Do you know your local farmer?
Honestly, where does your food come from?
Okay, do you know where your food comes from?
Is it beef from Namibia?
Or is it a beef from a rancher in the US?
Where did your veggies come from?
Were they flown in on a jet?
What were they sprayed with in Mexico or Chile?
You know, we live in this global system.
But really, what was done to your food before you consumed it?
Most of us don't know.
And I think, you know, even if you don't have a farm,
just getting connected to, wait a minute,
this is something intentional I can think about and do.
Eat real food, not food-like substances.
When I grow things on the farm, and I think Dr. Malone
and Dr. Martinson can attest to this,
they're not rectangular, the things I grow.
And they don't come in boxes.
And they don't generally have five ingredients
when you pull them off the plant.
It's generally sunshine, water, and soil, isn't it?
And the genetic code that makes it grow.
Who grows your food?
This is the motto at our farmer's market.
farmers you can trust, food you can trace.
You can come to our farms.
And we're a network, a community like Dr. Malone mentioned,
a community of organic, small farmers.
And the movement is growing and it's wonderful.
And at the end of the season we generally have 150 people come
to the farm, set up tents, set up tables in the greenhouses
and provide an entire meal that comes from all the local farms.
And it really connects the community to the concept of,
wow, our earth can grow things organically
without chemical inputs, with the labor of people
that love the land, love the food, and love each other.
So it's really a cool construct.
This is one of my farmers at our farmer's market.
That's from my dirt, and sunshine, soil, and water,
and it turns into beautiful things like that.
But you don't have, I mean, I think many people aspire to have a farm.
Many people have heard me say, I do not go to the gym.
I don't do crossfit.
I do crop fit.
It's hardcore fitness based on 19th century farming practices.
Not everybody can farm, but you can grow something.
If you have an apartment, does your porch look like that?
Are you growing something?
Are you connected to these cycles of life and nature?
If you live in a city, you have a rooftop.
You can keep bees.
If you live in just a suburban neighborhood like I did growing up, who says you have to
grow a lawn?
That's not a golden rule or a cardinal rule unless you have a really bad homeowners association.
The earth, I know these gentlemen know this, produces in abundance and excess.
The earth is abundant and the fullness thereof for a Sunday morning sermon.
And good earth.
Soil is an antidepressant.
There is a mycobacterium in the soil, mycobacterium vasii, found in the soil and leaf mold that
literally lights up your neurotransmitters.
in the dirt is an antidepressant, literally.
And this, again, we interact and live with microbes.
One of my friends, it is beautiful to walk out at night with my headlamp on going between
the house and the wood shop to bathe myself in man glitter, to step on the ground with
your headlamp on and literally watch the earth move.
By the thousands and thousands of worms and nightcrawlers.
It is connecting pollinators.
Chris brought this up.
We have a problem, folks, and we have chemicals and pesticides.
We have mites.
You look at your plate and a third to a half of your plate would be gone without pollinators.
And in our valley like Chris, we also have the highest concentration of the native small
bees.
honey bees, they're not native to North America.
They were imported with the migrations many centuries ago.
So what we know, Apis mellifera is generally out of Europe,
and there's a bunch of other bees.
I won't give an hour electron beekeeping
since I only have a couple minutes.
But beekeeping is spiritual.
There's a frequency to it.
There's a smell to it.
There's a dance to it.
And if you walk by a hive ever in nature
and you smell rotten bananas, get out of there quickly.
They're mad.
And I think that's the other thing about working with the dirt,
with the earth, with the plants, is you get in touch with the senses.
It's tactile.
It's visual.
There's smells to it.
There are flavors to it, obviously.
And sometimes there's the fecal remnants that have to be cleared
and aren't so pleasant.
But it reminds you that it is all intertwined.
And to Robert's point, the bees are out.
but we need to protect our pollinators
and understand the cycles of what we do,
how they affect our environment.
And even if, again, if you have an apartment,
if you have a house, put up a little bamboo tubes
for the local small bee pollinators, they're solitary bees
and they're better pollinators than honey bees
because they can get into the smaller blooms.
And if you have bees on your farm,
your production is generally a 30 to 50% more
than it would be otherwise.
