Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode #124: Food Uniformity = Death of Human Health

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Episode #124: Food Uniformity = Death of Human Health · Beyond Labels Premium

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If it were easy and convenient, everybody would do it.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason it's not easy is because when you start mixing crops, it makes it very difficult to harvest them because now you've got two different harvest windows.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now you can't run a single harvester down through uh and even planting, they're planting at different times, the seeds are different sizes, uh different kind of calibration of equipment.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: It it takes way more management and um and and and intercropping is much more much more uh conducive to hand harvest than mechanical harvest.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when you're when you're uh uh mechanically running over something, you want as much homogeneity as possible, not heterogeneity.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, welcome to Beyond Labels.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Dr.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Cena McCullough, and I am here with our favorite farmer, Joel Salatin.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: And today I think this is going to be a fascinating topic.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Joel's gonna do most of the speaking.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I wanted to introduce this, kick it off, because I found what I think is a really interesting article.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was posted in Zero Hedge, and this is what it says from ancient Egypt to medieval England, cultivating one or more crops in the same field was common practice among many farmers for thousands of years.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: But in the last century, food producers largely stopped intercropping and moved toward an industrial type of agriculture, a shift that contributed to 34% of the world's farmland being degraded today.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so now what they're saying is there's been a new interest in what they're calling intercropping, right?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Basically cultivating more than one crop in the same field to mixing crops.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: And they're saying that farmers are starting to understand that it improves soil health, it decreased costs.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and as we know from research we've done on this show in the past, Joel, it also usually increases nutrient density of those foods and biodiversity of the microbes when you intercrop.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: So what they're reporting on is that there's a new project in the EU.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's called leguminose.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And researchers are starting to study the benefits of intercropping in eight different European countries, as well as in Egypt and Pakistan.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: They have 180, what they're calling living labs, where farmers who are farming by a monoculture system are going to introduce one strip of intercropped cereals and legumes.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, like a wheat paired with a pea or a barley, you know, with beans.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: They already have results from one of the UK's living labs and the test farm plant um that planted wheats and wheat and beans, they reported a 27% increase in the intercropped plot compared with the monoculture strip of the same farm, right?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: So this is on the same farm.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: They got a 20% increase.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm assuming that means in yield.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: They also had less weeds reported, um, a prelim preliminary analysis of the soil showed less plant disease present, uh, meaning less need to buy and use agricultural chemicals.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: There was another test plot that tested wheat inner crop with clover.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: And they said it completely removed the presence of a parasitic weed called daughter.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so I want to jump into this because this is really interesting.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really hoping that this catches on.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And right, and that's the purpose of this study.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: They're actually showing to have good test results, and they're trying to convince more farmers to farm this way by you know, farming by intercropping as opposed to monocropping, like we do predominantly here in the US as well.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and also hoping that consumers become educated about how their fruits and vegetables are actually grown and maybe exercise the power of their dollar, right, to try to help shift the market.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, but my first question, Joel, for you is if the crop mixing is beneficial to farmers, right, and beneficial to consumers based on nutrient, uh more dense nutrients profile and more robust microbiome of those foods, why did industrial agricultural agriculture basically wipe it out?
