Latest / Homestead And Heal Podcast / Ep 4: Nutrient Density, Plant Resilience, and the Future of Food with Dan Kittredge

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Ep 4: Nutrient Density, Plant Resilience, and the Future of Food with Dan Kittredge · Homestead And Heal Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Homestead and Heal.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Scott.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a farm in Vermont.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: Our lives revolve around growing food and medicine, working with the body, and trying every day to live in deeper relationship with the earth.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: And now we're welcoming guests to our farm for intimate retreats where they can slow down and feel deeply into this earth-body connection.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Our bodies are part of it.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Our healing comes through it.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Through conversations with herbalists, farmers, body workers, and people walking unconventional paths, we explore what it looks like to step outside the modern paradigm and build lives rooted in connection, healing, and reciprocity with the earth.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, welcome back to the Homestead and Yale podcast.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: We're really excited to have Dan Kittridge with us today from the BioNutrient Food Association.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: I started learning from Dan probably back around like 2009, something like that, when their organization was called the Real Food Campaign.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to let Dan sort of more properly introduce himself here in a minute.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: But we started incorporating all of the exciting things that I was learning from you back then.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell this story a lot, but within a couple of years of incorporating the practices, we had this really wild experience on our farm, which was that we were growing on a larger farm.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: The farmer uh basically gave us an acre of his about 12 tilable acres that he was using.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: He gave us an acre that we could get our business started on.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And one summer, we planted our summer squash in Zucchini about 20, 25 feet away from where he planted his.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: There was just a grass strip in between.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And within a couple of weeks of those plants going in, his got annihilated with striped cucumber beetle damage.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: They just turned into lace.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the plants were maybe two inches tall and three inches across.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And they were so stressed that, and plants will often do this when they get super stressed.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: They just try to create fruit because that's their mission.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So they're trying to make that happen.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so before they were ready, they're pushing fruits at these little teeny tiny plants that probably just more or less died.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: They maybe produced a fruit, a tiny fruit or two each.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And ours planted 20 feet away, certainly plenty of cucumber beetles around.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Very similar soil and just the same fields, the exact same soil, exact same field, 20 feet apart.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: You would you were hard pressed to find a cucumber beetle in our patch.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: The plants were shiny, humongous.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: They were three feet tall and three feet across before they even thought of making flowers.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so that to me was just like okay, this stuff is for real.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's something here.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that being said, Dan, could you introduce yourself?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: My name is Dan Kittredge.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we talked about that.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up on an organic farm in Massachusetts.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: My parents were very actively involved in the organic movement through NOFA for 30, 30 years.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: That was like their job was basically running NOFA in some meaningful way.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I friend of the farm's my late 20s when I got married.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point I was struggling with the logistics of how to make a living.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, I was a for one guy, you know, I could work on the work my parents' farm and have enough money to be to bum around in the winter and I was fine.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: But when I got married, I had actually had to make a living to provide for a family.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: And um and my chops just weren't there.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: All I knew how to do was farm, and I didn't know how to make any money for me.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: And um, yeah, that guy we start to like ask questions about why I have pest pressure and disease pressure, why my plants don't thrive, why you know why is it that it's so hard to make a living?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you've been brought up in the organic orthodoxy about how we're better.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: But being eaten alive by pests and diseases is not a sign of flourishing.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I started reading books and going to conferences and attending seminars and you know, weaving in insights from permaculture and biodynamics and agroethology, but also microbiology and biochemistry and biophysics and the quantum and you know, indigenous perspective and all that kind of stuff.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, it wasn't actually that hard once you know what you're doing to create a dynamic where things grow well and all of a sudden your cost of production goes down and you gotta the capacity to make a living is there.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I started to have those experiences of my crops flourishing, and I literally was able to make my living working part-time farming, then I felt this obligation to start talking about it.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: I just felt like I grew up in the organic world.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up going to conferences and board meetings, and like my father was the editor of the natural farmer.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: I knew that everybody had a hard time farming, and when I got to the point where it was actually easy, I was like, wait a minute, there's something different here that needs to be shared.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I started, yeah, just talking, doing workshops and courses, and I didn't really know I knew enough to know that I didn't know what I was really talking about, but that there was really something there.