So you can literally serve as a surrogate farmer for pollination
by providing habitat for not just the bees and the little microbees
and the solitary bees, but it's fantastic with the headlamp on at night
to go out and watch the moths as pollinators
and the butterflies as pollinators.
Build some butterfly houses.
Buy a butterfly house.
Put those in your environment.
And again, bloom where you're planted.
Not everybody can do this.
But going back to that construct of can we have a victory garden?
Can we have a postage stamp garden?
You can grow something if it's nothing more than a little pot
in your kitchen window growing some herbs.
But it connects you to those cycles of life and nature.
Homesteading, joy is found in the journey.
It's the work, it's the sweat, it's the toil, it's the outdoors,
it's the sunshine, it's the community, it's the dance with nature,
it's the symphony of movement and sound,
the anticipation of what's to come,
the smells, the textures, the colors, the flavors.
More importantly, it's the sharing
and the joy that it brings when people come to your farm.
And I don't care what they're going through in life.
When you go back to that primal state of going,
oh, we've forgotten this.
And they want to pet the lambs and the cows
and they want to touch the trees
and reconnecting to the cycles of life
that too much of society has forgotten.
It's spiritual.
Here's half of my farm.
Those are the fields just recently tilled,
ready for the season, the greenhouses, hoop houses.
On the right, that's my log yard.
I do urban timbering.
And we bring in trees from all around the city.
I'm friends with a bunch of tree cutters.
My best friend's a firefighter, a bunch of heavy equipment.
And then I sawmill those and I do custom art
and gallery art with a lot of that.
And I make as much kindling as I do finished product.
And so that which doesn't turn into art turns into warmth.
And there's the freshly tilled fields.
There's the freshly pruned orchard.
This was a hay field as well and a nonchemical hay field.
And over the 16 years I've been on it,
we've turned it into a farm.
I've got over 200 fruit trees two nights before I came here.
I was out in the snow flurries planting another 15 trees,
peaches and nectarines and cherries
to replace part of the orchard.
Sculpting trees and pruning.
Edward Scissorhands, it's an art.
And it's so, it's a dance with nature.
It is literally a dance with nature.
And the joy it brings to children
if you have grandchildren, even if it's a little patch of dirt,
for them to be involved and then to see what the earth produces,
again in abundance, you can't put into words when you look
at your plate and you say to the six daughters of the table,
look at your plate, everything on that plate came
from this earth, not from a grocery store.
And God bless the farmers everywhere
that do feed us all.
Yeah.
One minute.
One minute.
So the earth produces an abundance.
Colors, textures, joy, joy.
More of the world needs to grow a pair.
You see what I did there.
Abundance, abundance, abundance.
Abundance, abundance, abundance.
Abundance, beauty, that's my vineyard.
My wine usually tastes like vinegars.
I'm not very good at a lot of things.
And my critters, that's why do cows wear bells
because their horns don't work.
Yeah. And dirt and cows and microbiome, what do you call a cow
with a twitch, beef jerky.
There's my lambies at the base of the mountains in there,
spring pasture, there's the helpers, and the millhomes are still here.
Just to be clear, we raise cows.
They have bison, which is known as a high-capacity assault cow.
And steak is already plant-based, just to confirm that for everybody.
Learn to preserve your food, store food.
Teach a man to fish.
for a day, teach him to garden and the whole neighborhood gets a zucchini.
And then maybe we can talk about the poisons in our environment that I know we try to avoid
the glyphosates.
And it is not an herbicide, it is an antibiotic.
It messes up the microbiome.
This is a point I want to make.
Most of the world is getting an antibiotic daily without informed consent, the corporate
practice of medicine without a license.
as an antibiotic, high fructose corn syrup
inactivates your vitamin D.
You could take all the supplements in the world.
If you're eating high fructose corn syrup,
you're deactivating your vitamin D
and you're now vitamin D deficient.
Seed oils are poison, regenerative farming
is what we need to do.
My friend Joel Salatin, I love Joel.
And those who can make it to the Brownstone retreat
in September, look that up.
It's going to be fantastic on Joel's farm.
If you love a farmer, raise your hand.
If not, raise your standards.
She asked me to whisper three sexy words in her ear.
So I told her, I'm a farmer.
And I'll quit with that.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
So, Robert, I know that you can see, ignore the time,
because we're just going to burn into our break for just a minute.