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like for the most part, what allowed that to happen?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, it's a it's the it's the it's of course a great question, uh Cena.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the reason is because this isn't easy.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, if it were easy and convenient, everybody would do it.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason it's not easy is because when you start mixing crops, it makes it very difficult to harvest them because now you've got two different harvest windows.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now you can't run a single harvester down through uh and even planting, they're planting at different times, the seeds are different sizes, uh different kind of calibration of equipment.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: It it takes way more management and um and and and intercropping is much more much more uh conducive to hand harvest than mechanical harvest.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when you're when you're uh uh mechanically running over something, you want as much homogeneity as homogeneity as possible, not heterogeneity.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and so uh uh, you know, my first reaction when you sent this call article to me and I read through it was, well, boy, you talk about uh back to the future.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, the the indigenous American uh farming, the three sisters, you know, the three sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash uh was the ultimate, you know, intercropping, you know, um leguminose kind of a system.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that was done, you know, for centuries prior to European arrival here in the Americas.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, and so the reason that we went away from that kind of thing is because the the planting of those three things um is almost impossible with machines.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, if you if you plant them all at the same time, the corn plant might not be big enough to trellis up the uh the the beans.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to plant the beans two weeks behind the corn, so the corn can get up about a foot before you plant the beans, otherwise the corn isn't a strong enough trellis, and the beans actually uh overwhelm the corn.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can't go down with a machine and and plant beans two weeks after you planted a corn without tearing up the corn.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it it it it just it's very, very difficult, very, very tedious.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so the monocropping was was um you know the the pillar of the four pillars of industrialism are are mechanization, routinization, simplification, and spec and specialization.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Those four things mechanization, routinization, specialization, and simplification.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so everything in the industrial agriculture sector is all about making it more routine, more simple, more specialized, so that you can mechanically move through.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: All those four pillars come to bear in a in a mono, you know, in a monocrop situation.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so the intercropping just takes a lot more management, um uh often you know far more conducive to handwork and uh and not nearly as conducive to to uh mechanical work.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: So that that's why we went to the monocrop and uh and so the the the whole idea of the intercropping is um you know is fraught with logistical and and practical you know problems on a on a mechanic, you know, on an industrial mechanical scale.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I was I read this fascinating article over the weekend.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is from science in 2022.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's titled The Ancient Grain Sowing Method Could Be Farming's Future.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: And this will piggyback on what you're saying.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: They're talking about how in Ethiopia, it's one of the few places in the world where farmers still grow uh maslins.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'm saying that right.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: That term for growing different varieties and species of grains in the same field, right?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: Intercropping with grains.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: And they're saying that um that the Ethiopian farmers feel pressured to grow modern monocultural crops.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: And this is in large part because you need uniformity, like what you're talking about.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: They said the global market wants a certain type of wheat for their wonder bread, a mixture of three varieties of wheat and four varieties of barley with some other things thrown in really doesn't make the cut.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: That basically there is this consumer demand that we want it all uniform, right?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we talked about this previously with um produce, with fruits and vegetables.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: And part of the reason why there's a coating, often a wax coating on it, is because we want it to look a certain way, right?
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a man-made problem.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: So they're saying that there is this demand that you want everything to have um like a uniform taste.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: So when you intercrop, for instance, with the grain, the bread that you make from it or the beer that you make from it might have a little different flavor to it, right?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Based on whatever was intercropped and what survived.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that we are wanting the consumers are demanding basically a mono taste, right?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: If you will.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: A mono crop giving you this mono taste.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, you know, imagine, imagine if the average person getting a loaf of bread um got, you know, one loaf uh had brown speckles in it, and another one had black speckles in it.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: One tasted a little more like rye, one tasted a little more like barley.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, people would go crazy.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: We we live, I mean, um just just just think about uh what happens in a in a franchise.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'll just give you a personal story.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Years ago, we um we had a friend who introduced us to cracker barrel, you know, the the restaurant chain cracker barrel.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And um what he did, he was he was buying our eggs, and he would take them into cracker barrel and uh order breakfast and and give the uh the uh attendant, the waitress, the eggs and say, I want I I want two sunny side up eggs, but I want you to cook these for me.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: And um one time he did that, and the cook came running back in from the kitchen to see this guy and said, Where did you get these eggs?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've never seen eggs like this.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And um so he told him, and the next next thing, you know, within within like two or three weeks, here I'm see, I'm talking to the vice president of of of new product marketing at at uh cracker barrel headquarters in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and you know, and she was interested in what we were doing with the pastured eggs and and all this stuff.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, so she was actually very, very interested.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, so you know, my vision was okay, so there's at that time, I think there was a hundred and hundred and eighty-seven cracker barrels.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and my vision, and each one of them, get this, each one of them used 600 dozen eggs.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, um, yeah, 600 dozen eggs a week.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: So think about that.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: 600 dozen eggs a week.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I mean, that that's almost enough to support a small farmer on a you know on a 10 or 12 acre place.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so my vision was, okay, so I get I get 187 small farms, all within like five to 10 miles of cracker barrels, and you know, and we we we supply the eggs.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so anyway, she asked me, uh, so um if we want to do this, how long would it take you to, you know, to to supply us?