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just got up on stage, and yeah, you guys are in there early.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh take it till you make it that.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: But oh, I don't think you're giving yourself quite enough credit there.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: It was pretty life-changing.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was life-changing for me, and all I knew was like, guys, there's something really exciting here, and I don't really understand it, but here's some of the things I do understand, and I just kind of let it rip.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: I at this point, wait teen years later, or whatever it is, I feel like I've got a little better hold on what's going on and how it works, and metaphors and all that kind of stuff, because I've been teaching this course now all over the planet for literally almost 20 years.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, early on, I I didn't really, I really didn't understand it, and I knew I didn't understand it.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: I just knew that there were some things I could repeat and that I had done that seemed to work, and so I was just like sharing it.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I guess I've felt that way at times.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I it is the type of thing, growing things, farming that you could study every day for the rest of your life, I'm sure you will, and still not be close to having a full understanding of the all the magic that is at work.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: But something that I learned early on from uh learning from you was that by just having some of the foundational principles, there was there's a lot out there.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I listened to John Kemp's regenerative farmer podcast, and he gets so deeply into some of the technical issues that's going on, and I so appreciate that.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes I try to grasp it and often do, but often it's maybe flying over my head.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: But he also always is like checking back in with this foundational principles.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: So once you understand these basic tenets of how you can improve the system, just by making little tweaks, the things we were doing early on that we saw a difference, we were minding micronutrients.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: So balance, balancing the soil, getting soil tests from Logan Labs, better sort of soil analysis, minding micronutrients and the macros, of course, always inoculating everything.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then doing some foliar sprays and little bits and pieces here and there.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: But really, what we were trying to do was remineralize and try to facilitate more robust uh diversity and vitality in the soil.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to say for me too, it's really inspiring to hear you speak about the kind of fake it till you make it, because I now do body work.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: I focus on fascia and I now teach a training, and I feel very much like I'm in my second year of teaching the training and feel very much like what you're describing.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, oh yeah, 15 years from now, I will feel a lot better with teaching it.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I was in the course with Scott as well.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the first time, maybe.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: The first time.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't have nearly as scientific of a brain.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: My I've really exercised my intuitive brain at this point and less my scientific brain.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: But I think what stuck out to me and where I'd like to connect the body into this is just this idea that a couple things.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: One is just this paradigm shift that was so eye-opening for us that you could actually make conditions so that your plants would be so healthy that the pests and disease would not find the pests would not be able to find them.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: And that was like mind-blowing for me.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: And then the other thing was just I had never, we were maybe not that far into our farming career, but I hadn't really ever thought about how the building blocks of life in soil are the building blocks of life in our bodies.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds so silly, but it's like the way you described that and talked about those interconnections in the plant and how balancing that is so important.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: Right now, I feel like there's this huge trend that I see in my world of this hair tissue mineral analysis and balancing the minerals in our body.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like that's but what you are teaching, are teaching for plants in some way or another.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I feel like that paradigm shift, a couple of those paradigm shifts for me were just really eye-opening and just gave us so much possibility and how we could move forward in our work.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, my absolute pleasure.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it's wonderful.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: I remember you guys, totally sweet young couple, just like and really good students.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: Just like you went home and you did it.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then you would call me back six months later when I have a couple questions, but like we're doing this, we're doing this, we're doing this.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you sent me some pictures of some tomatoes one time.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: I what I remember, I don't remember the swash story, but I remember the tomatoes that had these crystals on them.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: You called in globs of fat.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was the charts, ridiculously.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, like it was stuck, like, wow, those are some really good looking tomatoes.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's like what you think of with like cannabis, the way it gets so sparkly and like the tomatoes, yeah, they're still always like that.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: Scott's such an amazing grower.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, for me, it was easy to want to do all this stuff because it was so compelling.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: There seemed to be something there.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And for me, it that's what like my real interest is in pushing quality, like doing wild things.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like we've had carrots sometimes that get pushed to the back of the walk-in cooler.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: You find the bin over two years later and have been full of sound carrots.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Last, yeah, literally over two years.