But I want to hear about the intentional community
that you encountered because I think
that we're all individual farmers, but I'm starting to reach
into my community more and more, and I know that it's going
to take a village, right?
We can't just be all soloists in this story,
so I'd love to hear that story.
So we're lucky to live, Jill found it,
in a strange little community that is an hour and a half south
of Dulles Airport, but still has the same population
that it had in World War II and was settled
by German indentured Lutherans back in the 1600s.
The oldest Lutheran church in North America is
about two miles to crow flies from our place.
So we're surrounded by a small informal intentional community
and really that is one of the great sources of joy
in our lives is I leave these urban environments
and all this travel and go back and hang out with the guys
at the feed store on the loading dock,
which kind of grounds you a little bit.
But the example you're talking about was brought to my attention
by Justine Insulinka, who is a South African that writes for us
on our substack and travels back and forth to South Africa.
And she shared with me a story of another intentional community.
I'm trying to kind of collect intentional communities
because I think they provide the metaphors in the learning
that we can all gather together.
As I was saying, my view of the future is for those of us
in the alternative world, we're going to have
to find some way to tunnel through
into some indeterminate future in the face
of really a rather oppressive political and economic situation.
And so we can learn from the past, like for instance monasteries,
in a sense, were intentional communities historically.
I talked about the Amish and Mennonites.
In the case of South Africa, it's a very fascinating community
to me called Orangia that has been formed by the Boers,
essentially Afrikan, and was launched in a very desert area
of South Africa after apartheid.
And the Afrikaans in that community believed
that their culture was in significant danger.
Now we see the kill the boar,
which is officially not racist according
to the South African courts, and is more than just a slogan.
I mean, there are graveyards of African boys and farmers
that are being slaughtered and their land is being appropriated.
So these folks that formed Orangia had three core tenants.
You have to speak Afrikan.
It doesn't matter whether you're black, white, or brown.
And there is, by the way, a significant brown community
from Indonesia in South Africa that are non-black.
and so they don't get the benefits of the ANC
and that kind of political dominant force.
They are also considered outsiders
just like the Boers are, the Afrikan.
So they welcome everyone, but it's not race-based,
it's culture-based, you have to speak Afrikan,
which is kind of an ancient Dutch,
and you have to be Christian.
And more importantly, you cannot,
One of the core tenets is you cannot use cheap labor.
It's very easy in Africa, in South Africa,
to go to the neighboring township
and purchase inexpensive labor
because there's such discrepancies to do your washing,
do your cleaning, wash your car, whatever.
And this community in Oranje made us one
of their core tenets.
We will not allow that.
Everybody has to do their own labor because they knew
that if they would permit this kind of cheap imported labor
from surrounding townships,
they would just reestablish the same dynamic that had led
to the corruption and dysfunction
that eventually gave rise to apartheid.
And in fact, now what we seem to see is a reverse apartheid.
If you follow the metaphor of being
against the Afrikaans, so they've created this community based
on these core tenets.
It's thriving.
It has a lot of analogy to some of the Israeli communities
that have learned to make the desert bloom with drip systems
and other technologies and hard labor.
And this community is growing at a very high rate right now,
not just because of refugees that are seeking protection
from these new movements in South Africa,
but also because it is a viable alternative metaphor for how
to live your life, how to exist in the world
and build a interlaced intentional community
that is productive.
They're highly productive.
They're producing food surplus, and it's a great place
to raise your kids.
So that's just another example
that I had just recently encountered,
but it illustrates the same core concept that in order to survive
and prosper and thrive, I think, if you want to step outside
of the urban industrialized metaphor
that we're surrounded by right now, you may wish
to also gather your own examples and learn from them as you seek a way
to exist in the world that is consistent with your ethics
and will allow you to create your own bottom-up.
I mean, that's kind of what we're all doing,
is we're all creating our own little heaven on earth.
And then once we have it, we have the challenge
of how do we sustain it and protect it.
And that's really what Intentional Communities are about.
Fantastic.
Can we read about that on Substack?
Do you have anything?
We have.
Actually, Justine is in contact with the lead spokesperson
for Orangia, and she's promised us an upcoming essay.
Excellent.
Well, thank you for your participation here today.
Thanks to me.
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