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh and um and of course she was thinking we would supply all the eggs to poly uh to to uh cracker barrel, you know, from polyphase.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: We no no no that wasn't my my idea was we have you know 187 farms supplying 187 cracker barrels.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And um anyway, I told her, well, you know, we got it, we gotta buy the chickens, we've gotta, I mean, it would be it would be several years before I could get such a network going.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: So and and quickly she just cut me up and said, Well, forget it, we we can't do it because there's nothing that makes people angrier in a chain or a franchise situation than having something taste different or look different or be able to get something different in one and not be able to get it in another one.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so we we have completely commodified and um and and uniformed uh not only our food system, but even our our personal expectations in our in our culture, uh where we don't we don't appreciate different, we appreciate the same.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants to go to McDonald's and have a burger taste different in one than it tastes in another one.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And and so so this all this whole thing goes hand in hand, this uniformity, you really, I mean, that was that was the perfect word.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uniformity is the is the foundation of of of commod of commodification.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because you don't want you don't want one bushel of corn to be different than another another bushel of corn.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want one bushel of wheat to be different than another bushel of wheat.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: You want uniformity, uh, because otherwise you can't call it yellow dent corn number five.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you can't call it, you know, uh wheat number three, you know, and um, and of course the commodity traders, they don't want variety because every time you have variety, you got to have a different silo to store it in.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we don't want to have a different silo.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: We want to all store it in one silo.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: One, one great big silo, so it's all one great, you know, great big thing.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want, we don't want differentiation.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, when um when uh um GMOs first came in, genocid modified organisms.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: I went to, you know, went to my the feed mill that I'd been using.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: I said, hey, I want to get GMO free.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh boy, they wouldn't even give me the time of day.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they they they didn't want to complicate their life with other storage storage bins, you know, to separate one product from another.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so uniformity is absolutely uh the the key through you know throughout the system, even to even I would suggest to the American food expectation.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we want that we want that that item to be exactly the same uh in one place as well as another.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, we we've kind of we we've kind of done it to ourselves, you know, we've fallen in.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: And and and and and then and then when you, I mean, you know, one of our favorite topics is the food labeling.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, if you if you veer from a label at all, then suddenly your label is illegal, and now you can't have that product because it's actually not that, it's it's this.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And um and so you know the labeling laws, you know, go right into this as well.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, even if it's healthier, right?
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Even if it's healthier.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Even if it's even if it's healthier.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And um I remember, I remember um one one restaurant we were in, and uh or tried to get in, and the chef wouldn't um he wouldn't look at our eggs.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: He he tasted our eggs, he says, wow, these these have a taste.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: He said, he looked at me, he said, nah, we don't want these.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Our customers don't want eggs with taste.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: They just want bland.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: They just want bland.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and and you know, a lot of the uh, you know, the the the doctoring up that we do with American food now with all of our sauces and barbecues and all this stuff, is because our food is so bland, it doesn't have any taste.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the funnest things we do here, you know, at the farm is is you know, we cook stuff, you know, pork and chicken and and different things, you know, with no salt, nope nothing, serve it.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: People say, what?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: What'd you put on?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: No, we didn't put anything on it.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what you're tasting is all that all that um you know diversity of uh uh of feedstock coming into it, you know, the salad bar and all that stuff.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'll get down that rabbit hole.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: But but the the you know the the intercropping or the you know the leguminos as they're calling this, and you got to put a fancy uh scientific name on it.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um all of that, all of that absolutely, absolutely, is exactly what ecology wants.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's what pollinators want, it's what soil cover it wants.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: It it's it's everything proper ecologically.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's just really hard, uh, as you find out when you have an industrial system, and industrial system does not sit well on top of an ecological system.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I and I think I think it's so important to call out, you know, you've touched on it, but really to call out the health consequences of having this uniformity in our food supply, you know, as you as you said, just not the monocropping, and then as you said, those are fed to the livestock.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: So then they have a uniform diet.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: And as we all know, this is common sense, right?