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's not most people's experience, usually six months out, and they're mostly gonna be getting soft and mush.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, for me, it was just it was so intriguing and uh yeah, it was easy to try to do the things, and not that I did all of them, I tried, you know, I took on as much as I could.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I was thinking, go ahead.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this nature is amazing, and if you just begin to do a couple little things a little better, you get what appear to be like major responses.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then the question is like, what's really possible?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, what is really possible because you see this massive transformation from like what's normal, and then you're like, and you know you're not doing everything, right?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: And like all the pieces that aren't dialed in yet, and yet you're seeing these amazing results.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it's so exciting to go around the world and teach these courses and have people like get that same experience and be transformed.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, no, it's absolutely amazing.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's absolutely amazing.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: I the last thing I just want to say is that I feel like for Scott, as such a plant person, it's there's so much that's about beauty and actually just caring for each individual plant.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I love also that's one thing that really sticks out to me.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: And the way you taught was like just the basics of are you really going to, if you're parenting a small child, are you gonna stick them out in a snowstorm with no shoes on?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: Are you gonna stress your plants out early on just to maybe get a little bit ahead?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: And that's one thing that is so different for Scott compared to other.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like gardeners and growers around is just putting the plants into these prime conditions and then just seeing them take off because they're not super stressed out.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so yeah, I feel like your metaphors even then were really powerful.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, it's been beautiful to watch because Scott and I, and we'll we are telling this story on this podcast in kind of the first episode of how we met and found gardening.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: And that wasn't that many years really before we took the course with you, but how basically I feel like Scott just immediately fell in love with it.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, it's just fun to to think about how coming across you and you being on our path really, I think, shifted things for Scott.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: I can see that it would have been really different had he not learned from you.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: So that's really cool.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um I kind of want to take us back just a tiny bit.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: And we were always we're always hoping with guests to have you introduce where you are in the world and what's going on outside and introduce your place.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: What's happening right now and on May 7th that is exciting for you?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: The apples just started blooming about a day and a half ago.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking at a few rabbits that are out running around the lawn.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't let the ducks out yet and the chickens, so they aren't running around quite yet.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a few things in, but to the point about not stressing things out.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's been quite a cold spring.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think we had frosts every night for the last maybe the last week, not so much, but all the end of April was just a nice hard frost every night.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm hoping to get a lot in the next uh what 10 days.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: I've got some kale and some chard and a few carrots and beets and things, but not much in right now.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: I take off for a three-week tour to Europe in ten days.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I gotta get some stuff in.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's exciting.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to speak at all about that European tour and kind of what you're up to over there?
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think I started off by keynoting a conference in York, uh, which is uh where New York comes from.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: York, York Minster is this beautiful, amazing cathedral there, actually.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was actually uh one of the central places where the Romans uh had a major place uh that we were con when they were in England.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's this big stone of the cathedral, but it's a beautiful place.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, uh keynoting to a bunch of uh broad-minded, holistic uh wheat producers mostly.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh then I go to Milan for the Milan Longevity Summit.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh just got a bunch of really interesting global players coming.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: And some of us are gonna get to go down and talk to the Pope afterwards or an audience of the Pope.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh huh.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh I think I work with some farmers.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was a company in Germany that's like making they're like trying to make energy energy drinks, but like basically from plant just choosing plants, and they want to have the ultra-high antioxidant polyphenol, like secondary metabolite, like a real energy drink.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: So they're asking me to help them optimize the nutritional caliber of the raw the kale or the chard and the squash, etc.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: The blueberries that are gonna be in the ingredients in the drinks.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Then I meet with some people, like a media team from uh they're based in the UK.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: They work for uh for uh Sadguru.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard of Sadhguru, the Safe Soil movement?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: There's this Indian guru guy who's been going around for a few years, like really making a lot of buzz about soil soil health and climate change and everything else in a lot of continents.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: He's got some presence here in North America, but more and like Asia and Europe and stuff.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: They've got an amazing global presence, and they've been trying to figure out how to get the stories told that will get people to make the connections about climate change and how we can affect it.