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: We're constantly saying, oh, add the rainbow to your diet, right?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like get diversity into your diet.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: So now we're eating largely we're eating monocropped, you know, um, foods, and the animals and the chickens that we're eating are eating a lot of monocropped, um, you know, monocropped foods.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And what I have learned in, you know, in my studies and my health journey and so forth is that uniformity is the death of the of human health.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: So uniformity kills the soil, it kills the livestock, it kills human health.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: Even if you think of it just from the perspective of the microbiome, right?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: We've talked about there's statistics showing we've lost about 35% of the diversity of our microbiome as a as a collective, uh human collective.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: And associated with that is a rise in um chronic and autoimmune diseases.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh lack of diversity also leads to nutrient deficiencies, right?
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: When you have monocrops, you have less nutrient, uh weaker nutrient profile, right?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's a weaker profile nutritionally.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so we tend to, we I think that we tend to kind of, you know, like poo-poo, oh, it's just uh a little nutrient, right?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like when you talk about micronutrient deficiencies, right?
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like how important can they be?
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: But we're seeing a resurgence of micronutrient deficiency diseases, even in our Western society.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, for my story alone, right?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: I was borderline for both Pellegra and Berry Berry, which were eradicated by the mid-1900s.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're seeing this across the board in people coming into clinics, showing up with micronutrient deficiencies.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so those deficiencies aren't just from like, you know, processed foods and fortifying those processed foods with synthetic versions of nutrients, but the deficiencies also come from our choice to support a system that has monocultures, right, as its pillar that's basically supporting uniformity over diversity.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh the the all of it is a one intricately linked uh pathway.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And anyone who's been, you know, in the in the backyard gardening space for a long time knows the term companion planting.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you there are certain, you know, uh what the what one of the book one of the book titles on this is Carrots Love Tomatoes, you know, and nasturtiums, for example.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Nasturtiums are a are an insect repellent.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: You can plant them around the border of your garden, and nasturtiums tend to keep, you know, bugs away.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so there this is all tied up in this companion planting.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: But when you, but Cena, when you go to a uh huge blocks of land with uniformity, that it it it all, you know, it all falls apart.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you have to realize that um that the original prairie, the original uh prairie of America, uh, each acre had something in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 different species of types of plants on it.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and in fact, uh, I remember in the early days of Stopman Grass Farmer, I read an article, said uh uh one plow.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Plowing, one plowing of a prairie, it takes a hundred years for all the original species that grew in the prairie.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: It takes a hundred years for that prairie to heal from one plowing for all those species to come back into it.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's how big a shock it is to the ecosystem.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: So here on our farm, you know, we haven't plowed since 1961 when we came.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we're just in the whatever 61 to 23.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're what 62, uh, 62 years.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we're just over the halfway point on this century deal.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we see even today, see that today, we see new species in the fields that we've never seen before.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we know that they're continuing to slowly creep back in.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: That seed bank is there and waiting for for healing, for uh things that nobody even knows, you know, all the nuances and the and the biochemical reactions and the trades and the the decisions that are being made on a seed, you know, uh uh cellular microbial level um that that would bring some of these uh these species back, you know, uh tall growing, short growing, shade loving, uh, you know, shade not loving, you know, all the different spreader plants, uh upright plants, all these different plants.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so just think about um, just think about that from a from a microbiome standpoint that the cows that we have today versus the original bison that we're eating, you know, routinely a hundred different species of plants, routinely, uh, when we go to you know, alfalfa, corn, and soybeans, a lot of times beef today is has only eaten maybe you know five to ten varieties of plants uh in its entire life.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh and that's a that's an incredible um um uh anti-diversification of what nature wanted with these you know huge varieties of of of intake on the on the different uh animals.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and like you're saying, you can definitely taste the difference.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like when something has a lot of uh like a chicken or a piece of meat or an egg has a lot of nutrient density in it, you can definitely taste the difference.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to also point out that so when we're talking about you know the inner cropping and these the livestock and you know the the animals eating all these different grasses, you know, plants um in the field, don't just think of it as they're consuming calories, right?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like we've talked about that before, the myth of the calorie.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: But so I won't go down that road.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Think of they're also consuming medicinals, right?
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is like what our ancient ancestors consumed.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: They consumed when it was available, they consumed medicinals on a daily basis.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't just eat for the calories, right?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: The for the presumed calories, the energy of the plant.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: They ate daily doses when available of medicines.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like plantain.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Plant plantain is a big one.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you alcohol plantain, yes, so much healing ability in plantain, um, and seasonally, right?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: It comes at it works with nature, it comes at a certain season.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: The cows know to eat it, and and that's what they need to get them through that season in life.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we talk about this, don't forget that we have now taken away God's medicine in their daily normal diet.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: So they're even more deficient, they're less resilient than they would have been, you know, before we had this whole age of mono monocropping and you know, industrial ag.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, so Joel, I know we're about out of time, but I wanna I want to end somewhere like on a positive, if you can.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um so my first question is one of the arguments against inner cropping, you know, doing this mixed cropping is that you can't feed the world if you are focused on inner cropping.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: You have to have monocultures.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Is that true?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: Is there because you you talked about here how it is more difficult to do it.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: So is that actually true?
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: I said it's I said it's more difficult, it's not it's not less productive.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, you mentioned in your opening how much more productive it is.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's this is why, Cena, this is why even a novice backyard garden with a lot of variety is more productive per square yard than even the most sophisticated um corporate industrial um monocrop farm.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because the diversity, yes, yes, absolutely.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: You you don't have to be a good gardener, you don't have to be a backyard gardener to produce way more per square yard than even the very best industrial monocrop farm.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people don't realize that.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: And and now, now you might not produce be because of your diversity, you might not produce the same amount of of one item per you know per square yard, but but the cumulative effect of of of the of the symbiosis, the symbiosis between uh the different plants, the cum the the the sum, the sum of the production is more than the monocrop.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's true in almost uh in just everything.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, uh there are farmers in the US uh now that are planting cocktails.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's the that's a kind of a new a new term.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's one step beyond intercropping, it's where we plant a whole cocktail uh of things.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, uh, and and generally those are used as cover crops or soil remediation, soil looseners, um, you know, uh different things then you know to graze across.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're not usually used to to combine off with a with a combine.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Although pasture cropping, collin size in Australia has developed pasture cropping where you don't plow at all, then you use livestock to temporarily weaken.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think we've talked about that, weaken, weaken the forage, weaken the sod in order to get a an annual in, and then you're up and running.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: So these are all these are all techniques to reduce the the damage of moldboard uh of inversion plowing, where you're inverting the soil layers and go to a either a gentle stir or a no stir at all with a no uh a no herbicide component to be able to keep the soil layers intact, to not chop up the um the um the tunnels that the earthworms have made, the tunnels that that um um deep-rooted weeds and thistles and things have made, and and and keep the that soil profile, keep the chocolate cake intact and not either compress it or invert it.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and so you know, these are all techniques, and and yeah, I I think that this whole the whole topic that we're discussing uh simply indicates the the the new understanding around the world that we can't continue down the same path.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we we have exceeded we have exceeded the the ability of uniformity to to break to bring us to another level of of um of production.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're gonna have to do is so the new step to higher production is going to be uh going back to a more ecological approach, which um honestly may take smaller equipment, way more farmers, and spending a little more on your food in order to preserve the productive capacity of the soils that's being worn out and torn out by uniformity and monocropping.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I was able to find some studies that are supporting exactly what you're saying that when you do this intercropping, the companion cropping, you get a more reliable yield, a more complete nutritional profile, um, you have a more diversity of microbes in your soil, um, more resistance to diseases, resistance to pests like insects, and greater ability to survive harsh climates like drought.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we know this, right?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's all in the scientific literature as well.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is substantiated.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's you know, it's common knowledge, it sounds like.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: So my last, I'll I'll I'm gonna have let you please close it out for us.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm wondering is so two things, um, if we can do them quickly.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: If someone's hearing this for the first time and they're interested in starting like a companion crop in their garden, where get a simple step for them to start, or maybe a simple resource, you know, uh thinking of like the busy mom, you know, the busy dad in mind.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: So what's something very simple they can do?