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: And they've I've been talking to them for years, but they've been saying, like, we think this food argument, like nutrition, like your health, like if you eat food that's more nutritious, that will only be able to be raised from soil that's living and sequestering carbon.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so basically the best thing you can do for climate change is eat food that tastes good.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: That whole storyline is one that they find compelling and are gonna try to put into a bunch of I think they call it tier one media, which is like BBC and New York Times and stuff like that.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, cool.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: But also we've got this little Brixit kit here.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: This we've branded a refractometer called the Brick.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: So there's like a here's the it's just a refractometer, but we've got a little label on it, a sticker on it, and here's the uh there's the garlic press that's also branded, and just a regular little BRICS chart.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: But we've got an app and we're just finished finalizing the app.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the idea is basically to invite people to when they take all the shopping to test it and upload onto the app the data purchase, place of purchase, brand, and bricks reading.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to speak a little bit about bricks for our listeners who might have no idea what that is?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Can I finish my tour?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: We're only oh no, I guess we're a little over halfway through the tour.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I got a couple days a couple days with the with the media team there in the UK, and we're talking about having them help to really launch this campaign globally.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I meet with somebody from uh it's called Rabobank, which is the world's largest agricultural lender.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: They're headquarters in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and they're looking at how can farmers make a living.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: They're really there's a real struggle with a lot of farmers basically not being able to pay the bills.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I met with some of their people last fall in Europe.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: They're really starting to make real toxic chemicals illegal.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: You just can't buy them anymore, they're not around.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so the farmers are like, what do we do?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: We we need these fungicides and insecticides to get the crops to market, and now they're illegal and we don't know what to do.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's a real interesting receptivity to these uh deeper principles because of the regulations that are coming in.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: So Rabobank in the morning and then I key start open up the Cybe Day conference in in Utrecht.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then I fly down to Valencia for a really exciting conference put on by this uh guess you call it an investment fund of like a people that raise literally billions of dollars and run companies and do that kind of stuff.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: But they're really broad-minded, holistic, looking at nature and trying to support nature and the whole thing.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's really holistic.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: And they got CEOs there and members of parliaments from across Europe and high net worth, rich people from and I'm the only speaker.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm doing, I speak and then we talk for a day and a half about this work.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's invitation only because I'm so excited about this.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Then back to Utrecht to finish up that conference and then home by the 7th or 8th of June, I think.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: So get busy planting again when you get home.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and then I've got a guy coming who's he's just doing his final exams at UConn right now.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: He's gonna come and start working on I think he's coming by on Saturday mornings.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: He's gonna come on Tuesday, move in and start helping out, and I got a week to train him.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: He worked at Brighton Harris farm last year, so it shouldn't be too hard.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, cool.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: But uh That's amazing that that's that all sounds amazing, and I feel like it's really amazing that you have that all in your head.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: That's such a such a wide range of experiences that you're going to have there.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds so exciting.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, it's I literally circumnavigated the planet three times last year on tour.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was like 60,000 miles in a hundred days in the fall, six continents.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, it's gotten really epic.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Spoke at the World Economic Forum, did a TED talk.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was supposed to go to the World, what's it called?
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: The COP COP 30 in Brazil, but I didn't know that you had to actually apply for a visa ahead of time.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Apparently, Trump and Lula had been having a pissing contest about terrorists.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: All Americans have to like go through the process of getting permission to come into the country.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: Take that, so it was like anyway, didn't get to go to the the speak COP 30.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: But uh yeah, it's really kind of cool how the work is spreading and the corporate boardrooms and the castles and the all of it.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: People are really getting this whole thing about uh soil health and nutrition and flavor and human health and climate and all of it.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: So that's super exciting.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um and just I think again, it's like that.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: I think for our listeners, we'll really speak to the possibility because I think it can be I don't follow the news much, but it can be very depressing and discouraging sometimes.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's an understatement.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I feel like what you're designed to cause you to be depressed.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I feel like things that are emphasized are like a horrible spin to create fear and paralysis.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: So would you speak a little bit about Bricks before we get into more?