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then on a larger scale, is there some way we could know, like when we go out to buy our food, is there some way to know if you're supporting an establishment that intercrops, aside from knowing your local farmer?
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the the I'll answer the second one first.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's easy.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh no, there's no way to know.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you'd have to go, you know, know a farmer or visit the farm, that sort of thing.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I will tell you that it's it's extremely rare.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, um, all these things take time to develop.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're it's not easy.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so don't don't kick your farmer to the curb if he or she is not um you know not not adopting this.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: These things are incremental, they take time.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, and so I mean the the the main thing that you can do is to get um is in the animal side of things, whether it's dairy, eggs, or meat and poultry, in the animal side of things, get things that are on um pasture that is not a a planted or a quote unquote improved pasture.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: What you're looking for is native pasture that hasn't been plowed or planted for a very, very long time.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and that's how you get this diversity.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: Go walk in the fields, you know, see, see, see, see what how many different things you can find out there.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: You'd be amazing.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: When we say grass or or pasture, people tend to think of lawns, but um, but you know, uh one of my favorite things is to walk out in the field and and just and just in, you know, in a 10 10 foot by 10 foot place, pick up a whole bouquet of different kinds of plants.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, that that's what that's what we're looking for.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you can do that with your, you know, with your livestock.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the answer to the first question is to simply um, I mean, obviously, you know, carrots love tomatoes.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's iconic.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's a wonderful book uh written a long time ago about companion planting.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: But things that you can do in your garden is not only uh you know, the whole square foot gardening idea where you're tucking, you're tucking plants close to each other, but also you're you're you're creating a successional thing.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're planting, for example, um cabbage or lettuce that's early and cool season, well, before before those plants finally give out because it's too hot and they get overly mature, you can go ahead and plant something warm, you know, uh green beans or something, uh in amongst them so that so that that that next crop is inner is it's already growing and up and running before the previous one goes.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that way you can really, you can all not only get you know intercropping, uh, you don't give weeds a chance to get going because you've got more cover all the time, you hold the soil moisture in.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, you hope you're gonna do a bunch of mulching and keep a nice vegetative cover there, but you also get this effect of of multi-speciation, you know, even if you're just using a four foot by eight foot bed, you can have a lot of multi-speciation.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can tuck, you can tuck uh lettuce under tomatoes.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: They love the shade in the hot summer.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: It'll help to to let them grow better.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can tuck stuff to use um, you know, cute the the whole the cubic space uh rather than just linear space.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: And you can do it uh successionally, you can do it by vertical, uh, by by how much something loves shade or or heat, that sort of thing.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you can and you can uh manipulate your garden so you get you know way more way more production uh uh under a under a thing.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, even things like like beets or carrots that grow um that like it cooler, uh you can you know grow them in the shade of, let's say, some pole beans, you know, and so you so you shade them out and then and then as the beans, as the beans go go down at the first frost, the frost kill, you know, uh dries down all the bean plants, and suddenly now you've got a flush of light in the cool fall to bring on the lettuce and uh the the carrots and the beets, you know, that were that were shaded and and kept you know nice and cool in the shade.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now they've got full light when they need full light when it's not as hot, and they come on, you know, for the late fall winter.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: So those are the kind of things that you can do to companion plant in your garden.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope this has been interesting for everyone and uh and that you'll you know you'll you'll realize there are, you know, there there are beacons of hope throughout the world.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: There are people that are that are understanding this and getting this, and um, and this whole diversified, you know, biological um, you know, heterosis out there is uh is making more and more ecological headway.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope that's an encouragement uh to us all to realize there are um uh the the the ecological imperative in agriculture, the ecological imperative in agriculture, despite of what you read about, you know, Bill Gates and fake meat and and uh AI and everything else, um, the ecological imperative uh is being is being demonstrated and uh and affirmed uh around the globe.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: And this is just the leguminos program is just one of those um studies that's being done in numerous countries that helps people like us to appreciate that there are smart minds that haven't completely bowed to the industrial uh system and are recognizing the value and the importance of maintaining a viable ecological system as the underpinnings of our food system.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us on another Beyond Labels podcast.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: We look forward to visiting with you again next week.