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, of course.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Bricks Bricks was a an Austrian chemist who won the prize put up by the German Wintners in the 1830s, the German Wintners, the guys that were raising grapes and making wine in Germany 1830.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: It was before Germany was a country, right?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Back then it was just all a bunch of different duchies and things.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, they were like sometimes we harvest our grapes and stomp them and ferment them and stick them in vats in the catacombs and take them out three years later and they're vinegar.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes we stomp them and ferment them and stick them in vats in the catacombs for three years and take them out and they're beautiful wine.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't know which grapes are gonna make high-quality wine and which grapes are gonna make vinegar.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: Can someone figure this out?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: So they got a bunch of money together and there's a prize.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Who can whoever can figure this out gets the prize?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Why how do you know which grapes make vinegar, which make grapes make wine?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Drick told the prize.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: And his what he figured out was that it was a specific gravity of the juice.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: The more viscous, the more dense, the more stuff in the grape juice, the better the quality of the wine, the more watery it was, the more likely it's like vinegar.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so the bricks chart got developed, and there's a bricks refractometer.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: The refractometer is a tool that most people are familiar with, which measures the bend of light refraction.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: So you can take a drop of you can take a leaf of a plant and s and squish it and get a drop of juice out of it and put it on a refractometer, and you can see relatively how healthy that plant is.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: You can take a a piece of a carrot or a tomato or a blueberry and squish it and get a drop of juice out of it and put it on the refractometer and you can see how nutritious it is.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's very simple tool.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can get it for$10.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no battery.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can use it 10,000 times.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: As long as you don't drop it on the floor, it just keeps working.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: Never have to charge it.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's been around for 200 years.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: But it's like the best tool we have right now if you want a number for like how good your food is, how what the quality nutritional quality of your crops are.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: And also if you're a farmer, it's a great way to measure proactively the health of your plant.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the bricks reading in the leaf tells you a hell of a lot about vigor, vitality, pesticise resistance, etc, etc.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And and you can take readings in response to practices that you're doing on your farm.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you can like take a reading, give it a foliar feed, take another reading, see if how it's affected, all that sort of thing.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty cool.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things if you're not using the Fentiance method of actually talking to your plants and asking them what they want and then giving it to them.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you need to be in that left was it left brain?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's the left brain.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Linear one.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you need numbers in science and cause and effect like you aren't tapped into your intuition, it's a great tool for facilitating that communication with the plants to see how they're doing.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like some people because we're just so steeped in that left brain, our world promotes that so much that the transition to trusting your intuition it can be a helpful tool, I feel like powerful.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: Powerful for sure.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that you guys pointed out is just the massive difference that you might find in carrot coming from the grocery store grown in poor soils or just all chemical fertilizers and totally dead soil organic multiple from the farmer's market.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, sure, sure.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're you're seeing ginormous, humongous difference between the quality in some of these things.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: I heard you I think it was actually you were on John Kemp's podcast in the last couple of years and I I forget how it came up but I've thought about this a lot since there's this there's this whole storyline out there that apples today are one fiftieth as nutritious as the apples that your grandparents ate sort of thing.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: We just call that what it is which is largely true if you look at apples that were largely available then versus today, but that is to negate this idea that that's not across the board.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's not all apples are created equally today.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: All apples are uniform.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah and if you're you know if you're doing some of these things if you're remineral remineralizing your soil and tending to the biology in your soil then you might be growing apples on my farm that are more nutritious than what my grandparents ate.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: And there might be more nutritious and the brick tree factometer is the best way to get a number to tell.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's the whole point about the Brixit kit is like here's a tool that you can have in your hands take home your shopping like whatever you normally buy don't do anything special just test it and upload that into the onto the app and if other people around do also but they buy from different farm stands or different grocery stores or different brands then we'll be able to see what's better, what's worse.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if people want to choose the best for themselves and their families then we basically through bottom up citizen science actions we can begin to tease out where the better stuff is and where the worst stuff is.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so yeah it's a powerful tool if we use it for collective action.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: But the point about variation is massive right we've done a bunch of research to test we did I think it was started in 2017 we did our first real science project and we first three built this little meter flash of light meter because we thought that was a way people could test in the future but then we started sampling crops and we sampled 10,000 different samples of crops from four over four years in Europe and North America 25 different crops 10,000 samples like all over the place.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it was amazing how varied the nutrient levels are like four to one eight to one twenty to one forty to one like this carrot has eight times as much phosphorus as that carrot 20 times as many polyphenols 40 times as many antioxidants.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's not small the nutrient variation in food.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: And you can taste it that's that was all I wanted to say was like my kids when they ever have a carrot from anywhere other than what Scott has grown they're just like they're what the fuck?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: What is this?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't the 10% spit it out.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's not a carrot it's just so different.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the right brain left brain you can talk about the numbers or you can say God gave us these amazing nutrient monitoring systems called noses and tongues and it's right there.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I do think from when we were when we used to sell at the farmer's market we're not selling there anymore but some people are so in their heads and they're trying to eat this very specific diet that they aren't tuned in to their nose and tongues as well.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: So they're they don't maybe notice and then other people would come to the market and be like oh my gosh like your tomatoes are just the best like they get it.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was always so affirming when people would come and say that it is affirming yeah and it is true that many of us I call it the cultural trauma right the generational trauma of like the culture is being separated from ourselves.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: I remember being in school when I was a kid and being told that yes we're animals but we don't have instincts and animals do.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like huh didn't think about it.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: That was just like what it is I'm like actually your nose and your tongue that's what the goats use that's what the cows use right that's how they know is because they're actually tasting and they're like not so good go over here.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because they're actually it's not instinct I guess it is instinct it's like the thing that evolved in you to discern what's better and what's worse is already within you.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's not outside right that's part of the whole thing is like trained that the answers are outside.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: We have to trust someone else we have to read a paper we have to listen to a scientist and not that gut feeling you have that that that flavor the answers are within.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: We have the answers what does your soil need the soil soil tests are nice and there's a nice framework and linear numbers and citations you can go to justify this or whatever but actually every piece of land is unique.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: It there is sentience there is consciousness all of our indigenous forebearers from all continents tell us this some people who haven't been too indoctrinated into the dominant Western paradigm still have those senses about them.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: They get visions they hear voices they see things so the more we can the more we can remember and reconnect and maybe raise children in a way that they we they aren't disconnected I think we could have a future for humanity in a generation or two where if we've raised our children on the land with nature and they haven't been had that relationship broken, we could actually have healthy humans and a real healthy culture.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's really so much of what our podcast is about is asking people it sounds like you have been really connected to nature through your life but I do wonder have there been any moments like this story you told about being in school either where you've had that really affirmed or where you've like those early memories of feet like feeling the connection that you have to a specific plant or to the soil or hearing those messages or has it just gotten omnipresent always?
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah I did grow up on a farm.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: I spent my first four years living in inner city Boston when my parents met in not quite the projects but definitely the not the nice part of town.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah I did grow up in the land and raised animals and raised plants and homesteaded and there's a lot that is innate natural to me that is not for a lot of people and that certainly is a blessing.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: And a large part of why I've been able to do what I've been able to do is because of how I was raised I think I think that early childhood development experience is very formative.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so a lot of things are like self-evident to me.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's obviously the way it is that I think maybe haven't been people haven't been exposed to or considered or whatever.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: But I also think I don't know I definitely was very curious.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: I definitely had to work it out in my head I did study the science organic chemistry and physics and biology and all that stuff which is those are helpful lenses.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: They're very helpful lenses.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know I definitely had a the whole spiritual side right consciousness and that was a really big part of my path was going full speed ahead into the Himalayas and the deeper practices of the Tantras and the Vedas and the experience of superconsciousness and that fact that we are like we're not bodies right we're way more than this body we carry around and even the body we carry around we normally only pay attention to the physical body and not the other layers of our body right the energy body and the not to mention the emotional body and the mental body but the prana mate kosha and there's like so many layers of being that we are and for me learning about that and actually practicing the techniques long enough to be able to differentiate those sensations this is a physical sensation.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's an energy sensation and being able to drop into that and have that perspective I think has massively empowered me as far as understanding what's going on and how it works and everything else.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_02: How do you feel like that is received as you're teaching like I I'm just curious.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: I'm guessing for some people that are really analytical that might feel a little woo.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's very what you just spoke of is very much how we live and operate.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm wondering like do you have any stories about people receiving that knowledge and how they've related to it?
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: When I teach my course I save the best stuff for last I was save this conversation for the last hour and a half and God I've taught this course in so many continents cultural milieus just I've been amazingly diverse like people I presented this off to and it's almost spooky like how receptive people are.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: And my experience is I did study a lot and I feel like I have found some patterns that make sense and when I begin to present them people like oh yeah that's yeah yeah yeah it's just like a there's this deep I get at the end of the course I feel this like I don't know how there's no words for it but it's like it's a heartfelt appreciation like feeling of people are being touched and seen and acknowledged and they're going home with a lot to ponder and I feel like it's an absolute blessing to be able to do that.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: So broadly that's it.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: I got one story I just a friend of mine who's a I'm not sure if she's still farming or not but she was for a long time farmer out in the Western Mass and uh and I had been talking about the whole idea that plants are sentient beings and they have feelings and how you treat them matters and like the children and the animals right if you're gentle to them and say nice things now they do well.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: You're abusive to them and aggressive they don't do well and it's like kind people don't necessarily think about that and I've got and if you want to know what they need you ask them.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and she would she said ever since she's horrible out there like that when I hear my plants talking to me now which they do they talk to me in your voice.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so whenever I hear your voice in my head I know it's my plants because they've gotten permission from you to listen to them and so they use your voice to talk to me.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like oh my god I'm so touched what an amazing thing what an amazing thing.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah it's just there's so many stories we are all so amazing beings and this culture we're brought up in and the dynamics that we're like we're taught about what is reality is so perverse and we're all like just these delicate gentle loving sentient beings that are like have been put through the ringer right it's just so harsh this world and the logistics and the dynamics and it's just is dramatizing.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: What's that?
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: The pace the pace of the world yeah the but the structure the rules the regulations the dynamics like how what's what's considered to be appropriate and not appropriate and I don't know I could go on all kinds of rants but it's yeah for me I just think I look at the at the trajectory of things and what does success look like where how what's the path forward?
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: How do we like if if the the Native Americans rule was every decision must be taken for the betterment of seven seven generations in the future I'm almost 50.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's time to start pretending I'm an adult it's my time to be responsible for the world around me for the next 20 years.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is the peak of my career or my adulthood or whatever my maturity it's time to like take responsibility for okay if I could help the future in seven generations be better how would I focus what's the thing that I can do to have that effect and yeah we had our conference last year at the it was online but it was we haven't done one in person since COVID.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: The theme was renaturing ourselves and we went into all the nuances and depths of we could of what is our natural way of being and what is ourself and things.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the key points I kept trying to bring out was like the early childhood development and how massively important it is those first few years of life and what you get exposed to and what's normalized for you.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're sitting in front of a screen in a box in lots of 5G around you being having your brain perverted by messages spitting out at you through these electrons that's entirely different.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna be an entirely different being than if you're trolling around in the grass and playing with chickens and we're in the woods and eating whole food and having music and culture and community and maybe spirit so yeah how do we create a dynamic where children can be raised on the land in nature for me it's about land tenure and land access and sovereignty and in Russia they have this thing called the Dacha system where it's in the Constitution if you want enough land to have a house and be able to grow enough food you have the right to it as a citizen.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody's got the right to enough land to grow enough food for yourself and to have a house and you can never sell it.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's not for sale if you don't want it anymore it goes back they go back to the government and they give it to somebody else.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: But everybody has enough has rights to land and imagine how many young people might want an off ramp from the wage slavery dynamic.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't there's no way forward for humanity I don't think except reconnecting to nature.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Reconnecting with that which is the essence of all that is and that we are really getting more and more separated from and the more we're separated from it the more denatured we become and literally you devolve and you your line runs out after two or three generations of being separated from nature eating insufficient substance you break down you physiologically degenerate you can't reproduce you die at a young age like it's literally happening right now.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: I was gonna say we're seeing that where how many decades into this sort of what you're describing are we experiencing that's where we are in the West yeah that's why I've got the receptivity I've got that's why I'm talking to the Pope that's why I'm in these castles and corporate headquarters and stuff because I never thought I would at the USDA I'm like NIH like I'm literally in these rooms with these people who are in these places of power that as a growing up on an organic farm I was taught USDA bad comp food companies bad those a whole bunch of those are the enemies we don't like them they're bad people and lo and behold there's actually good people in all those structures that do really mean what want to do the best they can and are struggling with their trauma and where they were how they were raised and their dynamics to do the best that they can but people want what's good and right and there's good people everywhere and it's becoming very visceral right it's becoming extremely visceral how tenuous it all is how it really we're how much of a struggle and I think it's a pleasure pain principle right when things get bad enough people start to become willing to change and so I think we're getting close to the being bad enough.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I think like you said people are receptive and they just as you teach your your best stuff at the end of your class I can just relate to Scott never really had a period of disconnection from nature in his time growing up but I did I had a pretty big stretch where I was disconnected and I can relate to as soon as I got it it was like oh holy shit like I've really been missing such a big aspect of myself nature all of it and so I think that is the beauty is that once people feel it, it there's no going back.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's just you get to this like point of no return where you're like oh yeah we are nature we have to attune to it we have to protect it all these things.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: So and hopefully if enough people are realizing their need for it I think that's part of it is like you're saying like the media all this stuff that we're inundated with like overflow of information and very specific information to make us disempower us from being able to take care of ourselves grow our own food grow our own medicine take care of our families whatever it is people are just in such a so in the rat race of just trying to pay the bills and then at the end of the day maybe the best thing that they know is to just like turn the TV on and watch it for the next we don't have any energy left right your mitochondrial DNA is in such rough shape you don't have enough energy to get up off the couch.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: Or yeah to recognize what you're yearning for denatured you're you're literally your life force is at a low ebb and it's really difficult.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: And but the thing is we all do have free will we do have choice are you do you have you downloaded the app for the social media it's your own damn fault then are you using your credit card to buy things you don't have money for stop it there's nobody's gonna get you out of it except for yourself and every time you take a choice to engage that paradigm you are part of the problem and that's what it comes down to is we have agency we need to have boundaries we need to have enough self-respect to do with our time and our energy and our attention the things which will lead us towards success but it's so insidious like all these things are so insidious and it's just like it's become normalized and we're habitual right mammals are very habitual creatures they find a path and they and they make a rut.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: They're going back and forth to that path they don't break out that's just you look at a fox you look at any animal like a and they they're actually highly habitual and so it's that's the thing is we have to establish different habits and it's not hard once you've got the new the new rut created to stay in it.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: But we're I tell people you bitch and moan about things and then you go out and get some whatever Doritos.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: You go protest GMOs and then go get some Doritos.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: You're a freaking hypocrite as as long as you're using your money to buy the things that are part of the problem you are feeding the problem.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah you are literally feeding the problem with every dollar you put into the system so have some self-respect have some boundaries choose where you put your money choose where you put your attention you can do it we can all do it but it we have to do it.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: So to maybe getting better quality food into more bellies will give people the capacity to help them lift themselves out of it.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's the thesis is that you get a new body every six months plus or minus right your b your blood takes two weeks to replace itself your bones take seven years but average it out you get a new body every six months and if you're just beat tired can't think straight no energy etc because of what you've been eating to a large degree if you just ate better food nature over over time will rebuild you in a more well yeah level and so that's the whole thesis.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly the mission of the BFA increasing quality in the food supply we think if we can by Herc or by crook cause food to be more nutritious that will be foundational in solving a lot of the world's problems.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's such an amazing mission we're running a little bit short on time here and I was wondering if you could tell us like where people can find your work how to connect with the Bionutrient Food Association things like that.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah it's Bionutrient.org is the website for the general organization the bionutrientinstitute.org is where all the science is if you look up Bionutrient on YouTube we've got many hundreds of hours every single presentation at every one of our conferences over starting in 2011 is on that YouTube page.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully we're gonna be a little more active in the social realms in the near future I think we've been doing a lot of the work and not talking about it very much.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's all been sort of word of mouth so we have a remarkably small like media presence in relation to our actual presence in the world and that's something that I'm hoping is going to be changing soon.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: So look up Bionutrient anywhere on the various handles and things.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you look up my name on YouTube you can find the course for free tons of podcasts and webinars and stuff.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah just look up Dan Kittridge or BioNutrient and you'll find stuff.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing Dan thank you so give us your email go to the newsletter list whatever yeah yeah this thank you so much for fitting us into your life when you have the Pope on the schedule of the next couple weeks this was such a rich conversation I'm so excited to share it and just really grateful.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah you guys have been awesome and amazing for ever since I've known you you've just been a real bright light and yeah always Scott Lindsay you guys are just like yeah great fire great family and yeah well done thank you Dan I'll try to hopefully I'll have some glisteny or amazing tomato pictures to send you again sometime soon.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah all I gotta do is get some of your seedlings I think that's what I really need.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah yeah come to come bring me a whole bunch down sometime thanks Dan have a great day take care thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_02: If you loved it please help us spread the word by subscribing to this podcast and leaving us a review.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: For more information about our work visit homesteadandheal.net we're wishing you the life of your dreams one that feels deeply rooted fully alive and connected to the earth beneath your feet